My Log 278 Nov 19 2011 I move house: the hypocrites are spooked by the demos; capitalism reveals its essential cruelty and indifference to people

Bernie Sanders Image via Wikipedia

I have just spent the better part of two weeks moving house. Although I was told what a desirable tenant I would be, being older, and therefore more stable than the younger people, I was suddenly confronted one day with the news that the owner of the building in which I had my apartment, having previously lived in British Columbia, had decided to relocate to Ottawa, wanted to live in my apartment, and here, thank you very much, is your two months’ notice.

This came just after the students had arrived and filled up most of the places. However, being ever resourceful in such things, I started looking for a place on a Friday, and by Monday had decided to move to a two-bedroomed apartment in a high-rise building, just to make sure the same thing could not happen to me again.

So, for the first time, I find myself living on the fifth floor of a building with many dozens of tenants, with a swimming pool and a gym and an immense laundry room, on the 21^st floor, and with all manner of things you can and cannot do, in the general interests of the tenantry at large.

So far I like it. The hot water system is amazing: instanter, immediately one turns the tap; and the toilet whooshes away like a rocket machine.

And now, having put my remaining pictures (I sold most of them a year or so ago) back up on the walls, I have time to look around the world and see how things are going.

Some amazing things have taken place while I was preoccupied with establishing myself in a place that is right downtown in Ottawa.

Many things have puzzled me. For example, the panic that ensued when the Greek Prime Minister announced he would have a referendum on the proposed bailout for his country’s economic crisis. Has it not been an article of faith that the Western, capitalistic model of society is based on democratic decision of the citizens, and that this is what distinguishes it from draconian systems like dictatorships, communist or fascist, oligarchies, and the like? So how can these same propagandists for democracy raise such a hue and cry over a democratic vote on a proposal put forward by a bunch of economic technocrats? The very idea was not only frowned upon, but was met with panicked dismay, was said to be likely to scuttle any possibility of what these people call progress. In fact, the thing was so unthinkable that the Greek Prime Minister with this dangerous idea had to be removed from power, and this is exactly what has happened.

He has been replaced by a banker, or a collection of bankers. And the same thing has happened in Italy, where a group of banking technocrats have begun to impose the bankers’ favorite solution to all problems, which is to impose austerity on the living standards of the ordinary citizens.

That is one thing that has happened that has bewildered me somewhat. Another amazing revelation that literally set me back on my heels was that Bernie Sanders, the only socialist in the American political system, has managed to force out of the Federal Reserve in the United States information that that body was desperately anxious to hide: namely, that during the bailouts by which they prevented the whole capitalistic system from collapsing, the Federal Reserve put up --- wait for this, you’re scarcely going to believe this figure! --- $16 trillion dollars, paid out to bankers, individuals and government agencies in the United States and in some other countries. I am going to try to write that in figures.

$16,000,000,000,000. Would that be right?

It is an unimaginable figure, an amount of money that, I am quite sure, doesn’t really exist, except in the books of banks and government institutions. No one has ever had that much money, ever. But the enormity of what happened is even greater than I had imagined.

Let’s see: banks and insurance companies, and other similar agencies that have, all my life, ranked number one among by unfavorite demonic institutions, were granted sums in gazillions of dollars, for the most part without any conditions, to rescue them from their own horrendous mistakes that were caused by their own massive greed and lack of the qualities of citizenship. Meanwhile, the many hundreds of thousands of people who had been forced from their homes by these same institutions have been left to swelter, or freeze, depending on their location, without any aid of any kind. Many other consequences have been borne by the ordinary people: for example, education has been priced beyond the reach of everyone except the well-heeled, and food costs have spiraled upwards, as has the cost of living in general. Students leave university now crippled with a load of debt so huge that they probably are never going to be able to pay it off. And it has become common to hear people moan about how can a young couple ever aspire to owning a house?

It is too discouraging to go into all the many ways that ordinary people are stewing as a result of these machinations by the financial lords of creation.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has been an impressive response to all this: that it should have spread to more than 900 cities around the world is an indication of how close people must be to saying: we have had enough. We need a huge change in this self-sustaining, criminal, greedy, appallingly amoral system of capitalist goverance. The only problem is that unlike the situation in Egypt, the movement has been unable to mobilize the milllions into street demonstrations in their support. That is the missing ingredient that would lead to the overthrow of the whole rotten system.

I can conclude this by quoting (not for the first time, as readers of this blog over the years will know) the Indian novelist and polemicist Arundhati Roy,who recently made a speech in New York to the Wall street occupiers. In response to the bleatings of the establishment media to the effect that the Occupy movement has no comprehensible objectives, she produced four objectives, which I support:

“They (the 1%) say that we don't have demands… perhaps they don't know that our anger alone would be enough to destroy them. But here are some things – a few 'pre-revolutionary' thoughts I had – for us to think about together:

“We want to put a lid on this system that manufactures inequality. We want to put a cap on the unfettered accumulation of wealth and property by individuals as well as corporations. As 'cap-ist'" and 'lid-ites', we demand:

• An end to cross-ownership in businesses. For example, weapons manufacturers cannot own TV stations; mining corporations cannot run newspapers; business houses cannot fund universities; drug companies cannot control public health funds.

• Two, natural resources and essential infrastructure – water supply, electricity, health, and education – cannot be privatized.

• Three, everybody must have the right to shelter, education and healthcare.

• Four, the children of the rich cannot inherit their parents' wealth.

“This struggle has re-awakened our imagination. Somewhere along the way, capitalism reduced the idea of justice to mean just 'human rights', and the idea of dreaming of equality became blasphemous. We are not fighting to just tinker with reforming a system that needs to be replaced.”

