Tony Clement's Student Days

I don't normally concern myself with details of the histories of individual right-wing politicians, but I happened across this story when I was wading through old newspaper archives for my work. So I thought I would share it.

Back in the early 1980s, a student society at the University of Toronto law school invited the ambassador from South Africa, Glen Babb, to come and participate in a debate about international law with some Canadian academic or other. At the time, South Africa embraced the vicious apartheid system by which the dominance of the country's white minority was maintained and the racialized majority, particularly the large indigenous African population, was highly restricted in terms of their legal rights, was regularly subjected to nasty state repression and violence, and was forced into situations of extreme economic exploitation for the benefit of (white-owned) South African capital. Black Africans were, essentially, treated as sub-human.

This invitation of an official representative of the apartheid government to come and advocate for apartheid at a prestigious Canadian institution caused an uproar. My interest in the situation is that one of my interview participants, Charles Roach, represented four U of T professors who attempted to get a court injunction to prevent this from happening, though this unsuccessful effort is not the point of this post. What is the point is that in the furor that ensued after this invitation was issued, the society of law students decided to rescind their invitation.

One basis of the objection by the four professors was that "Academic freedom does not include the promotion of criminal acts." The United Nations had designated apartheid as a "crime against humanity" and a U.N. convention adopted in more than 100 countries (but not, at that time, Canada) also made it a crime.

Moreover, at that time Canada had laws against hate speech which had recently been successfully used against deniers of the World War II Holocaust against the Jewish people and others, including infamous names like Ernst Zundel and Jim Keegstra. Around the same time, a community-based committee that Roach was chairing put it this way: "The racist lies of (James) Keegstra and (Ernst) Zundel are attempts to deny the Nazi atrocities of 40 years ago...The propaganda of the South African Government is an attempt to justify the most racist of all present regimes...Neither should be allowed in Canada."

At the time, as always seems to happen, the invocation of "free speech" to support the right of the powerful to speak was done by liberals as well as the right. For example, social democratic icon Stephen Lewis, who today has a reputation, I think deserved, of speaking up to promote the interests of Africa on the global stage, took the "freedom of speech" position, as did the University of Toronto administration. And another example: after this first debate at U of T was called off, CBC radio made it happen on the air instead. The director of information programming at CBC radio at the time, Donna Logan, said, "I think that as long as the man is an ambassador in this country...we would be derelict in our duty not to put him on the air and subject his views to debate." Somehow there was nothing "derelict" about the fact that the CBC did not, merely because they happened to be "an amabassador in this country", provide prime-time platforms for every ambassador from regimes with explicitly anti-colonial or anti-capitalist politics.

At the university itself, two bold, dissident law students took it upon themselves to found a new student society to reissue the invitation to Ambassador Babb. They included statements involving a kind of ritualistic opposition to apartheid, of course, and they based their decision to do this in free speech arguments. But even so, what does it say that, with all the oppressed voices and experiences that routinely get excluded from elite universities and elite law schools in this country even today, the one that prompted them to take these extraordinary steps was the case of the poor, misunderstood ambassador from the apartheid regime? Why was it so important to allow this representative of the powerful, this official mouthpiece for global white supremacy, a chance to promote public policy that routiney dehumanized Black people and a government that regularly tortured and killed them when they insisted that they were in fact human?

One of these two law students so concerned with the rigths of poor Ambassador Babb that he had to take action was Tony Clement -- currently the Minister of Health and Minister for the Federal Economic Development Initiative for Northern Ontario in our federal Conservative government.

Roach asked rhetorically during one of the injunction requests, "Is the unversity really going to be harmed by not hearing a person who advocates genocide? How chilling."

But apparently so, according to Clement.

Quote: Canadian Apartheid

There is specific historical resonance in the concept of apartheid within Canada. Not only did Canadian immigration policy selectively encourage White settlement and prohibit immigration from racialized group members for many years, using a logic similar to that of the apartheid regime in South Africa, but also when the minority White South African regimes officially instituted the apartheid system of Bantustans or homelands for indigenous Africans, they looked to Canada's system of segregation of Aboriginal peoples and use of reserves to conceive the eventual model for their racist project. Further, while apartheid South Africa's use of domestic and migrant racialized labour was distinctive in the intensity of its exploitation, there are parallels to the historical exploitation of racialized labour in the Canadian labour market.

-- Grace-Edward Galabuzi

35 Ways to Take Action

Soon enough, whenever you are talking about the world and about social change, the question arises, "Well, okay, but what should I do?" Influential public intellectual Noam Chomsky has said he gets this question all the time when he does talks, albeit mostly from audiences in the rich countries of North America and Europe -- in the global south, people seem much more able to answer it for themselves and tend to be more interested in sharing what they're already doing.

This post is an attempt by the people over at Insurgent American to provide a generic answer to that question in its most generic form, in response to repeated queries of this sort from people who have come across their site. Normally, I'm a bit dubious about attempts to answer a question so broad in an abstract kind of way, given how much a good answer really depends on each individual's experiences, resources, social location, talents, and desires.

