Conversations with a Dead Man: Indigenous Rights and the Legacy of Duncan Campbell Scott. Mark Abley, 2013 2024.
Columbus: The Four Voyages 1492-1504. Laurence Bergen. 2011
The Parrot and the Igloo David Lipsky. 2023
The Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America 1754-1766. Fred Anderson. 2001
Kidnapped. Robert Louis Stevenson. Any complete edition. 1886
Exodus. Leon Uris. 1958
The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust. Tom Segev. 1990
Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach meets Frederick the Great in the Age of the Enlightenment. James R. Gaines. 2005
Various Books about the Franklin Expedition
Andy Borowitz. Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber. 2023
The Lumumba Plot. Stuart Reid. 2024
Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare. James Shapiro. 2010.
The Grey Wolf. Louise Penny. 2024
The Knowing. Tanya Talaga. 2024
The Cave and the Light: Plato vs. Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization. Arthur Herman. 2014
Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times ThatMade Handel’s Messiah. Charles King. 2024
I have been completely occupied in the early months of this year with research into the history of the North West Company. While multiple books have been written (and some of them were best sellers) about the NWC’s rival The Hudson Bay Company, very little has been written about the Norwesters– although a number of books have been written about individual members of the Company. Peter Pond, Alexander Mackenzie (the first European to cross overland to the Pacific Ocean – not Lewis and Clarke), Simon Fraser (he of the river), Simon McTavish (of the haunted tomb), James McGill, and on the list goes. The only study of the Company as a whole was by Marjorie Wilkins Campbell(all the best historians are women) and was first published in 1957 and is in dire need of an update. It was re-issued in 1973 and again in 1983 with a brilliant new introduction by Hugh MacLennan. The HBC gets all the fame and press but was essentially an offshore colonial styler business run from the home office in London – managed by Scots and crewed by men from the Orkneys. The NWC was Montreal run, by Scots and Canadiens, and crewed by voyageurs. While the HBC made the indigenous trappers bring their catch to the Bay, the NWC traders went to their indigenous partners (across 4,000 kms of wild terrain). If anyone opened the east/west-ness of this country and prevented Alberta and the rest of the west from becoming just another series of Dakotas it was the NWC and they deserve to have their story more widely known. In the future, I hope to play a small part in that.
If you are interested in the topic your starting point is: Innis, H. The Fur Trade in Canada
Conversations with a Dead Man: Indigenous Rights and the Legacy of Duncan Campbell Scott. Mark Abley, 2013 2024.
This is a tough one to pin down because it’s not really what it says it is and it’s not really what it tries to be. It’s not really about indigenous rights but it is about the residential school system, but only in a general way. It is about the legacy of Duncan Campbell Scott but more about his legacy to history than to indigenous peoples. It is structured (cleverly) as an inquest on Scott, his deeds, his misdeeds, his appalling inaction, his poetry –his guilt. It tries to answer a very, very difficult question that haunts all of history. Are individuals responsible when they behave according to the accepted norms of their time but against what we know to be just. Since Mr. Abley is Canadian, he’s pretty nice to everyone and so he doesn’t answer that question very well. If you want a definitive answer, then read John S. Milloy’s A National Crime and you will see that Scott and John A. and the Catholic Church and the Methodist Church and the Anglican Church were all guilty as hell (in the true sense of responsible). This is a question that need to be dealt with in some detail and nuance when it comes to bureaucrats like Scott and Abley does that. It should be an much easier answer when it comes to the religious who have, after all, the ear of god.
But if you are only vaguely aware of the story of the residential schools and are not interested in the fight over them then this is a very good place to start. At least you’ll get a clear sense of what happened and also a taste of Scott’s poetry (which was not very good poetry but every tradition has to start somewhere). If nothing else, you’ll get a very good reading list.
Milloy, John S. A National Crime
Fournier, S and Crey, E. Stolen From our Embrace
Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report 2012 (which every Canadian should read, especially as its free, online)
Graham, Elizabeth (compiler) The Mush Hole (Out of print but in some libraries – you remember libraries)
Stories, books and articles by Richard Wagamese, Joseph Auguste Merasty, Robert Joseph, Theodore Fontaine, Eli Baxter.
https://www.ahf.ca/publications/
Oh, and Abley does correct some conspiracy myths on the topic. Scott never said “the policy of this Department … is geared towards the final solution of our Indian Problem,” although Scott is constantly quoted online as having said it.