And so say all of us!

Udi aloni Image by aavarnum via FlickrLink of the Day (2), Nov 12, 2011: An Israeli writer, Udi Aloni, brought up in the heart of Zionism, tells in salon.com the agonizing story of how Israel has gradually turned into an apartheid state, denying rights to Palestinians. “My father was implementing agrarian apartheid policies, and long before the occupation of 1967…” “…A couple of years ago I approached my ardently Zionist mom, a woman who carried a weapon for the Jewish community of Jerusalem in 1948, and asked her a simple question: ‘Mom, is all this apartheid?’ With the sigh of a betrayed lover she indicated that, yes, this is apartheid. My heart broke….”

Bill Moyers Image via Wikipedia

Link of the Day (1): Nov 12 2011: Bill Moyers, in a remarkable article in
The Nation magazine, How Wall Street Occupied America, details the steps taken by the wealth-owners to take over the government and the running of the United States. It has all happened since 1971, and it has been a deliberate strategy run by major corporations, with heartbreaking results for the quality if American life.

Joseph Stiglitz Image via WikipediaLink of the Day: Nov 8 2011: The last words of my book, Memoirs of a Media Maverick, published some years ago, were that I agree with Arundhati Roy the wonderful Indian writer, that the only globalization we can embrace is the globalization of dissent. I am therefore delighted to find Joseph E. Stiglitz, noted Nobel laureate and professor at Columbia University, coming to the same conclusion this week, in an article in Project Syndicate, A World of Ideas, in which he explains why the Occupy Wall Street movement protesters are pursuing aims that are essential for the survival of the human race.

Read this notable article, The Globalization of Dissent, here.

Cairo University Image via Wikipedia Link of the Day: October 28 2011: A remarkably eloquent message has been sent from some activists in Cairo, of advice and encouragement to those in North America and elsewhere who are occupying the seats of financial power. It sets the whole movement, on both sides of the world, in a global context that makes a lot of sense. Dissent, and struggle, is all….

Link of the day, Oct 18 2011: A series of charts published online by BusinessInsider, compiled from statistics by Henry Blodgett on October 11, shows what the Wall Street protesters are mad about. Read it here and get mad, too.

Image via Wikipedia

Link of the Day, October 17 2011: ‘The slogan of Occupy Wall Street is “We are the 99%.” So, who are the 1 per cent in Canada? A 2010 report by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) by Armine Yalnizyan documents “The Rise of Canada's Richest 1%.” There are 246,000 of them and their average income is $403,000. They hold 13.8 per cent of incomes, and pay some of the lowest taxes that the top 1 per cent have ever paid, historically.'

Read the facts here about our 1 percenters, in the article by Justin Podur in Socialist Project • E-Bulletin No. 556 October 16, The Logic of Occupy Wall Street for Canada. This establishes that inequalities in Canada have grown faster even than in the US, under recent Conservative governments.

John Pilger (left) with Julian Assange...Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Link of the Day:October 9 2011: John Pilger brings us up-to-date on the international effort to smear Julian Assange and the revolution he brought to the media with his leaks of US classified documents. Read his article from The New Statesman of London.

My Log 277: “It’ll be the last time,” mutters Chris Hedges in face of Kevin O”Leary’s insults

Chris Hedges: Image via Wikipedia
I came across a fascinating example this week of how the CBC’s love affaire with right-wing populists can deprive us of the diversity of opinion that the CBC was established to encourage.
I am not a watcher of the Lang and O’Leary exchange, but I happened on it while flicking the dial tonight, and came across the last few minutes of an interview they were doing with the redoubtable US social commentator Chris Hedges. He was explaining to O’Leary and Diana Buckner the objectives of the many thousands of people who have joined the Occupy Wall street movement. What he was saying would not come as any surprise to anyone whose eyes and ears are open to what is really happening in the recent economic meltdown, which has exposed so cruelly the corruption, greed and dysfunctionality of capitalism, but it all seemed to come as a new idea to O’Leary, who became so agitated as Hedges began with his impressive dismissal of the corporate mind-set that he interrupted testily by saying, “You sound like some leftist nut-bar.”
At this point, justifiably, Hedges said that normally he did not accept invitations to speak on television programmes that could be expected to engage in personal abuse. He was interested in discussing the issues. And he went on to say that corporations don’t produce anything….
“Oh, really?” said O’Leary, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
“Of course not, said Hedges. He was, he said, talking about the financial gamblers who appear to have taken over the economy, and continued with his root-and-branch denunciation.
“So you want to do away with all corporations?” blurted O’Leary. “Where are you going to get a job? What would you do with Goldman Sachs, for example?”
Hedges told him in words of one-syllable. They should be prosecuted, because their sale of mortgages to people whom they knew could never repay them, which they then gathered into funds whose failure they then bet on, was fraudulent.
Buckner thanked him for giving his views, and Hedges muttered, as he took his hearing instrument out of his ear, “It will be the last time.”
Now I am sure I am not alone in believing that Canadians would be much better served by hearing regularly from Chris Hedges, who has an eloquent and challenging criticism of American society, than they are by the ubiquity on CBC screens of Kevin O’Leary, with whose brash arrogance the CBC seems to have fallen in love since they discovered him in the Dragon’s Den program.
I can only speak personally, but I find everything about O’Leary, his persona, his opinions, his overbearing manner, to be extremely off-putting, especially his constangt reiteration that only money matters, that nothing else in life is important, an opinion so idiotic that it amazes me that the CBC can’t get enough of him.
If there is anybody with some sense among the CBC brass, he or she will recognize this exchange between O’Leary and Hedges as a warning sign that it is time for the corporation to rediscover the impartiality that once allowed them to broadcast the widest possible range of opinion, unfortunately now denied to us.