However, the way the IA people have gone about answering it is interesting for a number of reasons. For one thing, you usually see attempts to produce generic answers to the question of what to do coming out of liberal politics, but this is very clearly coming from a place of revolutionary politics. At the same time, great care has been taken to make it actually meaningful to actual lives, rather than any sort of dogmatic or abstract irrelevance. They write:

New practices create new forms of consciousness; and here are a few ideas on some practices. Anyone can do one, two, or as many as are workable in present circumstances. The mental test we use in trying to determine the what’s appropriate is woman-burb-hood. Is this something that can relate to the capacities of a woman who lives in either a suburb or an urban neighborhood?

I am also interested in it because of the obvious priority it places on increasing the capacity of individuals and collectives to expand their potential for autonomous action. This is based not only on the IA folks valuing autonomy per se, but also on their analysis of the centrality of the pending end of cheap energy and what that will do to our lives and our world. So lots of their suggestions have to do with the development of capacity that increases our scope for autonomy -- if not exactly extracting us from the web of dependency and control that characterizes industrialized societies, then at least putting us in a position to act with greater agency with respect to it.

Perhaps another way to say this is that it recognizes that one way in which we are kept pacified by ruling relations is through the many ways in which they remove, constrain, erase, and deaden our capacity to do, again both as individuals and as communities or other sorts of collectives. There are some aspects of that global denial of capacity to act autonomously that will only be regained through massive struggle. But there are other aspects, smaller but still very important aspects, that we can actually do something about here and now. Sometimes it's as simple as trying and doing -- I know that I wrestle all the time with barriers to acting in the world in ways that would make me more effective as an agent of change and that would result in a me more genuinely in tune with my own wants/needs/desires, and often those barriers have more to do with what's going on in my own head than anything external preventing me from acting. Sometimes it's a matter of investing effort in developing skills that will make us less dependent, more able to act. Sometimes it's a matter of creating simple, social infrastructure. In any case, as the block of text quoted above implies, the authors of this list recognize that one of the most important aspects in fostering radical, autonomous, political doing in search of liberation is the deceptively simple goal of fostering habits of doing, but doing that is decidedly not habitual.

I also enjoy the deliberately eclectic nature of the collection, though I suppose almost all could be categorized as either fairly conventional political action or as capacity and community building. Still, the attention the specifics show to actually considering where a fairly broad and diverse chunk of ordinary North Americans are at is a good lesson in what radical politics have to be, I think. Personally, I don't think I'm going to follow either of the suggestions related to firearms. I am also distressed to notice there are at least four that I have done in the past but no longer do (grow my own food, vermiculture, own/ride a bike, frequent a farm market/Community Shared Agriculture farm). I think I might think about going back to one or all of those, to the extent that I can. The ones related to organizing in a more conventional sense make me a bit sad because of the relative lack of opportunities to do such things in my current location. But the one on doing a communtiy access cable show, with community radio mentioned in the explanatory text, has given me a bit of a jolt -- since reading it, I've actually been giving some thought to the idea of getting back involved in community radio, and I have a disturbingly practical idea for a show I could do. And as for the idea of deliberately setting out to learn new, practical, fix-it and build-it skills on a set schedule...well, speaking as someone with almost no such skills to speak of, this suggestion is both profound and intimidating.

Anyway. I have said often before to friends and loved ones that I am almost always in a state of low-level existential crisis, and I have a feeling that at the moment I am in the early flutterings of what will end up being a fairly significant transitional period for me, so "What to do?" and its myriad possible answers are feeling very close to home. But I think part of the point of a list of this sort is that invites all of us to be critical of the ways we are complicit in our own barriers to doing, and to do something about that.

Sudbury Event: Repression and Revolt in Oaxaca

To learn more about the recent uprising and repression in Oaxaca, Mexico, please come to the following event in Sudbury on March 1:

State Repression and Popular Revolt in Oaxaca, Mexico

On June 14th 2006 the Mexican National Guard attacked an encampment of striking teachers in Oaxaca City in southern Mexico During the eight hour onslaught the National Guard used tear gas spraying helicopters, and goon squads to attack unarmed teachers and supporters. This state attack produced a popular revolt sparking the formation of the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO) which included 350 social organizations and unions. APPO set about making this Mexican state 'ungovernable' in an unprecedented mass mobilization calling for the resignation of the corrupt Governor Ulises of the PRI Party and beginning to establish a new popular direct democracy across the state. Since then there has been a police and vigilante campaign against APPO leading to disappearances, assassinations, and the holding of APPO members as political prisoners. All of this occurs in the broader Mexican context of the Zapatista inspired Other Campaign, and the massive electoral fraud against Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the PRD party.

Speaker: Sherry Guppy is an activist and an artist. She lived in Oaxaca, Mexico from August 2004 until September 2006. She went to work in Oaxaca, Mexico to teach ESL. She arrived in Oaxaca days before the state election which resulted in the fraudulent victory of Governor Ulises; and she witnessed the first months of the popular uprising to oust Governor Ulises.

