By Mark Bisset
I was playing in the back yard of one of my friends on a sunny day at the height of the Cold War when an air raid siren went off.
It was a haunting wail that rose and fell, like those you still sometimes hear on the news from the Ukraine these days. It came from a military-grey horn on a tower near the downtown, almost five kilometres away, but it was clear and it went through us like a bayonet.
At about 10 or 11, we were just becoming aware of the real implications of total nuclear war, and I had started having dreams with mushroom clouds on the horizon.
I felt deep dread.
Fifty years later, that moment is still vivid. My friend and I freezing, locking eyes. His mother, hanging laundry, looking up into the blue sky, saying nothing for a long moment.
Then: “It’s just a test,” she said. “To make sure it’s still working.”
In the last few weeks I’ve been bumping up against feelings similar to those I felt that day.
Cold, visceral, a crawling in the gut.
I studied history in university, and have had a life-long interest in it, reading voraciously about the two world wars and the Holocaust in particular. This period fascinates me because my family was sewn into it.
My father served aboard ships in the North Atlantic during the Second World War while my grandfather, a hard-drinking trench veteran of the First World War, rushed to sign up again in 1939 to fight Hitler. My uncle became a paratrooper. Another uncle who made his living as a newspaper cartoonist died at Dieppe.
By 15, my mother was building Mosquito bombers out of plywood in an Ontario factory designed to make tractors. The war is a big part of my family context.
Persistent questions keep me reading about the first half of the 20th century. What would I have done? How did ordinary people turn into monsters under Nazi rule? How did the Nazis turn one of the most cultured nations on earth into a unified instrument of pure hate? How did Stalin turn Russia into a murderous prison?
Through history I struggle to understand the mechanisms and the human failings that led to such astounding suffering.
Now the post-Second World War political order that underpinned 80 years of relative stability appears to be spilling sideways. What will we do here in Orillia?
Cheer for Team Canada on the ice, certainly. Buy Canadian. Change travel plans. Prepare to accept tough times. Embrace our community. Shore up our institutions. Fight any sense of powerlessness. Manage our anger. Be open to nuance. Keep our eyes open.
I recommend a small, intense book written in 2017: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, by Timothy Snyder.
“History does not repeat, but it does instruct,” begins this Yale University history professor.
“History can familiarize, and it can warn,” Snyder continues.
“The history of the 20th century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well to understand why.”
Drawing on the experiences of millions of citizens who have suffered tyranny in its various guises over the previous century, the brief chapters begin with “1. Do not obey in advance.” and end with “20. Be as courageous as you can.”
The takeaway from this short read is that tyranny’s success is in part built on the small choices we make day by day. We are its source, its power, and with luck, its eventual downfall.
This book will not make you happy.
It will not help you sleep.
It may help you navigate should things unravel.
Perhaps this is just a test. But it never hurts to make sure our early warning system is working.
Mark Bisset spent the past 14 years of his working life as the executive director of the Couchiching Conservancy before retiring in 2024. In a previous iteration of himself, he worked in every news department at the Orillia Packet & Times, a daily newspaper from a bygone era. Mark was the managing editor when he stepped down in 2009. And before all of that, he was a pretty happy kid. He’s a lifelong sailor and gardener who has chosen Orillia as his beloved home for the past 38 years.