My Log 276:Documentary on “Experimental Eskimos” throws a sorry light on the arrogance, ignorance of Canada’s northern administration --

Image via WikipediaI hardly know where to begin to write about the documentary film screened tonight by CBC --- The Experimental Eskimos. It dealt with the experience of three notable Inuit --- Petger Ittinuar, Zebedee Nungak, and Eric Tagoona, --- who were especially chosen by educational experts in the north, because of their exceptional abilities, to be sent south for higher education. That the experiment had both positive and negative effects was shown by the film, directed by Barry Greenwald. But what has to be written first, I think, is that the positive results, such as they were, were political and formal; and the negative results were entirely, devastatingly, personal.

Allow me first to go back into history just for a moment. The great panjandrum of Canadian anthropology in the 1940s and before, was a man called Diamond Jenness, a man born in New Zealand (like quite a few others who have become prominent in the affairs of aboriginal Canadians).

He wrote a five-volume study of the Eskimos, as they were then known, and in 1968 published his conclusions in a slim chapbook. Whatever his immense accomplishments in his earlier life, the conclusions he published in this book must remain as a blot on his career. He advocated that there was only one solution to the problems of Canada’s Inuit, which was to move them south, where they would be able to get jobs. That was published when Jenness was at the end of his career.

At about the same time, the Northern Science Research Group, headed by the remarkable AJ.Kerr (affectionately known as Moose throughout the north) published a study of Eskimo Relocation for Industrial Employment, by D.S. Stevenson. This was also a slim chapbook, but it contained one paragraph that has refused to leave me over the years since.

“Frustrated, confused and downtrodden peoples everywhere have had recourse to alcohol, drugs or religion,” wrote Stevenson. “For the Eskimos in the south, the placedo is alcohol…It seems sometimes as if those least assimilated people deliberately use alcohol to blot out reality. I have been at drinking bouts where one woman, holding a naked baby in her lap, sat alternately sipping cheap rye whisky and vomiting into a cardboard box at her feet: she and some others were coimpletely drunk, yet they kept on drinking until absolutely unconscious.”

That, in face of such evidence, a famous anthropologist could have recommended that all Eskimos should be moved south simply to get jobs, could surely stand as a template for the Euro-Canadian insensitivity to the problems confronting them as they moved – uncomprehending, for the most part, ignorant to a very large degree and, it has to be said, prejudiced on racial grounds --- into the north to establish administration.

I mention this because the tale of the three men who were subject of the documentary broadcast tonight is that their personal lives were ruined by the experiment. None of them, or their families, was consulted or asked permission to send these three boys to Ottawa for European advanced schooling. That is typical of the insensitivity and arrogance of much that has passed in Canadian history for governmental administration of our northern regions.

One conclusion that the film comes to after examining the experience of the three men is that possibly --- just possibly, mind you --- the best option would have been for Euro-Canadians to have left the Inuit alone, not to have interfered with them, allowed them to continue their traditional way of life and to make their own accommodations with Euro-Canada as and when these became necessary.

I knew Zebedee Nungak fairly well during the fight over the James Bay hydro project in Quebec in the early seventies. He was an amusing, effective spokesperson for his people, but his humour and goodwill evidently were overlayers to hide the dreadful experience it had been for him to have been chosen by Euro educators for special treatment as an experiment. Zebedee helped to negotiate the James Bay agreement, and was one of its signatories. His evidence in the film was that he suffered from that, because in Povingnituk, where he came from, a large segment of the population opposed the James Bay agreement and held his approval of it against him.

Similarly Petger Ittinuar negotiated a rocky path in the white man’s world. He was the first Inuit elected to Canada’s Parliament, for the NDP. He played an important role in the interface between his people and the government, but later suffered because of criticism of his stand taken in support of this white man’s project. He switched parties, another no-no in the white world for which he was severely criticized. When he left Parliament he took refuge in alcohol, as indeed did all three of the experimcntal Eskimos, at various times in their lives. Eric Tagoona, from Baker Lake, played a role in obtaining the inclusion of aboriginal rights in the Canadian constitution. But he perhaps suffered more than any of them by entering a downpath of alcohol, drugs and abuse that has led him to spend the rest of his life as a recluse in Baker Lake.

One statement rang out from the film for me: when Zebedee Nungak was denied by the white politicians, he said, he would never stop urging his fight for Inuit rights, and his son, standing behind him, and his son’s son later would continue to fight their sons and the sons of their sons.

This is a documentary that it must have been salutary for Euro-Canadians to see, for it exposes, not only the fact that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but the lack of wisdom and empathy that has characterized so much of Canada’s interaction with aboriginal people.

Link of the Day, Sept 25 2011: Pax Americana Is Over in the Middle East. A sober assessment of thesituation by Dr Leon Hader, a Washington-basedanalyst, writing in Haaretz, of Israel.

Link of the Day Sept 12 2011: Robert Jenson, a professor at the University of Texas, in Austin, writes in an Al Jazeera commentary that ten years after the 9/11 attacks, US foreign policy remains aggressive and unrealistic. “The problem is not that we have strayed from our founding principles, but that we are still operating on those principles: delusional notions about manifest destiny, American exceptionalism, the right to take more than our share of the world's resources by whatever means necessary.”

(“….it's tempting to argue that we should refrain from political debate on the 9/11 anniversary to honour those who died and to respect those who lost loved ones. I would be willing to do that if the cheerleaders for the US empire would refrain from using the day to justify the wars of aggression that followed 9/11.”)

