Taylor C. Noakes is an independent journalist and public historian.
A Canadian legislator, Sarah Jama, is embroiled in controversy for advocating a cease-fire in Israel’s war on Gaza. Absurd accusations of antisemitism and a political firestorm have ensued, culminating in Jama’s expulsion from her own party’s caucus.
Figures like Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and US secretary of state Antony Blinken have tried to rewrite history to serve their own ends, often to equate Nazism and Communism. They exemplify the alarming trend of politically expedient distortions of history.
When Canada’s parliament unwittingly paid homage to a Nazi veteran, it opened the door to questions about its postwar past. The incident highlights broader issues of historical distortion and the country’s history of harboring Nazi war criminals.
Acclaimed filmmaker Adam Curtis talks to us about his latest film, Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone, the fall of the Soviet Union and the war in Ukraine, and the massive upward transfer of wealth to a tiny elite in both the East and West.
Black Ribbon Day is also known as the Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism. But this veneer of humanistic solicitude is a facade for historical distortion and antisemitic rhetoric, perpetuated by far-right movements across Eastern Europe.
On the 78th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Japan, we should remember that deploying the bomb wasn’t necessary to win the war. US policymakers were aware of this fact, yet they pressed on, thereby authoring the atrocity that launched the nuclear age.
Canadian politicians are destroying Canada’s greatest accomplishment — its health care system. The country is sliding toward health care privatization due to weak federal leadership and sustained assaults on Medicare by conservative provinces.
Montreal’s 1993 hockey riot wasn’t about one nation’s anger at another’s victory — it was an expression of fury over Quebec’s experience of neoliberalism and deindustrialization in the province.
A journalist in Edmonton is the most recent Canadian to be charged with vandalizing a Nazi monument. How Canada came to be home to so many monuments dedicated to Ukrainian Nazi collaborators is rooted in some dark chapters in the country’s history.
As Quebecers head to the polls on Monday, the waning sovereignty movement has lost ground to insular, xenophobic traditionalism. In an increasingly disenfranchised society, an exclusionary Quebec is a sign of fractured federalism.