Newsletter

September 2025

My Book About Censorship Was Censored

Jim McMurtry

The Nazi book burnings in Germany and Austria in
the 1930s targeted books that the German Student Union deemed
subversive. In Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, the
firemen burn subversive books. In 2019, the school district, Conseil
scolaire catholique (CSC) Providence, which operates as the French
language school board for southwestern Ontario, burned classic books and
used the ashes as fertilizer in the “spirit of reconciliation.” In 2025,
I was physically banned from my old school, WJ Mouat Secondary, by the
Abbotsford School District, because I went there to launch my book,
The Scarlet Lesson.

The operating principle in the instances above is that books are a
danger. But burning books or banishing authors is like shooting the
messenger: The message doesn’t perish. As the ancient Greek dramatist
Sophocles is often purported to have said,“You can kill a man, but you
can’t kill an idea”. My idea was that Christian teachers didn’t murder
students in Indian residential schools, which so upset my employer that
I was accused of “serious professional misconduct” for transmitting the
idea to students, and recently I was physically prevented from venturing
within twenty metres of school property because I had my book in
hand.

I had decided, cheekily, to launch my book at ground zero of my
cancellation, and when I exited my car across the street from Mouat
Secondary, I was abruptly met by two undercover police officers who told
me I had to stay a distance away and that there was no point in my being
there as the school had been emptied for an impromptu teacher-student
sports game of some type. I had arrived in time to watch the last
classes of students file out the west end of the school, with teachers
like sheep dogs hastening their step. Those students who looked over at
me, a solitary and forlorn figure on the sidewalk opposite the school,
were quickly set upon by their classroom teacher.

Having taught at the school, I suspected it was being evacuated
because I was deemed a potential threat. I later managed to speak with
some students who returned to the school to be picked up by parents.
When spoken to, they all had different stories as to why the school was
evacuated a full two hours before classes normally end. (Because the
school was evacuated, the B.C. Teacher Regulation Branch has added
another allegation against me.) None of the students mentioned anything
about a teacher-student sports game.

On a late Wednesday night in May I posted that I’d be selling my book
outside WJ Mouat on that Friday. The next day I had a letter wedged into
the frame of my front door. It accused me of hurting the mental state of
students and traumatizing indigenous students in particular—those
descendants of noble warriors of lore who stalked the rugged and
unforgiving landscape of Canada. School authorities, in order to signal
their moral superiority over past and present Canadians, decided a
generation ago that all indigenous people are now duped, dependent,
thin-skinned victims in a dark conspiracy of genocide.

The firemen in Fahrenheit 451 are starting fires because
their dystopian government judges them more useful in destroying
knowledge and intellectual freedom. The title of the book represents the
temperature at which paper burns (451°F), and the story itself is about
state control, censorship, and the absence of free thought and
individual identity.

I rail against creeping totalitarianism in Abbotsford, but the city
is far from a dystopia. It calls itself “the city in the country,” a
community succored on urban sprawl and agriculture, forged on the anvil
of delta and forest land in the Fraser Valley of southwestern B.C. by
early Mennonite pioneers whose ancestors had fled Russia to escape
persecution from Catherine the Great. So how did the police justify
sending two policemen to watch over my uneventful book launch with other
senior citizens on public property for three hours, considering that the
city is the third most crime-ridden in Canada?

By insisting that the Indigenous children in residential schools who
died tragically from disease did so because of this, I created a
firestorm I had not anticipated. Yet, as an older teacher, I was ready
to stand up for historical truth, and a fact established by the
eponymous Truth and Reconciliation Commission, against
illiterate woke cultists in my school district. What I wasn’t ready for
was the police presence—regarding a book that has a foreword by
legendary journalist and historian Conrad Black, reviews by other noted
Canadians, and reasoned argument for academic values over
indoctrination.

It’s strange that a school district has the police at its beck and
call, and also that schools are considered unsafe if someone is
expressing views contrary to those of district managers. Stranger yet is
that these managers are hostile to my ideas without caring to know
anything about them, as none of them ever agreed to a conversation with
me. To the contrary, they demanded that I not talk to anyone while going
through their years-long witch-hunt.

Everything has to be confidential, according to these district
managers. They don’t want bad publicity. If it happens, however, they
can always call the cops, or, better still, the firemen.

Jim McMurtry (jimmcmurtry01@gmail.com)
has a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in Educational Theory and for
over four decades has been a teacher, principal and college lecturer. He
gained notoriety for standing against the political indoctrination and
exploitation of school children, as detailed in his book The
Scarlet Lesson. He was fired by the Abbotsford School District for
speaking factually about residential schools.