On September 24, 1918, the Canadian government made membership in the Industrial Workers of the World illegal. The maximum sentence for membership in the IWW was five years to be served in one of 24 internment camps.
War brings out the worst in people and part of the propaganda of government in war time is to play on fear; fear of the “other”, fear of the “unknown”. During the First World War it was radical groups and publications, many whose membership came from Eastern Europe, that were targeted.
Within weeks of the start of the war in August 1914, Canada’s parliament passed the War Measures Act. In 1916, the press censorship was introduced by an Order-In-Council. In total of the 253 publications banned during the war, 164 were in a language other than French or English. But it was the 1917 Russian Revolution, and its withdrawal from the war, that caused the Canadian government to crack down harder on any social dissent.
By Order-in-Council PC2384, the federal government outlawed political and labour groups, focusing on German, Russian, Ukrainian and Polish speakers. It banned freedom of association, assembly, and speech for many Canadians.
One of the labour groups banned was the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), or as they were known “Wobblies”. This industrial union organization had been founded in 1905 in Chicago and quickly spread across North America. By 1906, the first Canadian chapters had been formed in B.C.
The IWW espoused the idea that workers should all be in one union as opposed to the tradition of Trades. It organized all workers including women and workers of colour. It organized unskilled laborers, the poor, and recent immigrants, all who were often on the margins of society. The IWW believed in “revolutionary syndicalism” where, once organized, workers would initiate a general strike and replace capitalism with a society run by workers. The Wobblies also opposed the First World War and the price paid by working people and, as a result, became an enemy of Prime Minister Robert Borden and the Canadian government.
On September 24, 1918, Borden’s government made membership in the Industrial Workers of the World and thirteen other (primarily ethnic radical political organizations) illegal. The maximum sentence for membership in the IWW, or affiliation with the banned organizations, was five years to be served in one of 24 internment camps.
The ideas of the Wobblies were harder to stop, however. When western Canadian workers formed an organization called the One Big Union (OBU) in 1919, its ideas were closely aligned with those of the IWW. Today every time “Solidarity Forever” is sung on a picket line or at a union convention the IWW spirit lives on because that was their song!
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I didn't get that, either. To me the core themes were the bizarre and impersonal nature of the universe, the feeling of growing older during the intense! Always accelerating future shock of the 20th century, and the ending
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___ is kind of a "character is who you are in the dark" thing. Red is a criminal, a father, an adventurer, a lost soul. He sees the other stalker get wealth and security and wonderful kids, knowing the other stalker sacrificed human people to the meat grinder. When Red finally gets sick of his marginal life (in Canada) he sacrifices the other Stalker's kid to the meat grinder, but in the moment of making his wish he finds he can't be selfish and wishes for "happiness for everyone, free, and no one will go away unsatisfied!" He went there to do something horrifically selfish and individualistic, but when he was finally contronted with unlimited posibility he choked. He couldn't think of what he wanted that was worth the horrible thing he'd done, something selfish that would balance the scales with the enormity of his crime, and instead he made Arthur's wish - a better world, born from the terror and desolation of the Zone."