In June 2008 Stephen Harper used another phrase when he stood in the House of Commons and apologized for the mistreatment of Aboriginal children in the residential schools: “Some sought, as it was infamously said, to kill the Indian in the child.” But the offending phrase is not Scott’s either. Neither did any other Canadian official. The quotation can be traced back to a somewhat different statement uttered by a high-ranking officer in the US. Army. Richard Henry Pratt, the nineteenth-century superintendent of a residential school in Pennsylvania: “All the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” P. 7 and 51
Also, Abley (like Milloy, oddly enough) is fairly brief about the ubiquitous issue of sexual abuse, although he does say this:
“After the Second World War, even when Scott’s successors inIndian Affairs hoped to abolish the network, the Catholic church in the Westapplied strong political pressure make sure its schools survived. The failuresof the system had become common knowledge long before the last residentialschool, originally an Anglican-run establishment in the Touchwood Hills ofsouth-central Saskatchewan, closed down in 1996. BY then its long-timesupervisor, William Starr, was serving a prison sentence for the sexual abusehe had inflicted on boys between seven and fourteen years of age.
About 230 men would eventually receive a settlement from thefederal government for the abuse that Starr had perpetrated over many years. Atleast six other men were unable to do so. They had committed suicide.” P. 56
Columbus: The Four Voyages 1492-1504. Laurence Bergreen. 2011
The American comic and political wit Trevor Noah does a clever piece on Columbus. “Here’s a guy,” he says, “who insists that he’s found India. When everybody tells him he’s wrong, he still insists. Hers’s a guy who never set foot in North America and they have big fight in America over whether there should be a Columbus Day.” Not only that, but he kept going back and risking his life and health to prove true what clearly wasn’t.
Bergman sets the record very straight, and in detail, starting with the fact that even in the 1490s, everyone, except a few idiots, knew that the world was round. What Columbus set out to prove was that it was smaller than it actually was by a considerable amount. On the other hand, he turned out to be an absolutely formidable dead-reckoning sailor. He was able to push his crews to their absolute limits and risked his life (on the 4thvoyage) to rescue them, but he was constantly facing mutinies. In other words, it wasn’t simple – it never is. His greatest chronicler and critic, Bartolome de La Casas started out as a slave owner and ended up author of A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, and known as the “Apostle to the Indians”.
The only great revelations here are how human beings constantly fail to live up to expectations, especially under pressure, how the people of island in the Caribbean committed mass suicide by starvation rather than give up their land and their persons to a better armed enemy and how Spain ruthlessly pushed forward with its empire building regardless of what was happening to the indigenous people and even Columbus himself. In fact Columbus was, at one point, shipped back to Spain in shackles himself – hardly the conquering hero of American mythology.
So, although this book is not an astonishing piece of historical writing – like, for instance, Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August – it is still a must read for anyone interested in part of the truth about the European colonization of the Americas.
I leave you with a quote:
Las Casas commented, “And so it was that a man who had, by his own efforts, discovered another world greater than the one we knew before and far more blessed, departed this life in a state of distress and bitterness and poverty without, as he put it himself, so much as a roof he could call his own where he might shelter from the rain and rest from his labors. He died, dispossessed and stripped of the position and honors he had earned by his tireless and heroic efforts and by risking his life over and over a again.” p.363
The Parrot and the Igloo David Lipsky. 2023
On page fifty-four of The Parrot and the Igloo, Lipsky references an article in Time Magazine. Here’s what he says:
Roger Revelle was in the Science section; with a discovery he’d remade. The title was “One Big Greenhouse.” The article totted up the residue of all Henry Ford’s cars, Tesla’s generators, Edison’s current. “Since the start of industrial revolution” Time explained, “mankind has been burning fossil fuel,” adding its “carbon to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.” The first paragraph continued, “In fifty years or so this process, says Director Roger Revelle of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, may have a violent effect on the earth’s climate.”
In the future, Time explained, “if the blanket of CO, produces a temperature rise of only one or two degrees, a chain of secondary effects may come into play.” (This process would later receive an official name: “feedback.” Another, slightly more bullying term is “forcing.”) Once the air warmed, “sea water will get warmer too, and CO, dissolved in it will return to the atmosphere, the magazine continued. “This will increase the green house effect of the CO₂. Each effect will reinforce the other, possibly raising the temperature enough to melt the icecaps of Antarctica and Greenland, which would flood the earth’s coastal lands.”
This was in 1956.
The calculations about how much carbon release was needed for this to happen were done by Svante Arrhenius in 1903.
