Author James Bacque
Phil introduced Jim, an author with 250,000 fiction and non fiction books sold and documentaries produced about him and his work. His ancestors settled here and he and his wife, Elizabeth, a teacher and painter, split their time between here and Toronto. They've been married since 1955 and now have two great grandchildren.
Jim congratulated Rotary on its work, especially its efforts towards world peace. Jim claimed to have been saved by literature. When caught reading after curfew at his boarding school and facing punishment the house master let him off cause he was reading War and Peace. It captured him - the lives of all those Russians - and it introduced him to a new medium of understanding which he vowed to try himself. The paradox he discovered is that writing requires ego and forces humility. But Jack McClellan encouraged him to enter into the languages, the lives and the experiences beyond his own.
As a participant in WW II he felt that it had been justified but he discovered that some behaviours of the allies were no better than our enemies. A million German prisoners died of maltreatment and starvation after the war's end and Jim has written about this atrocity. The bombing campaigns obliterated cities, causing horrific suffering. In 1986 he realized that Cologne, which looks old, is actually completely rebuilt. His sister helped to plan the raids that targeted civilians and he used to think all the people that took part were heroes but he's changed his mind and he pities the suffering while he hates the crimes that started it. In trying to explain he tried to combine in himself both novelist and historian in the production of his 'big book'.
There are two enemies in a war - we have to see ourselves and enemies of the other side and try to learn to stand with them without hatred. He turned to Tolstoy again to try to remove the lense of perspective - our own - and to present each side as they believed themselves to be. He feels the hatred poisons us still and we must leap the bounds of cultural stereotypes. Certainly Hitler was a problem and it's still unclear whether he was deceitful or not about the peace treaties he offered. He certainly broke some and laughed while doing it but Churchill had elements of racism and megalomania in his personality that may have driven him to reject overtures. These are theories and we need to know what actually happened. There was another offer of peace after the fall of Poland and it might have been possible to maintain the empire and let Stalin and Hitler fight it out rather than go to war to guarantee European borders.
Jim tries to look to individuals who make up the events. Canadians who fought were almost all volunteers and he tries to discover what drove them. There were 8 plots to kill Hitler over the 10 years he was in power and those plotters and the people who spied against their own country or who helped refugees escape are heroes too. Almost always it is the hopeful and idealistic young who are destroyed by the men at the top. Our history and our contributions are significant and fascinating and stand on their own, they don't need the myths and the concept of 'the enemy' that have been promulgated by writers on our side. The winners write the history and Churchill made a contribution there as well that we need to understand.
Jim quoted Palmerston who said that Nations have no Friends, only Interests but Jim thinks it is in a nation's interest to have friends and that events today can be seen in that light - why drive the Iranians away, why not maintain contact and seek options?