Image via Wikipedia Link of the Day Sept 6 2011: A calmlydispassionate account by Nobel Laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz of the cost ofAmerica’s recent disastrous wars. For everything one needs to know about theparlous state of the United States, read his article The Cost of 9/ll,published online in the Project Syndicate.

 (“Indeed, when Linda Bilmes and I calculated America’s war costs three years ago, the conservative tally was $3-5 trillion. Since then, the costs have mounted further. With almost 50% of returning troops eligible to receive some level of disability payment, and more than 600,000 treated so far in veterans’ medical facilities, we now estimate that future disability payments and health-care costs will total $600-900 billion. But the social costs, reflected in veteran suicides (which have topped 18 per day in recent years) and family breakups, are incalculable.”)

My Log 275: Surprising outpouring of affection for Jack Layton means his shoes will be almost impossible to fill.

Image via Wikipedia

The outpouring of public affection for Jack Layton took me by surprise, as it must have taken many other people, and it also set me seriously to think about those Canadian values that are so often spoken about, and so seldom defined.

This remarkable event cannot be seen in isolation: after all, when the CBC gave Canadians a chance some years ago to vote on who they considered the greatest Canadian of all time, their choice was Tommy Douglas, who as premier of Saskatchewan marched Canada into the modern world by creating what eventually became the national health scheme for the entire country.

This program had to be fought for bitterly, as it has in every country it has been introduced, but it is now so thoroughly accepted by Canadians that it is often regarded as the single thing that Canadians believe makes them different from Americans.

Now comes this extraordinary outpouring of affection and respect for the man who has led the NDP to its greatest electoral success ever, making a massive breakthrouth in Quebec, a territory that had previously been immune to the siren call of social democracy, having always preferred to vote for their nationalism, or ethnicity.

Of course, much of the affection came from Layton’s long and fruitful service as a municipal councilor in Toronto, whose citizens remember him as a decent man and an honest man, but also as a man whose optimism and humanity marked him off from the common herd of politicians.

A great deal of the admiration for Jack must have come from the last election, when he was seen --- a sick man --- bravely stumping the country, cane in hand, keeping up a pitiless schedule in his successful effort to lead his party to its huge breakthrough.

Still, the scale and intensity of the outpouring of public regard was a surprising thing. After all, until his recent breakthrough, the NDP had always been very much the third party in Canada, important for its policy initiatives, essential for its success in keeping the social democratic idea as part of the Canadian political discourse, and therefore a major element in the differentiation of Canada from the United States.

But can anybody have seriously believed such support exists for the values espoused by the New Democrats throughout the country: values of community, sharing, the idea that we are our brother’s keeper, essentially the value of equality and egalitarianism, the idea that everybody in the nation has a right to a fair chance, to develop his or her talents to the maximum. This is a way of saying social democracy that seems to suit Canadians, and yet, time after time, year after year, Canadians have voted against these values that they now seemed --- at least for a week or so --- to be so vociferously espousing.

Personally I have only twice joined a political party: the first time was when I arrived in England in 1951 in time for Labour to blow the immense majority they won in 1945 to let the reactionary Churchill back into office; the second time was when Layton was going for NDP leadership, and I joined to give his effort some support.

I have to confess that in neither case was my membership long-lasting. Although I have always supported the NDP in Canada, I have extravagant hopes of left-leaning parties that are never satisfied, and when I saw that Layton was not really a radical leader, I allowed my membership to lapse.

I never met Layton, not really, although on the one occasion I was introduced to him as he worked a room, he delivered a kind acknowledgement that he knew my work. I never heard from him again.

Anyway, politics isn’t about the stroking of egos, and I have always said --- I said this in relation to the fact that it took me 26 years to apply for Canadian citizenship --- that I believed I voted every day through the medium of my work.

The memorial service, as I would prefer to call the state funeral service held in his honour, was a very moving occasion that allowed a wide range of expressions of admiration for the man and his unquenchable optimism and friendliness --- which, I have got to admit, is something that separates him from me, a perennial grouch and pessimist. I could have done with less of the religious gentleman, whoever he was, a friend of Jack’s, who did manage, in the last moments, to invoke God and his blessings on everyone, something that I wuld have thought was against Jack’s inclinations.

Perhaps as a total event, it was a little over-the-top. How could it help but be when graced by one of Stephen Lewis’s over-heated tributes. Perhaps the most amazing thing about the event was that it had been ordered by the Prime Minister. And the most remarkable thing at it was when the entire crowd rose with a burst of wild applause when Lewis described Jack’s last letter as “a manifesto for social democracy.” That caught Harper and his Conservative Cabinet ministers on the hop, not sure whether to rise with the applauding crowd, or to mark their disapproval by just sitting there. Eventually Harper, bowing to the inevitable, rose to his feet and began to applaud, surely some kind of apotheosis for him.

Well, Jack is gone, and the choice os his successor lies ahead. Personally I would like someone like Libby Davies, a sound radical politician, but I know they will never support her, and it is almost certain that she would not succeed in building on Jack’s achievement, if only because she doesn’t speak French.

Some may have begun to wonder whether Lewis’s ringing elegy might not herald an effort by him to take over the party: he certainly would be a good choice, but I doubt if he would succeed in earning the trust of Canadians any more than he did last time when he led the Ontario NDP in the provincial legislature.

Besides, having been involved so internationally, one doubts if his ego would permit him to retire to the national stage again.

I have no idea who should be the leader: clearly, he has a tough act to follow, and whoever he or she is, it seems unlikely to be anyone with Jack’s common touch. We now have to just wait and see to what extent the outpoiuring for Jack has touched the hearts of Canadians, if at all.