DVD: Never Forget: Oaxaca City University Students footage of the June 14th Attack.

Thursday, March 1st

*2:30 pm Room C-114 in the Classroom Building at Laurentian University.

*7:30 pm Fourth Floor Resource Area, St. Andrew's Place, 111 Larch Street, Downtown Sudbury.

Both locations are wheelchair accessible.

If you need more information, let me know and I can put you in touch with the right people. If you are in Sudbury on March 1, please come to one of these events!

Review: Canada and the Commonwealth Caribbean

[Brian Douglas Tennyson, editor. Canada and the Commonwealth Caribbean. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988.]

This book is a collection of essays previously published in academic journals, and according to the book's introduction it includes most of the work published to that time on Canada and the Commonwealth Caribbean. The scant scholarly attention this area has received is attested to not only by this volume's modest size but by the fact that its introduction opens with a quote from and them proceeds to draw heavily on a non-academic book written more than a decade earlier (and recently reviewed by me).

I had expected this to be a rather boring read but was pleasantly surprised. Perhaps the least interesting pieces in the collection were those that were most contemporary in their focus, while those that were more purely historical tended to tell more interesting tales.

One of the more interesting essays, for example, focused on the Canadian Presbyterian mission to the South Asian community in Trinidad in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I actually found it kind of difficult to know what to make of the essay's tone -- it presents ample foundational information to construct a stinging indictment of colonial Christianity, yet it does not quite manage to do so in a direct way. It demonstrates that the success of the mission was in part due to its support by the Crown Colony government and the white planter class in Trinidad, support given because the mission provided benefits to them in return in terms of supporting rather nasty social relations from which they gained. Another factor to the advantage of the mission was summarized as "the achievements of contemporary white society", which seems to be a more academically acceptable way of talking about the impact that global white supremacy had on the choices and subjectivities of the colonized. In any case, it quite nicely demonstrates, perhaps without really intending to, the ways in which this exercise in Canadian so-called philanthropy fit in as one piece in the overall oppressive imperial/colonial project.

A number of essays touched on ongoing scheming for political union between Canada and some or all of the West Indies. This was raised as early as 1884 and I remember hearing something about it on the news (and being quite mystified by the whole thing) when I was a teenager, probably in the late 1980s or so. Most Canadian elites have always been ambivalent about this possibility, though early on the objections seemed to have been most strenuous from the British Colonial Office because of potential commercial impacts on the "mother country" and a bureaucratic investment in not surrendering their part of the "white man's burden". The closest it came to happening was in the late years of World War I, when Prime Minister Robert Borden was firmly convinced of the idea. Initially, though the Colonial Office continued to object, Prime Minister Lloyd George of Great Britain was favourable as were a few other powerful members of his Cabinet, but making it happen was never a priority for any of these imperialists, as busy as they were with imperialist war and its aftermath in Europe, and so momentum was lost. Canada also stationed troops in the Caribbean during both World Wars, ostensibly to guard against German attack but also to put down any uprising or agitation by disgruntled locals were it to occur, though this did not really arise in practice. By the end of World War II elements of the British government were asking Canada to keep its troops there and to assume "colonial responsibilities" for the West Indies, but at that point Canadian political elites had no interest whatsoever in taking on such a role.

A final essay of interest focused on immigration from the Caribbean to Canada in the early 20th century. It is a fine illustration of how selective enforcement, informal understandings, and straight-up deception can make race-neutral written rules work in racist ways. There was an order-in-coucil written and signed by the minister in 1914 but never put into effect that would have banned Black immigration. Despite this lack of formal textual authority, the Immigration Branch spent the next forty years doing whatever it could to keep African Caribbean people out of Canada. One common mechanism was by invoking a section of the regulations which allowed them to bar people that they judged might end up depending on public assistance of some kind -- the higher-ups in the department made it quite clear to the agents on the ground that all African Caribbean people were considered to meet this criterion. They also attempted to invoke the "continuous journey" clause that was used to keep immigrants from South Asia out of Canada, though this particular device did not hold up because of the much shorter distances involved. It is doubly fascinating to see that an element of this racist determination seemed to be a bureaucratic calcification of cultural prejudice that did not necessarily reflect immediate material interests of powerful people. For example, there were times when the coal mines in Cape Breton were short of workers and the mine owners wished to arrange for immigration from the West Indies, but they were denied permission. During World War I, there was even a nasty note from the Colonial Office, but to no effect. Throughout, the Immigration Branch continued to deny that this was its policy, but to nonetheless enforce it vigorously.

I doubt too many people will be interested in this book unless their work or some particular combination of personal experiences draws them to it. Nonetheless, it does have plenty of material that is interesting and useful to me, and helped shed light on a few more obscure corners of Canadian history.

[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Sudbury Police Violence Update

On this site, I have been periodically following developments in a local case in which two youth were subjected to police harassment and violence last summer and then charged with absurd things. It looks like those charges are about to be dropped. If you are in Sudbury on February 21st, please stop by the court house to help us make a strong final statement against police violence!

