Psycho-Social Passions Unleashed

Playing with peoples' emotions, manipulating peoples' propensity to guarding themselves against those who are alien, too different from themselves to be acceptable, a clear threat to their well-being, and you provoke within them sometimes surprising tendencies and sometimes harshly ungovernable reactions difficult to control, posing their own very dangerous risk to society.

In Europe political parties on the far right have gained in strength on the basis of their exhorting members of society alarmed at the changing face of their culture - their heritage, their values with the introduction of unfamiliar cultures and a religion that has itself impelled many of its believers toward a fearful terrorism they name the jihad of the faith-  has invoked a backlash.

Norway saw the result of one man, Anders Behring Breivik, coming cannily unhinged to the point where he emulated the fanatical Islamist attacks on both Western and Muslim targets to compel a purer Islam among the believers and the fear of conquest or death among the unbelievers with his own planned-and-executed terror attack. 

This man developed his very own ideological structure of striking back - against those symbolic of his countrymen who allowed his beloved country to absorb the stranger, and accommodate itself to that stranger's faith, threatening that of the indigenous population, and the country reeled in horror that any among them could descend to such madness of logic.

In Quebec, there is another kind of fear stoked by francophones invested in saving their culture and their language from assimilation into the prevailing English majority.  The French in Quebec achieve their goal at the expense of the human rights of the anglophones in direct contradiction to the federal legal status of official bilingualism.

And, having achieved a remarkable level of success, they remain adamant and invested in creating even greater linguistic and cultural disparities between the "pur laine" francophones and the anglophone and allophone populations that have long called the province their home.  The psychological push-and-shove has created a climate of mutual suspicion.

And in this latest election result that has restored the Parti Quebecois to power albeit with a minority government whose life may not be as long as its leader Pauline Marois anticipates, a sufficient level of insecurity and rage was raised within the apprehensive mood of at least one resident of the province to persuade him to commit incomprehensible violence.

Richard Henry Bain, owner of a Laurentian sport-oriented resort fatally shot Denis Blanchette and wounded David Courage at the Metropolis nightclub in Montreal on the occasion of the victory speech being delivered by Madame Marois.  The two men were sound technicians who just happened to be in the right place at the wrong time.

The Front de Liberation du Quebec, a Marxist-Leninist paramilitary group whose goal was Quebec secession organized violence and created acts of terror in the province, setting explosives in mailboxes and kidnapping and murdering a Quebec cabinet minister, Pierre Laporte in their revolutionary zeal; rioting university students recalled that time just recently when they urged that Premier Jean Charest be put in a car trunk in response to his raising student tuition fees.

And this man, Richard Henry Gain, owner of 21 registered guns brought five of them with him when he drove to Montreal and appeared at the Metropolis to demonstrate his displeasure with the Parti Quebecois, and in all likelihood meant to target Madame Marois so his message would be clear and unforgettable.

His goal was achieved; Madame Marois is alive and well, one man is dead, another severely injured.  The Norwegian mass murderer insisted on his being found totally sane in his commission of mass murder.  Mr. Bain, charged in a Montreal courthouse with 16 counts, from first-degree murder to weapons and explosives charges does, in fact, suffer from a severe personality disorder.

"He had to take pills - but how severe was his illness, I don't know.  In the last year, he had been pretty calm.  So this really surprised us", explained a friend and neighbour of Mr. Bain who has known him for 40 years, and knew he was being treated for bipolar disorder. One might wonder how it is that someone with such a mental illness, however controlled, could legally own firearms.

 It represents a supreme irony that the Province of Quebec too suffers a type of collective bipolar disorder.

It is beyond tragic that a young man, father of young children, became a victim of an enraged anglophone who felt his province's language laws pushed him too far and completely unhinged his moral compass to make of him an odious murderer.