Image via Wikipedia

Link of the day: “Another climate-related record will soon be broken, but it's not like those you've been hearing about: the heat waves, droughts and torrential floods setting calamitous precedents everywhere. For a change, mark down this next one as a sign of hope. It's that Washington will play host to the largest act of civil disobedience for the climate in US history,” writes Montrealer Martin Lukacs, in The Guardian, of London. Lukacs is a courageous campaigner for aboriginal rights and environmental sanity, and his excellent article draws attention to a decision that has been taken: that the only way to stop the world’s climate from spiraling into disaster is a massive confrontation between the aware people and the wealth-owners, who are supported by governments like those in Canada and the U.S. He describes our awful Canadian government as having developed into “the foreign branch of the tar sands industry… scrambling to beat back the ferocious attack by the US environmental movement" against the Alberta tar sands – the world’s dirtiest oil.

Image via Wikipedia

Link of the day Aug 8 2011: We are all wondering “What Happened to Obama?” the question raised in an insightful article in the New York Times by Drew Westen, professor of psychology at Emory University.

(“Like most Americans, at this point, I have no idea what Barack Obama — and by extension the party he leads — believes on virtually any issue….Those of us who were bewitched by his eloquence on the campaign trail chose to ignore some disquieting aspects of his biography: that he had accomplished very little before he ran for president, having never run a business or a state; that he had a singularly unremarkable career as a law professor, publishing nothing in 12 years at the University of Chicago other than an autobiography; and that, before joining the United States Senate, he had voted ‘present’ (instead of yea or nay) 130 times, sometimes dodging difficult issues.”)

My Log 274: Sarajevo, desperately trying to rebuild its reputation for culture, multinationalism and calm, unhurried beauty

Image via Wikipedia
The Moslem quarters, Bascarsija,of Sarajevo

I found a paradox at the heart of the beautiful city of Sarajevo, which I visited this week. It is a city that emanates an unusual sense of human warmth, creativity, amusement and even adventure. And yet it has become a symbol for one of the most dramatic and appalling acts of civic barbarity in modern times. It is a city whose recent experiences would reduce to tears anyone who cares about the quality of human life.

In other words I fell in love with Sarajevo, and felt like weeping for what it had to endure during the 1990s Yugoslav war, when it was besieged by the Yugoslav National Army, and Serbian Bosnian militias, who mounted their guns in the hills surrounding the city and made it almost impossible for anyone to leave their houses.

The four-year siege of Sarajevo has been extensively written about and celebrated in print, song, dance and every conceivable medium of expression, so there is no point in my recalling it in any detail. A sort of grim humour has arisen about the war, and a little book I bought, a sort of fake Michelin guide written in 1992 and 1993, exemplifies how unconquerable is the human spirit. It says its purpose is to instruct visitors on how to survive “without transportation, hotels, taxis, telephones, food, shops, heating, water, information, electricity”, and claims to show the city as a place where “wit can survive over terror.”

“This book was written at the site where one civilization was dismantled in the course of intentional violence…” writes the book’s author, Miroslav Prsojevic, “and where another had to be born.” It is a “picture of civilization that emerges out of cataclysm, which makes something out of nothing, gives some messages for the future. Not because the future is necessarily a future of wars and disasters, but because humans are growing older and being born into a world which is ever less secure.”

They begin their chronicle by saying that in April 1992, appeared around the city “two-hundred-sixty tanks, 120 mortars, and innumerable anti-aircraft cannons, sniper rifles and other small arms…..At any moment…any of these arms can hit any target in the city. And they did hit, indeed, --- civilian housing, museums, churches, mosques, hospitals, cemeteries, people on the streets. Everything became a target. All exits from the city, all points of entry, were blocked.”

Well, on to the present day, to the city that seems to have been largely rebuilt, although it is rather a strange landscape when these shiny new buildings share the cityscape still with innumerable monstrous ruins of huge buildings that once were functional, but were bombed into uselessness, ever-present reminders of what happened.

Under the guidance of a friend who had been there several times we headed for the older part of the city known as Bascarsija. A guidebook writes about a man called Gazi Husrev Bey who was born in 1480, became ruler of Bosnia for 20 years and laid the foundations for the city as it is today, building it up to a city of 50,000. An Islamic school he built has been open for 470 years, and when it was founded it was dedicated to gifted and good pupils who would be taught “rational and traditional sciences.” He built Mosques and Franciscan monastries, one of the most beautiful Orthodox churches, public drinking fountains, inns, Turkish baths and a soup kitchen offering free meals to the poor. A foundation that this man created is still functioning after five centuries, financing stipends for students, feeding the poor and engaging in other charitable work. He is buried next to a former prisoner of war, a Christian, whom he freed and gave the title of a Duke.

In these early acts, surely, can be seen something of the spirit of the city that remains today. For myself, I can say I have seldom if ever been in a city whose inhabitants seem to be touched with such a particular grace.

For example, on our first day there our friend led us to a delightful spot, a courtyard hidden in behind one of the pedestrian streets constructed for the most part of wooden buildings, low-lying, expressive and friendly (every shop has a folding bench in front for the weary traveler or citizen to sit on, for example). This courtyard was quiet, although the streets around were vibrant and full of the bustle of a normal city. It sheltered under an immense tree, and was surrounded by small but elegant shops selling beautiful carpets mostly made in Iran. Some art works, of astonishing vivacity, were made of carpet, and although our friend enjoyed the peaceful ambience, he regretted that a tea shop that had existed there before the war had disappeared. I could not help but think that any people who could create such a perfect environment, so full of quiet human values, must be an exceptional people. And this was confirmed by the next place we visited.