Here is the latest from Ander:

Hi Everyone.


After nine months of filling courtrooms, holding community
gatherings, handing out ‘know your rights’ pamphlets,
postering the city, holding rallies, snickering and
giggling inside courtrooms, doing media work, and lots of
personal support, it looks like the charges against Ander
and Shawn are going to be dropped on February 21 at 1:30
in courtroom B!

This is the result of huge amounts of work on the part of
S-CAP, communities and individual people mobilizing around
this case to denounce routine police violence and put
pressure on the courts to drop the charges.

I am asking that people come out and fill the courtroom
to the brim- wall to wall! After this, there is going to
be an S-CAP rally on the steps of the courthouse for a
media conference.

Being the final ‘episode’ in this particular (criminal)
court, it’s important that we make a strong last stand to
speak out against routine police violence and harassment
directed towards marginalized peoples.


Ander

Urgent Action: Innocent Aboriginal Man Seeking Judicial Review for Wrongful Conviction

I would urge all readers to take a few minutes to engage in this action. If you are bloggers, it would be great if you could post this material on your own site or link to it. In many situations, writing letters is a sufficiently pointless exercise that I would not recommend wasting your energy on it, but in circumstances like that of John Moore's, showing the government that people around the country and even around the world are watching is one key way to ensure that justice might actually be done. I've gotten to know John a little bit in my time in Sudbury, because he has been involved in anti-poverty struggles and the group that I have been participating in has been involved in supporting his struggle for justice. He has lots of support locally, but we need to put some pressure on at the national level. I would encourage everyone to write a letter or two (or use the sample letter at the bottom of this post) in support of his request for a judicial review of his wrongful and racist conviction.

Please note, if you are a little uncomfortable with the idea of intervening in a case that you have only just heard of, that you are not asking for some sort of arbitrary overturning of the conviction, but rather that the federal government take action that is well within its power to ensure due process in the case by starting a judicial review.

Here is some background:

John Moore, an Ojibway man from Serpent River First Nation, spent 10 years (from 1978 to 1988) in Millhaven, for a murder he did not commit. John Moore is asking the Justice Department to review his unconstitutional 2nd degree murder conviction.

After being sentence in 1978, the law under which he was tried was repealed in 1987. “If he were to go to trial today on exactly the same facts and evidence, the murder charge would never get past the stage of a preliminary inquiry. He wouldn’t even have to stand on it today”, said lawyer Glenn Sandberg.

John Moore has petitioned the federal justice department several times to clear his name in the 1978 murder of a Sault Ste. Marie taxi cab driver (Regina versus Moore). Court records show Moore was not present at the crime scene, yet he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for second degree murder because, the Crown argued, he spoke to the two killers about the premeditated crime before it happened.

At the time of his conviction, Canadian law held that even though there was evidence to show Moore was not at the murder scene but in fact with other people, he could be found guilty of the crime because, on an objective standard, he ought to have known the crime could have happened.

Moore argues that his conviction was a case of guilt by association. Not only an association with the men who actually took a man’s life, but judicial prejudice that come with being a native man in a non-native justice system. “There is no doubt in my mind that I was convicted because of racism,” said Moore, who was tried by an all-white jury.

Although Moore has exhausted all his avenues of appeal, there is a section in the Criminal Code, which gives special powers to the Minister of Justice to order an appeal or a new trial in special circumstances.

Considering that several people convicted of murder were later found to be innocent - David Milgaard, Donald Marshall, Guy Paul Morin - the justice department should review cases such as Moore’s.

Despite his release from prison, Moore stresses that punishment continues with the stigmatization of a conviction of murder charge. He continues to serve a sentence of life of parole reporting to officers on a monthly basis and asking permission to leave the city of Sudbury to return home.

While he was in jail, Moore also lost several important people in his life, including a son, his father, and grandmother. Further, he faces inability to find meaningful work due to his conviction.

Please write a letter of support (see sample below) for John Moore calling for a judicial review of his case leading to exoneration.

For more information or to support John directly, please contact:

John Moore, 3 Eyre Street, Sudbury, Ontario, P3C 4A2, 705.673.9576
Denis Michel, John Moore’s Lawyer, 36 Elgin Street, Sudbury,
Ontario, P3C 5B4, 705.674.1976

Here are a few politicians that you could send your letter to. The first one is probably the most important, so if you are only able to send one then send it to him. It would also be useful to send it to your own MP. If you are feeling really ambitious, why not CC: the national media?

