Ignatieff punished for tackling hard questions.

It was inevitable. Michael Ignatieff is an intelligent, introspective man who has spent his life thinking about hard questions and committing his thoughts to paper. But now he is running for Parliament in a political culture that expects politicians to think and talk no differently than the folks in line at Tim Hortons. It was only a matter of time before tiny minds combed Ignatieff's writing, wrenched a few sentences out of context and waved them about like a bloody shirt.

The only surprise is how little time it took.

Ignatieff announced his candidacy for a Toronto riding last week. On Sunday, the Ukrainian-Canadian Congress issued a press release demanding Paul Martin remove his support for the author and Harvard professor while several dozen protesters trudged in the slush outside a Liberal office. Ignatieff's sin, the protesters feel, was to pen "derogatory remarks" about Ukrainians in his 1995 book Blood & Belonging.

The UCC's press release cites two offending passages. "From my childhood in Canada," Ignatieff wrote, "I remember expatriate Ukrainian nationalists demonstrating in the snow outside ballet performances by the Bolshoi in Toronto. 'Free the captive nations!' they chanted. In 1960, they seemed strange and pathetic, chanting in the snow, haranguing people who just wanted to see ballet and to hell with politics. They seemed fanatical, too, unreasonable. Hadn't they looked at the map? How did they think Ukraine could ever be free?"

That does seem a little harsh. It's also crude, which is something Ignatieff's writing never is. Which is why it wasn't a surprise for me to discover, when I re-read the chapter, that Ignatieff immediately followed that statement with this sentence mysteriously omitted from the UCC press release: "Yet the tendentious fanatics who refused to look at maps, who refused to accept that Soviet power would last an eternity, got it right, and the rest of us were wrong."
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The other offending passage cited by the UCC is this: "I have reasons to take the Ukraine seriously, indeed," wrote Ignatieff. "But, to be honest, I'm having trouble. Ukrainian independence conjures up images of peasant embroidered shirts, the nasal whine of ethnic instruments, phoney Cossacks in cloaks and boots, nasty anti-Semites."

One newspaper reporter covering the protest cited a third offending statement. Ignatieff "invokes Russian imperialism," the reporter stated, and writes that "he feels 'disdain' for the Ukrainian people."

This looks like damning stuff. But both these statements are found at the beginning of a chapter on Ignatieff's experiences in Ukraine, where he is laying out what he calls "my basic pre-judices." The first of these prejudices is not antipathy for Ukrainian nationalism, as the UCC is claiming, but for all forms of nationalism. "Isn't nationalism just an exercise in kitsch, in fervent emotional insincerity?" Ignatieff writes.

The other bias Ignatieff is describing is one he learned from his grandparents, Russian nobles who lived for decades in Ukraine. They took the traditional Russian view that Kyiv is not only a Russian city but that it is the birthplace of Russian identity because it was there that the ruler of Kievan Rus accepted Christianity and laid the foundations of the Russian Orthodox Church.

In this tradition, Russians and Ukrainians are not separate nations but are instead branches of one family. "Somewhere inside," Ignatieff writes of the influence of his grandparents, "I'm also what Ukrainians would call a Great Russian, and there is just a trace of old Russian disdain for those little Russians."

This alone shows Ignatieff is not the caricature the UCC is making him out to be. But the rest of the chapter, in which Ignatieff describes his experiences in Ukraine, underscores the point.
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The most moving passage involves a visit to his ancestral crypt, which had been used as a slaughterhouse in the terrible years of the 1930s. The marble of his great-grandfather's tomb still bears the scars of the butcher's knife.

"Nations and graves," Ignatieff writes. "Graves and nations. Land is sacred because it is where your ancestors lie. Ancestors must be remembered because human life is a small and trivial thing without the anchoring of the past. Land is worth dying for, because strangers will profane the graves. The graves were profaned. The butchers slaughtered on top of the marble. A person would fight to stop this if he could."

"Looking back," Ignatieff concludes, "I see that time in the crypt as a moment when I began to change, when some element of respect for the national project began to creep into my feelings, when I understood why land and graves matter and why the nations matter which protect both."

This is the fine and humane writing of a serious man. For it to be characterized as some kind of tawdry ethnic slur is itself a slur.

But of course it was bound to happen. Canada's political culture is thick with a pseudo-populist atmosphere in which the dim, dull and conventional thrive while the thoughtful and creative wilt.

Dan Gardner*'s column appears Wednesdays and Fridays.
E-mail: dgardner@thecitizen.canwest.com

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