Every time out, they get more carried away; the truth gets a little more distorted; the fantasies become more extreme; the slow process of turning victims into victimizers gathers steam.
This month, it is 40 years since British trade commissioner James Cross was kidnapped (he was released on Dec. 3) and Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte was murdered and the War Measures Act imposed.
The conspiracy theorists have done their best, over those 40 years, to try to turn Laporte's killers into innocent, well-intentioned freedom fighters and to convince Quebecers that the authorities knew all along where Cross was being held, refusing to rescue him because they wanted to discredit Quebec's fledgling independence movement.
Quebecers who were not alive at the time have no way of knowing what a massive whitewash effort this is. Laporte didn't die as a result of an "accident." He was strangled on Oct. 17. Killing a grown man by strangulation takes sustained effort. It's not something done in a moment of panic, as the revisionists would like people new to the history to believe.
Did the police really know where Cross was held for weeks? Nothing factual or plausible suggests this was true, yet by dint of repetition, thousands of Quebecers could end up believing it.
The revisionists/conspiracists play on an understandable fascination with a politically important and emotionally charged moment in the province's history. But their romanticized, sanitized version distorts that history.
Most Quebecers were repelled by the violence. Eighty-six per cent of them favoured taking a hard line against the Front de liberation du Quebec. Eight days after Laporte's body was found stuffed in the trunk of a car, Jean Drapeau -an implacable foe of the FLQ -swept to power at city hall.
It is a mistake to look at October Crisis revisionists and conspiracy theorists as harmless crackpots. The FLQ included people who murdered a minister of the crown and kidnapped a foreign official on Canadian soil and have never apologized for either act.
The October Crisis seems to have inoculated Quebecers against political violence in the decades since. But there is no guarantee that this peace will endure.
Softening the historical FLQ's hard edges with a patina of revisionism and nostalgia can only encourage a new generation to view violence as romantic. Quebec is already home to the Jeunes patriotes, an offshoot of the Mouvement de liberation du Quebec, led by former terrorist Raymond Villeneuve. A few weeks after 9/11, Villeneuve talked of blowing up tank trucks full of explosives in the West Island "where there are a lot of Canadians."
Anniversaries should be used to good purpose. All Quebec should use this one to reject anew any tendency to mythologize bloodshed as a way of grabbing what cannot be won at the ballot box.