The Honourable Robert Douglas Nicholson, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, 239 Kent Street 306 Justice Building, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, K1A 0A6
Telephone: 613.992.4621
Fax:613.990.7255
Email: webadmin(at)justice.gc.ca

The Honourable Mr.Jim Prentice, Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Wellington Street, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, K1A 0A6
Telephone: 613.992.4275
Fax: 613.947.9475
Email: infoPubs(at)ainc-inac.gc.ca

The Right Honourable, Mr. Stephen Joseph Harper, The Prime Minister of Canada, The House of Commons, Prime Minister’s Office, Ottawa, ON, K1A 0A6
Telephone: 613.992.4211
Fax: 613.941.6900
Email: pm(at)pm.gc.ca

Mrs. Diane Marleau, The House of Commons, Ottawa, ON, K1A 0A6
Telephone: 705.673.7107
Fax: 705.673.0944
Email: info(at)dianemarleau.com

Mr. Raymond Bonin, The House of Commons, Ottawa, ON, K1A 0A6
Telephone: 705.897.2222
Fax: 613.995.9100
Email: boninr(at)parl.gc.ca

And here is the sample letter:

(DATE)

Robert Douglas Nicholson
Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada
239 Kent Street, 306 Justice Building
Ottawa, Ontario
CANADA, K1A 0A6

Dear Honourable Minister Nicholson,

Re: Judicial Review of John Moore’s Case

I am writing to ask for an immediate judicial review of John Moore’s 2nd degree murder case. John Moore is an Ojibway man from Serpent River First Nation who spent 10 years (from 1978 to 1988) in Millhaven Penitentiary for a murder he did not commit.

John Moore was convicted of 2nd degree murder in 1978 under a law which was later repealed in 1987. The same evidence for which he spent time in jail would no longer stand up in a court of law. Many also believe there is ample evidence to indicate that racial profiling was a key factor leading to his false conviction.

His wrongful conviction continues to follow him today as he reports to a parole office on a monthly basis and must be granted permission to leave the city of Sudbury. This is impeding his freedom of movement and capacity to find meaningful work.

Mr. Moore has repeatedly asked for a review of his case, but these requests have not been granted. I believe that you have a duty to grant a judicial review of Mr. Moore’s case, particularly considering that several people convicted of murder were later found to be innocent, including David Milgaard, Donald Marshall, and Guy Paul Morin.

Please uphold principles of justice and equality in our legal system, and promptly grant a review of John Moores’ case. I will continue to follow this issue with great interest and look forward to hearing of progress.

Sincerely,
(YOUR NAME HERE)

Please write!


(Thanks to CF and GK for the background material and the sample letter.)

Buffy the Anarcho Syndicalist

I am somewhat embarassed to admit that, in the past, I have occasionally been known to decompress by indulging in reading fanfiction -- that is, creative writing in which ordinary people seize characters, imagery, and narratives originating in mass-produced cultural "franchises" and use them for their own purposes. In principle, I see a productive tension there between the origins of the characters and stories in dominant media and the inevitable impact on storytelling possibilities that such a hegemony-infused inheritance will bring, on the one hand, with the potential for mass recognizeability and following to be used by ordinary people telling stories in subversive ways, on the other hand. In practice, it is often a bit disappointing because the vast majority of fanfiction is not only of dubious quality in terms of writing, it is also usually not subversive in the least, and the only consistently norm-challenging area that I've encountered (and, admittedly, I'm not claiming that my past explorations have been at all exhaustive) is around dissenting sexual and relationship practices and occasionally in limited ways around gender.

However, there do seem to be occasional exceptions. The good people at AK Press have published this delightfully silly-looking yet dominant-narrative-bending comic, which I have ordered but not yet received. Their web site describes it as follows:

Buffy the Anarcho Syndicalist

A wonderful situ-inspired detourned comic, featuring our young anarcho-syndicalist hero; Giles, a hardened revolutionary who is one of Buffy's closest comrades; Carlos, an old wobbly who has't forgotten his passion for social justice; Jim Orwell, a black activist who has been stirring up trouble amongst Sunnydale's minority workforce, and Maria, the evil CEO of Blood Red Enterprises.

Review: The Caribbean Connection

[Robert Chodos. The Caribbean Connection. Toronto: James Lorimer & Company, 1977.]

Canadian delusions of our country having a purely benign role in the world are incredibly difficult to dispel. As I have searched for a certain type of source in doing research to produce contextual material for my chapter focusing on a Trinidadian Canadian activist lawyer in Toronto, it has become clear to me that one of the reasons why it is difficult to dispel this myth of Canadian innocence, at least when it comes to the Caribbean, is that relatively little has actually been written on the subject.

Though this book is three decades old, it is a very effective introduction to some of the less positive roles that Canada has played with respect to the Caribbean. It contains lots of information to help me write the two or three related paragraphs that I need to write. Moreover, though it is not an easy book to find and has long been out of print, its age would not stop it from serving as a good introduction to the area for any early twenty-first century Canadians wishing to educate themselves on the subject. Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of this book being so old was that my copy is extremely fragile so I could not easily read it as one component of multi-tasking, as I so often do, and even so it literally fell apart as I read it.

(Before I go any farther in commenting on the book's content, I should probably issue a disclaimer: I have never met him myself, but the author lives in the same part of the country that I grew up in, and his wife is a good friend of my mother. Don't think that has affected my opinions any, but it's always best to be up front about such things!)

