On the death of a local hero

Sad news from ed_rex: His uncle, Jules Paivio, has passed away at the age of 96. Jules lived near where I spent the first 18 years of my life, but I only met him in 2005, when my friend informed me that the last surviving member of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, Canadian volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War, was living in Aurora, of all places, and up to being interviewed.

I can't do justice to all of the stories he told us that day, but here's the article that my friend wrote. Epic, grand narrative stuff. The nice old man who lives down the street fought in the noble and ultimately doomed Good Fight. Jules was only 19 when, against the policy of the Canadian government, he joined 40,000 other brave Communists, anarchists, and socialists from all over the world to fight against Franco's fascists. He spent a year in a prison camp and, upon returning home, was considered a "premature fascist" and barred from fighting overseas in WWII. Those urban legends about how Vietnam vets were spat upon by hippies coming back from the war? Well, in the case of veterans of the Spanish Civil War, it was the government spitting on them. It wasn't until 2001 that the Canadian government would recognize the courage of these volunteers, who fought against fascism when the international community had turned its back on the people of Spain.

In 2011, Jules was granted honourary Spanish citizenship.

When you hang around with enough leftists and would-be revolutionaries, an inevitable topic of conversation is about whether you'd have gone to fight in Spain if you'd lived back then. If something like that happened now, would we abandon everything we had—our jobs, our families and friends, our lives—to fight the good fight? We all like to think that we would, and most of us are honest enough to admit that we just aren't that strong.

Jules was. They don't make people like him anymore.

My sincere condolences to ed_rex and his family.