This section of town is the Moslem section, of course, and --- perhaps this was exceptional because Ramadam had just started --- it was impossible to find a place in any of these beautiful little streets that served any alcohol. We asked a taxi driver, a garrulous, helpful middle-aged man, who undertook enthusiastically the assignment to find us a place where we could have a meal with some wine,by driving us up some very steep hills until reaching a point that he couldn’t go any further.
We had to walk the last precipitous slope up to a restaurant which, like the coffee shop in the courtyard, was another example of creative design. The restaurant existed on several levels, each room being complete in itself, each sharing the exceptional views over the city. (I counted 19 mosques in sight as I ate my meal.) Over an ember fire at the back of the room turned a lamb on a spit for which, unfortunately, we were too early. But we left it to the helpful and friendly waiter to choose what he served us. So we started with a totally delicious Bosnian soup, went on to a mélange of dishes comprised of chopped meat, marinated and cooked in sauces, mushrooms, vegetables, and ended with a superb dessert of the eastern variety. The cost of this triumphant invention was about half of what a similar meal would have cost in Toronto or Montreal. I know both of those cities have superb eating places, but I doubt that either could rival this Sarajevan restaurant for atmosphere, its air of quiet civility, and its magnificent view.

On the way back we had to order another taxi. But again we found an enthusiastic middle-aged man anxious to fulfil what we wanted: our objective was to go somewhere we could have a final drink before retiring, He took us to a place across the river from our hotel, to a pub the like of which I have never seen in all my wanderings. It was a tall building, open to the roof several stories above, its central space surrounded by balconies where meals were served while the ordinary people got on with their drinking downstairs. The design of this place was amazing: exquisite designs on the ceilings, even those above the bar, just another evidence of the civilized air of this whole city.

It was raining lightly the next morning, but not enough to prevent us from wandering through the city streets, themselves a feast for the eyes, past the dozens of coffee houses, and shops selling everything under the sun. If this part of town was damaged, rather little evidence of it remains: that stands to reason, because the rebuilding of these low-rise streets of mostly wooden buildings would not have required the vast financial operation needed for your modern high-rise blocks of offices, which have been built further along, although not verfy far away, in town.

We visited a modest little museum devoted to the occasion in 1914 on which the 20-year-old Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, an event that is said in history to have precipitated the First World War. There were seven assassins among the crowds through which the Royal coach moved. One of them threw a bomb that hit the coach and rolled under the following vehicle, exploding. Incredibly, the procession continued. Some of the assassins lost their nerve. Princip went to have a coffee, and when he emerged he discovered the procession had taken a wrong turning. Finding the Royal couple right in front of him, he fired twice, and killed both the Archduke and his glamorous wife Sophie.

That evening another equally helpful taxi-driver took us out of town to a roadside restaurant where we enjoyed the Bosnian specialty dish, lamb, again an excellent meal. On the way back the same taxi-driver --- who had told us he was bringing up his children to believe we were all brothers, everyone, no matter of what religion or ethnicity, belongs, and is one of us --- offered to show us around at his own cost. He took us to a small park built around a spring, a beautiful place.

Well, we didn’t spent a lot of time in Sarajevo, but long enough to contract a deadly disease Sarajevo-itis, which will no doubt demand that I make another visit, if I live long enough to do so. On the way back to Dubrovnik we passed through immense mountains of bare rock, stratified and exposed in an unusual way, which seemed to suggest that the whole area had at some time in the distant past been thrown up by some convulsive movement of the earth’s surface.

Dramatic though these mountains are, they can’t hold a candle to the city, the work of men and women, people of evey race and religion, the city pre-eminent in Europe for its successful building of a multicultural, multilingual, multireligious civilization that was relentlessly attacked just 18 years ago by men bent on imposing their barbaric ethnicity and nationalism over all others.

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• Video: Angelina Jolie Accepts Heart of Sarajevo Award in Bosnia (shoppingblog.com)

My Log 273: Award-winning Croatian film eloquent on the problems of the diaspora

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I saw a Croatian film last night that dealt in subjects that should be familiar to Canadians, including the agonies of people who become members of diasporas of whatever country, and of the problems of families that are divided by emigration. The name of the film was Kotlovina, a reference to some local dish that was being prepared for a monster family gathering when three sisters who had not seen each other for 35 years finally managed to get together. The director was Tomislav Radic.

This film only last week won the grand prize at the Pula film festival. Radic is a former head of production of Croatian TV, and in 2005 he made a widely praised film called What Iva Recorded, about a 14 year-old girl who was given a present of a video camera with which she began to record her family.

That probably gives a clue to Radic’s interests --- family dramas --- and this film was entirely about the whole family, the sisters, their husbands, their children, their neighbours, as they all set up for the party.

My knowledge of Yugoslav film is sketchy. I remember well the remarkable film W.R.: The Mysteries of the Organism, made in 1971 by the experimental Yugoslav director Dusan Makavejev, which purported to be an examination of the work of William Reich, but actually was an examination of the role of sex in a Communist country. The film was a great success in the Western world,it came like a breath of fresh air, but it was banned in Yugoslavia and earned Makavejev exile from his home country.

During his exile he made a scandalous film called Sweet Movie, so sexually explicit that the Canadian actress Carole Laure quit it before it was finished in disgust at some of the actions called for by her character (she was making love on the Eiffel Tower when she was interrupted by a group of nuns, for example) and Laure’s resignation from the film prompted the director to shoot an entirely different sequence around a different actress. Later, Makevejev made a film in Australia called The Coca Cola Kid, starring the remarkable American actor Eric Roberts (brother to Julia), so it seems that the diaspora has never been far from the thoughts of Yugoslav directors.