The book is written in a journalistic rather than an academic or otherwise excessively analytical style. Chodos has a good eye for detail and a good ear for anecdote, so the text moves along quite briskly, is filled with colourful characters, and is an easy and entertaining read. He begins with some general discussion of Caribbean history and politics, and then moves into an item-by-item consideration of Canadian involvement in the region. Much of that involvement (beyond the basics of being willing long-term participants in an imperial and colonial order run from London, largely to the benefit of white Canadians and the detriment of racialized Caribbean people) has been commercial in nature. At the time the book was written, three of the four largest banks in the Caribbean were Canadian banks. Canadian capital has also been involved in the bauxite extraction and aluminum production industry in the region and in tourism, as well as a number of smaller ventures. Canadians have also been religious missionaries and the Canadian state has been a source of aid for the region.

When presented unadorned, it would be easy for most Canadians to read the above list and consider themselves affirmed in their belief in Canada's positive role: It's all about investing in the region, helping it out, being supportive, that sort of thing, so what could be wrong? But in each case, though there are arguably positive impacts as well, Chodos explores the down side. The banks, for example, accepted deposits but did not provide loans in the region for many, many years, with the result that Caribbean money was loaned and invested elsewhere in the world. At the time the book was written they were giving loans, but mostly consumer loans to purchase imported goods rather than business or agriculture loans to stimulate local economic growth. In fact, that is one of the most consistent criticisms of all of the areas of Canadian economic investment in the Caribbean, from banking to tourism: It almost universally has supported a modern version of the traditional colonial relationship between metropole and periphery, with little support for independent economic development that might decrease dependency.

In the chapter on Canadian missionaries in the Caribbean -- and the Canadian Presbyterian mission, particularly in Guyana and Trinidad, was a powerful presence for decades -- Chodos quotes a passage from a novel by a Trinidadian who later lived in Toronto. In it, the author (Harold Sonny Ladoo) writes of hypotehtically turning the tables and setting up Hindu missionary schools in Canada. His stark descriptions of what they might be like are taken from his own experience of Canadian Presbyterian missionary schools growing up, and they sound eerily like things I have read about the hated residential schools to which indigenous peoples in Canada were subjected between 1898 and the 1980s.

Even Canadian aid programs to the region seem to have been a mixed blessing. On the one hand, at least when this book was written, the Caribbean continued to be a region of particular focus for Canadian government aid programs. From Chodos' descriptions, the Canadian aid programs do not seem to have been quite as deliberately nefarious as those of certain other industrialized states, but they have still usually come attached to all sorts of conditions and provisos that end up benefiting Canadian capital more than Caribbean people, or that are clearly about pushing North American ways of doing things onto other cultures.

Perhaps the most interesting part of reading this book was being immersed in its tone. It was a much different era. The global reaction later labelled "neoliberalism" had begun, but it seems clear from this book that the left was not yet aware of it. The efforts of Caribbean nations to foster national self-sufficiency and gain control of their economies by one means or another are presented as facing all sorts of obstacles but as making progress and as being fundamentally possible. This was still an era of nationalizations and capital export restrictions and import substitution and commodity producer cartels. It was a time of much greater optimism than the present.

For most people, this is not a book you are going to encounter without exerting some effort to find it. However, along with being interesting and entertaining in its own right, it appears to be a rare place to learn about one particular aspect of Canada's less than savoury participation in global social relations. If that is something you wish to learn about, perhaps it might be worth searching through used book stores or getting the gears of interlibrary loan churning to get your hands on this book.

[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

"Hannibal Rising"

[BEWARE! SPOILERS BELOW FOR "HANNIBAL RISING"!]


Evil has always been one of the most powerful of explanations that does not explain. It captivates our attention, taps into the stories of sin and saints and devils that still lie deep beneath our culture, and distracts us from causality. In the simplicity of its "just because" handwaving, of the mystical, inalterable essence it assumes, evil as explanation enchants us away from the messy job of linking a horrific present to a very real past. The confusing tangle of "she did", "I did", "they did", and "we did" is so easily swept away by a boldly proclaimed "He is!" or "They are!"

On a superficial level, "Hannibal Rising" attempts to go beyond this. The adaptation of Thomas Harris' latest Hannibal Lecter book, it takes one of the most chilling fictional murderers of recent decades and refuses to be satisfied that he does what he does simply because of what he is, insisting that he must have come from somewhere. Yet it does not even come close to escaping the notion that evil is its own explanation and this results in a far less compelling film than the original "Silence of the Lambs".

Though there is also something ridiculous about it, in terms of the psychological impact it would have had, the original trauma proposed as the source of Lecter's monstrousness is plausible enough. He is a seven or eight year-old boy at the beginning of the film, scion to an aristocratic Lithuanian family. It is 1944 and the Red Army is on the verge of pushing the Nazi Wehrmacht out of Lithuania. The front is about to pass over his family's lands, so they retreat from their castle to a small lodge in the woods. Random war violence kills his parents. A band of local men who had been collaborating in genocide with the SS comes across him and his four year-old sister in the lodge, where they are all promptly stranded by war danger and weather. There is no food. So, of course, the Lituanian quislings kill and eat his sister. We next see him as a teen, nightmare-stricken and mute, in the "people's orphanage" that has been made of his family's castle, and soon after he escapes to Paris, finds his rich uncle's widow, and eventually goes to medical school and wreaks bloody vengeance on the men who ate his sister.

