What remembrance really means.

Today is the anniversary of the Montreal Massacre. On the 6th of December, in 1989, Marc Lepine entered the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, Quebec, separated the men from the women, and began to kill the 'feminists' that he hated so much before turning the gun on himself

Please note that if I am committing suicide today ... it is not for economic reasons ... but for political reasons. For I have decided to send Ad Patres [Latin: "to the fathers"] the feminists who have ruined my life. ... The feminists always have a talent for enraging me. They want to retain the advantages of being women ... while trying to grab those of men. ... They are so opportunistic that they neglect to profit from the knowledge accumulated by men throughout the ages. They always try to misrepresent them every time they can.

Attached to the letter was a list of 19 prominent Québec women in non-traditional occupations, including the province's first woman firefighter and police captain. Beneath the list Lépine wrote: "[These women] nearly died today. The lack of time (because I started too late) has allowed these radical feminists to survive." It was, instead, dozens of ordinary women at the École Polytechnique who would bear the brunt of his fury.

(from Gendercide.org's Case Study

This is one of the most important events in Canadian history. It is tempting to dismiss Lepine as a madman, but we should take care not to do so, because that absolves him of any personal responsibility for this. These crimes were deliberate, planned--not random acts of violence.

The CBC has impressive archives in general, but their video and radio footage of the Massacre is particularly affecting. When this happened, it was something that Canada was unprepared for it. No one wants to deal with sexism in the way that the Massacre forces us to, and that's very apparent in the footage.