I found the opening sequences of Kotlovina to be almost tiresomely slow, although they did succeed in delineating the characters. Two of the sisters were traveling by car to the home of the third, in these earlier sequences, and on the way the one sister, a 40-ish widow, who had returned from Australia, where she had been taken as a child of four, got involved in a sexual romp with the stepson of one of her sisters, a virile 20-year-old lad. During the course of her liaison she was bitten by some insect, and her bite required treatment. She had also lost her panties, which her sister found later in the young man’s overcoat. This led to a huge confrontation after the Australian returned from a visit to the hospital for a shot of anti-rabies vaccine.

The film ended with a really remarkable sequence of the family party, as all the participants became drunk, and started yelling at each other. A visitor (daughter of the woman doctor, who was invited to the feast, thus establishing the neighborliness of Croatians), began to yell her detestation of the diaspora, populated, as she claimed, by a group of people whose only objective in leaving their home country was to have a swimming pool. Finally, the visitor in her turn burst out her resentments with her unsatisfactory life in Australia: she had had no pool, she complained, all she had was a marriage to an older man who didn’t love her any more than she loved him.

The party almost broke up over these quarrels, and would have done if the doctor’s daughter had not flaked out entirely, having drunk far too much. Seeing to her, getting her home, occupied everybody’s attention, taking their minds off their quarrelling, and the film ended with the three sisters clutching each other affectionately, and laughing gently at their ridiculous quarrelling.

I don’t think this film is destined to do particularly well abroad. I can understand if it becomes a success in Croatia, but its slow beginning will prevent it from capturing the attention of foreign audiences.

What was interesting was to find a movie that dealt with such important subjects in such an intense, concentrated manner. After all, in a world rent with emigration, much of it designed simply to improve the conditions and standards of living of the emigrants, these resentments are bound to become more intense as time goes on.

I felt I could relate to it myself. I lived in Canada for 26 years before becoming a citizen, and for all of that time I never considered myself truly Canadian, although I felt I was qualified because I was performing work that was essential to the quality of Canadian life. At least I thought so.

After returning briefly to New Zealand, my home country, I realized I didn’t belong there, either. I could have complained, as the protagonist in this movie did, that I was neither one thing nor the other, neither a Kiwi nor a Canuck. But I figured I had been operating according to an outmoded set of beliefs about one’s personal roots. Your roots, I discovered are created by your friendships, acquaintances, working life, your beliefs and actions, the whole corpus of your life, not from some phony attachment to a particular place.

The Australian protagonist in this film announced her intention of going back to Australia. How many emigrants have done exactly this: gone home, discovered it is no longer your home, and returned to their new home, more contented for the experience.

My Log 272: Quebec minister’s visits to Algonquin communities takes me down memory lane from 50 years ago

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Lake Kipawa

Some news has come across my e-mail that the Wolf Lake Algonquin community in Quebec has been given a grant of some $200,000 by the Quebec government to rebuild a camp located on the shore of Lake Kipawa, which will be developed into a centre for ecotourism.

Wolf Lake is a small community of people who live in what used to be called the Hunter’s Point settlement, on an island in the middle of Lake Kipawa, and is one of nine Algonquin communities in Quebec, seven of which I visited over the years when I was more active.

I made a trip around these communities in 1969, when I first started writing about native communities as a reporter for The Montreal Star. My guide was the chief of Timiskaming band, Mike Mackenzie, who was interested in signing up as many of the Algonquin people as he could to become members of the Indians of Quebec association, in which he held some executive position. Mike had been for many years a worker in the paper mill in Temiskaming, and he took me not only by plane to the community of Hunter’s Point, but north along the course of the Ottawa river to Ville Marie, and then east by logging roads to the community of Winneway, today an Algonquin village of 461 people which is the site of the Long Point band.

Already as we moved on from one Algonquin community to the next I had become accustomed to the fact that none of them ever appeared on the maps of Quebec, and that their few people --- there are still, even today, only a total of some 6,000 people in the nine communities --- were existing on tiny reserves that had been carved out for them, usually without their participation or consent. I was surprised to find in these remote, hidden places that people were still speaking their Algonquin language, but there was a fairly common assumption in those days that the language was doomed.

Years later, in the late 1980s, when I became involved in the struggle of the Barriere Lake people to defend their traditional hunting territory, which was contiguous with La Verendrye wildlife reserve --- a highly ironic title, since the reserve was and is being clear-cut by loggers --- I discovered that the language was still in use, as it still is today: in short, the Algonquins of Quebec, hidden away for the most part in their nine remote communities, were expected by many Canadians to more or less disappear. But they have defied these somber predictions, and appear at the moment to be on the verge of a comeback.

One thing that struck me in the late 1960s was that almost everywhere we went, even when it was just by some rough logging road through the wilderness, when we would come to the site of an Algonquin community, we would always have to ask where the people lived --- and then we would find them living around some corner, hiding even from the small amount of traffic that passed through their settlement. I remember one such community, known as Rapide-7, where we discovered a beautiful young woman who had been out somewhere for schooling, but had returned to her home in this wilderness where she was doing --- well, what was she doing exactly?

The only two of these communities I have never visited are Grand Lac Victoria and Lac Simon, but I still remember running across some anthropologists or scientists of some kind who had just come from these villages, and who assured us if we wanted to see aboriginal life in its natural state, those were the places to go to.

On other occasions I have visited the Algonquin communities of Maniwaki (known as the River Desert band, or more recently as Kitigan Zibi), and Amos (now known more generally as Abitibiwinni or Pikogan First Nation, a sort of northern outlier on the Harricana river more in the region of Abitibi than the other reserves).