Okay. Sure. That'd mess a person up.

Unfortunately, in its exploration of the origins of evil, the film does not get beyond the rather banal idea that trauma is traumatizing -- that horrifically traumatizing circumstances will lead to horrifically traumatized individuals, some of whom will respond to their trauma by doing messed up things (albeit relatively few to anything approaching the spectacular excess exhibited by Lecter across his career). Rather than say anything interesting or subversive, the film taps into some already existing and quite pat narratives about evil and instead of playing with them or even challenging them, it just does its best to harness them for maximum dramatic effect and gore value.

The first warning bell was the World War II setting. Even six decades later, the narrative of the "good war" is, in North America at least, one of the most easily mobilized and hard to counter public mythologies that divides the world cleanly into essential good and essential evil. The wealth of scholarship showing this clear division to be utter hogwash has done little to change the fact that a core component of any effort today to publically demonize the official enemy of the moment still involves heavy-handed use of WWII-based imagery, from comparisons to Hitler to invokation of words like "axis". Basing an exploration of the origins of evil in this millieu is indicative of something of a lack of imagination and hints, even before any other evidence is presented, at a lack of much interesting to say.

The lack of imagination goes from scent on the wind to unpalatable reek when it turns out that the film is largely populated by cartoon Nazis. I am perhaps being unfair, but the one actual SS officer that appears briefly in the film was sufficiently caricature-like that he made me think of Herr Flick from the British sitcom "'Allo, 'Allo". The Lithuanian fascist collaborators could have been taken straight out of some 1950s U.S. comic book they were so one-dimensional. Though I doubt many comics in that era had even their villains eating small children, but you get my meaning.

And so, everything is explained: Hannibal is evil because of what these cartoon Nazis did to him. They are evil because -- well, because they are cartoon Nazis, who are evil by definition. Quod erat demonstrandum. It is a rather short trip to go from the destabilizing place of actually seeking explanations and back to the safe ground of "They are!", isn't it?

Part of why this very flat portrayal of evil is so disappointing cinematically and not just intellectually is that you cannot watch the film without thinking aboput Anthony Hopkins' portrayal of the much older Hannibal Lecter at the other end of his cannibalistic career (and however uneven the quality of the films made after "Silence of the Lambs", he is always a powerful presence). I suspect there is something uncool, some sort of desensitization to violence and internalization of the objectification of human beings, implicit in any fascination with a monster like Hopkins' Lecter, but I confess to finding him very compelling. A part of that for me is his ability to see inside those around him with uncanny accuracy -- something that has always drawn me to fictional characters, from Lecter to Rex Stout's "Nero Wolfe" and beyond. But it is also the overall package, the striking combination of aristocratic cultural refinement with inhuman violence, of powerful perception with absence of empathy, of over-the-top evilness with the sense of three-dimensionality that Hopkins' considerable talents bring to the part. It is this sense of three-dimensionality that is absent from the most recent film. It is perhaps understandable that Gaspard Ulliel's portrayal of the young Lecter not only couldn't combine those elements as Hopkins does -- he's alright, but his capabilities are not in the same league -- but that it shouldn't. After all, we are looking to learn where the mature Lecter came from, so he should not already exist fully formed. However, I think there could have been greater skill employed (and I blame the screenwriting more than the acting for this) in showing these things in embryonic form, but things like his exquisite manners, his distinctive affect, and hints of his future ability to read Clarice Starling at a glance are dropped in rather clumsily. For all that this exercise is about providing Lector with more depth by giving him a history, he does not actually come across with nearly the same complexity as his future self -- he is not a complete cut-out, but he is still quite flat. And the evil that made him evil, the cartoon Nazis, seems even more ridiculous than they otherwise would because they exist in the shadow of the older Lecter of the other films.

Another disappointing element in the portrayal of Lecter's path to evil, and another demonstration of a lack of anything resembling a critical imagination, was deliberate exploitation of racialized/racist narratives already existing in the audience's imagination to give a dramatic boost to the story. Lecter's rich aunt-by-marriage is a Japanese woman, Lady Murasaka Shikibu, played by Li Gong. I was actually on a trip to the bathroom when the character was introduced so it took me a couple of minutes to figure out who she was when I resumed my seat. At first, I was pleasantly surprised -- there have been small numbers of people of colour in the West for centuries even though they are not allowed any space in the popular projections of European and North American history (other than slaves) until the 1960s or so, so the choice to have a main character in 1950s Europe played by a woman of colour is plausible and, though hardly revolutionary, still unHollywood-like, unconventional and mildly positive when a white actor could fill the part just as well.