As a result of these travels I have discovered that the history of the few surviving Algonquins is a typically infuriating, tragic Canadian story, but one which lies at the very centre of Canadian history, although it is not mentioned very much in Canadian history books. As a tribe the Algonquins have been divided for many years between the few small commuities in Ontario, and those in Quebec. That is the result of the machinations of the white invaders who worked their way into the Algonquin territories along the Ottawa river as they began the intense logging industry on which white European prosperity in the region was based. First, they displaced the Algonquins whom they encountered living along the river in Ontario, but they had less success in dislodging the northern Algonquins, who lived in Quebec. The people fought persistently for their rights, but were always swept aside by the arrogant governments. Then the government/church tandem decided on the grand gesture of gathering all of the displaced people who had collected around the monastery at Oka into a big reserve at Maniwaki in Quebec. This was a decision of the priests and the government, but it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that its real purpose was to remove the Algonquins from the path of so-called European progress --- in other words, to get them the hell off the land so the Europeans could do what they wanted with the land and its resources.

In this they have not been altogether successful: the northern Quebec communities decided not to join the rush to Maniwaki, and when I asked about that once I was told that they did make a long canoe journey down to Maniwaki on one occasion, but a number of their paddlers fell ill by contracting one of the European diseases, and they then withdrew for good.

After that, the history of, for example, the Barriere Lake people has been a terrible one, a story of white arrogance and greed, and of church and state collaboration which has left the reserve today one of the most impoverished in the entire country, but one that is fighting like a tiger to defend its right not only to exist, but to have some control over the remaining resources from the land that they have always considered to be theirs, land that they have neither surrendered by treaty, nor lost through conquest.

In other words, these Algonquins who have received four visits from the Quebec minister, Geoffrey Kelley, are fighting for their lives. They deserve to be better treated than they have ever been before --- their historical treatment being a virtual template for how not to treat native people decently --- and with any luck, with support from non-native supporters, of whom there is a determined nucleus in Montreal, and with the sheer naked determination they have recently begun to show not to be any longer the doormats for European civilization and its acquisitive values, they will eventually win through to a better life.

Let’s hope so, anyway.

My Log 271: Once again, I stray among the classicists, and am put off when they pander to my depraved tastes

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The Rector's Palace, Dubrovnik

Last night I attended a concert by musicians whom I had reason to expect were among the best in Europe.

They were all members of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, playing together as a smaller group as Soloists of the Munich Philharmonic, founded in 1999 by a musician called Sreten Krstic, who previously had founded a group called the Munich Philharmonic String Sextet.

There were 12 of these musicians, playing in the open air patio, or atrium, of the Rector’s Palace, a beautiful building constructed in the mid-15^th century, damaged later by an explosion, and rebuilt after a huge earthquake in 1667, with
Renaissance and baroque architectural elements. The building was the seat of government when Dubrovnik was a city-state, and a republic, and the Rector after which it was named was an official elected by the Great Council to represent the Republic for a month during which he wasn't allowed to leave the palace at anytime except on government business.

This was held to have fitted exactly the principle of the Dubrovnik republic that is inscribed in Latin over the door of the Great council hall, "Forget private and deal with public business" (a message that we could do with in our own capitalist-controlled times in most countries of the Western world.)

The Atrium is regarded as an ideal location for the chamber music concerts that are held frequently during the Dubrovnik summer festival: indeed, last night I noticed various members of the 12-person group of musicians looking around them in wonderment at their surroundings.

Well, that’s as may be: the musicians were clearly expert on their fiddles of various kinds, and the soloist, a woman cellist called Monika Leskover, was a wonderful artist.

Readers of this site will not be surprised, nevertheless, to know that this music left me more or less cold, since I have no knowledge of classical music, and would, to be perfectly honest, rather attend a concert by my son’s raucous rock and roll band, Grady, out of Austin, Texas. I was not surprised to read that she had been highly spoken of by such luminaries as Mstislav Rostropovich (whose master classes she had attended) and Yehudi Menuhin, but the information that she had performed with three “world famous conductors” (none of whom I have ever heard of), and with four of “the world’s leading musicians” (whose fame has also escaped me during my 83 years) kind of suggested I had strayed into an environment I should have avoided.

Okay, call me a slob. One thing I discovered last night is that classical musicians are at least as self-indulgent as rock musicians: it seemed that Ms Leskover went on and on with her piece from Haydn, which, to me sounded like she was repeating the same phrases over and over, and I came to the conclusion that her piece would have benefited from being cut to the length my rock and roll experience has made more familiar to me.

The group had previously played works from Handel,
Charles Avison, and a Croatian composer called Dubravko Detoni, who was present at the concert, and whose work I thought was the most interesting of the night. He has composed some 130 productions around musicals, books of poetry and radio and TV programmes, and they were, to me, more evocative than the more classical works.

But then, with all this completed, the group launched into a bizarre evocation of what I have always considered the tripe composed by the Beatles, whose rubbishy tunes were disguised (though barely) as baroque compositions. She Loves You, a Hard Day’s Night, Here Comes the Sun? As baroque compositions? Do me a favour, fellers, better that you stick to your last and don’t try to curry favour with slobs like me.

Maybe my uneasiness was caused by the fact that, with a standing room ticket, the only place I could find to perch was on the medieval stone staircase, on to which I was crowded with dozens of others, (who seemed just as uncomfortable as me).

I gotta admit, the audience was enthusiastic, as they should have been before these master musicians. But I was glad to escape with my sanity more or less intact, and my bum bruised, cold, but still functioning. I think.