Except, of course, a couple of minutes further along it became clear that his aunt was Asian not incidentally but to give the story access by the presence of her body to certain racialized/racist narratives in the European and EuroAmerican cultural repertoire associated with Asian-ness. Her "otherness" and her "exoticness" as constructed in the white imagination could then be deliberately used to add particular kinds of intensity and "flavour" to Hannibal's story. For example, soon after he moves in with her, he comes upon her as she prays at a shrine to her ancestors somewhere in the bowels of her palatial home. I have no idea how accurate the shrine and her relation to it may or may not be, culturally speaking, but that is really of secondary concern. What matters is its deliberate use to create a sense of "different", of "other", of "not normal, not right." This was helpfully illustrated by the two older white people sitting behind me, one of whom commented a few seconds into the shrine's first appearance, "She's a devil worshipper!" Hannibal develops a connection to the shrine. It inclues some antique samurai armour and blades, and in one shot he tries on a mask-like piece of the armour that foreshadows the hospital restraints worn by the older Lecter in other movies, and he uses the blades in his killing. The shrine is clearly an important part of his journey away from "normal" and towards monstrosity. And to take all of this deliberate and mercenary deployment of Orientalist imagery from the gross to the ridiculous, they actually have a short series of shots implying that Lady Murasaka taught martial arts to Lecter. Not only is this the tired old Orientalist bit in which the "wise Asian" grants the "secrets of the East" to the worthy or beloved white man, but it also strikes me as laughably unrealistic. My knowledge of Japanese culture and history is pretty shallow, but was it really a natural and unremarkable thing for an upper-class Japanese woman born in the 1920s (more or less) to have warrior training, or are we just supposed to go along with this without question because, y'know, she's Asian and all, so of course she knows kung fu?

On the other hand, given the fact that most of the rest of the screen time belongs to Lecter himself, to the cartoon Nazis, and to a Nazi-hunting French police inspector who was scarcely less cartoony than his prey, Lady Murasaka was presented as the most humanized major character in the film, except perhaps child-Lecter and his pre-consumption sister in the first few scenes. In a dominant media environment where the bodies of racialized women tend to be presented most often as objects when they aren't ignored completely, this is a positive thing, I suppose.

The climax of the film seems to confirm the rejection of explanation and the embrace of evil as essence rather than consequence. Just as Lecter is about to kill the chief of the cartoon Nazis that dined on his sister, said fascist thug shares the tidbit that Lecter too gained sustenance from her flesh in the form of broth fed him while semi-conscious and delirious. It is this unsettling news that forces him to complete his journey of transition from child traumatized by war to man ready for decades of remorseless cannibalism. Obviously you can read this as further trauma completing the damage, but it is also a metaphor of essential taint ingested and incorporated. This piece of news transforms his activities from vengeance (which tends to be understood much more sympathetically in Hollywood-land than in the real world even when it is taken to extremes, and is therefore treated as human) to pathology.

Therefore: He is. The others who made him did not so much create him as infect him. Evil is incomprehensible and divorced from history, the film tells us, and any attempt to look at history to understand evil is doomed sooner or later to run aground upon the rocks of Satan's presence, the horrid Other who cannot be explained but must simply be feared and fought at all costs, so we might as well not bother asking "why". Moreover, we see this essential evil in the film, we see its symbolic markers of excess and depravity, and we know that it is not us, therefore we must be good and any who accuse us of anything that might be remotely considered evil are themselves alien and other and need not be listened to. We are titilated while at the same time reassured that hard questions serve no purpose.

Yet I cannot keep my mind from returning to the widespread fascination with the older Lecter, Hopkins' Lecter. He is, really, us, or an ideal of us. He is highly capable, cultured, brilliant, and aristocratically polite -- most of us who are somewhat privileged but are not all of those things have been trained, deep down even if we disdain them on the surface, to see them as markers of real worth, of importance, of all the things we are supposed to desire in life. What makes him fascinating is not that his killing makes him different and inhuman. Not at all. Because I think on some level, most of us in North America recognize that our comfort is built in very direct ways on suffering -- we are too squeamish to eat anyone's tongue ourselves, but the social relations that make us who we are require, at a nice deniable distance from us, a steady supply of bodies. Our designer couches are drenched in blood and our wealth rests upon stacks of corpses. What is fascinating about Lecter is that he has found a way around the repression and denial (the tools most privileged North Americans use most of the time to deal with this discomfiting knowledge) and the paralyzing guilt (a supplementary tool for liberals who still don't actually want to deal with the reality when forced for a brief time out of denial) and is so comfortable that his pleasures are based on the suffering and deaths of others that he can just get on with life, and still have all of those qualities that we have been trained to admire. He is the perfect man of privilege. He is fascinating because he has solved a dilemma that lurks deep in the privileged North American unconscious, yet he has done so in a way that stories about him not only do not challenge the collective denial of the viewer, they help reinforce it -- evil is essence, we are told, and we are not cartoon Nazis. Therefore, we must be essentially Good. Therefore, we must continue to fear the Other, while avoiding any examination of our own roles in the world.

He is. We are. They are.

[BEWARE! SPOILERS ABOVE FOR "HANNIBAL RISING"!]