People began to notice a warming in the twenties; they just didn’t have a name for it. Decades later, the NASA scientist Jim Hansen - whose midnight nickname was “the Paul Revere of Global Warming”- would fix the heating’s start at 1880. He received an immediate reward: the Department of Energy under Ronald Reagan cut his funding. 63
Roger Revelle put it succinctly: human beings are now carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future. He added, “Within a few centuries, we are returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years.” He published this in 1957. 77
As an economist at MIT would explain in 1995, “If you said, ‘Let’s design a problem that human institutions can’t deal with, you couldn’t find one better than global warming.” 79
Lipsky concludes this section of the book with the following piece of whimsy:
“It’s nice to imagine this as a movie montage: couple at the breakfast table-toast, bathrobes, hairstyles lowering and rising with the years-as the camera pans across their newspapers. 1971: “Study Says Man Alters Climate - UN. Report Links Melting of Ice to His Activities.” 1982: “Some Polar Ice Melting Linked to Global Heating.” 2006: “Climate Change ‘Irreversible’ as Arctic Sea Ice Fails to Re-Form.” 2017: “The Arctic as It Is Known Today Is Almost Certainly Gone”. 111
In other words, we have known the science (the facts, the simple reality) of Global Warming (which will probably bring an end to our species) for a very long time – over 50-70 technologically brilliant years – and we have done nothing to significantly slow it down. Roger Revelle described it as a geophysical experiment gone wrong. The MIT guy called it “a problem.” The most accurate descriptions would be mass suicide, or, colossal stupidity on an unimaginable scale.
Why did this happen?
It could be blamed on our extraordinary greed (that would be very accurate). It could be blamed on our unfathomable arrogance (that would be accurate). It could be blamed on our outrageous lack of empathy towards others and I include other species (that would be accurate). It could be blamed on our stupidity – and that would be accurate too. It could also be blamed on our relentless idiocy in believing the rich who say that “the market place will solve it.” (Please keep in mind that the return on investment (even today) in renewable energies is about 2-5%, in the fossil fuel industry it is about 15%. Where do you think investors are going to place their money? The market place will not solve it, it will compound it.
But how did it happen? How did we, given the facts so early on, let it come to this moment when hope is slipping away?
That is the subject of David Lipsky’s magnificent, but slightly flawed, book.
It is impossible to reproduce here all the details of his opus, so I won’t try. Read the book. But a brief outline is in order and one example will suffice – and then you can read the book.
Here’s the precis, in his own words:
By the nineties, a commando squad of climate change skeptics had been fielded by industry. These men were fire-jumpers. Within moments of a global warming report, they were ready to leap into the guest chair at any talk show, the columns of any newspaper. In 1994, a skeptic named Patrick Michaels introduced the poles as anti-evidence on ABC News Nightline. “The polar regions should be so warm now as a result of the enhancement of the greenhouse effect that we wouldn’t even be talking here,” he told host Ted Koppel. “It would be obvious. That’s the region where the most warming is supposed to occur. There isn’t any.”
In 1995, the Arizona State geography professor Robert Balling reassured the boardrooms-and-golf-shoes readership of the Wall Street Journal: “The Arctic area, where most of the warming should be taking place, has not warmed over the past 16 years or over the past fifty years, as measured by standard weather stations. 111
And yet, by1997, air temperatures in the Arctic had warmed five degrees in fifty years. A veteran Polar researcher was quoted as saying “Holy Shit!” When, in 2000, the Icebreaker Yamal set out for the Arctic from Norway chock-full of scientists, they found only some thin ice and open water. “None of us,” Dr. McCarthy explained later, “had ever seen any thing like what we observed in this particular journey.” McCarthy and the academics had logged about two dozen polar visits between them. Now, no ice. Instead, a mile-wide lake, gulls keening. The North Pole had melted: What did it mean?” 111
And yet people believed the skeptics. Why?
Lipsky says t started with WW1. The introduction of the mass use of cigarettes by the army. Even matches were perfected for the occasion. They were called, ironically, Lucifers. Lipsky calls the war a “monumental trade show, to gather customers and showcase the features.” “You ask me what we need to win this war,” said General John Pershing, leader of the American Expeditionary Force. “I answer tobacco, as much as bullets.” “As Allan Brandt writes in The Cigarette Century, “Soldiers returned home committed to the cigarette.” 198 This created the staggeringly profitable Tobacco Industry. And advertising – a lot of it using Doctors –makes it even more profitable. Everybody smokes. Everybody coughs. Tobacco makes money. Some people may even remember the Marlboro Man – the smoking cowboy – feature ad program for tobacco. “Why it works,” the advertiser said, “is it captures the spirit of an alienated country and recaptures a lost time. ”Office Camus, cowboy Proust. “The pressures of society have made us something we don’t want to be. The cowboy is an antithesis.” 214 Trump grabbed onto this kind of con very hard. Except the ‘lost time’ only ever existed in nostalgic memories and all the cowboys that smoked got lung cancer. And that is a documented fact.
What has this got to do with Global Warming? I almost wrote Climate Change but that’s a denier term made to make it all seem more benign. ‘The difference,” writes Lipsky, “between tobacco on health and Exxon on climate I believe is this: their (Exxon) records have not yet been thrown open by court order.” 241 When tobacco had tried all of the standard deny and delay tricks that con-people love to use, they realized that their central dilemma was this: if people accepted the science of tobacco causing cancer (which their OWN scientists agreed with) then eventually they would lose all that income.
Unless…
They could persuade people that science was not science, just opinion.
And so, out of common everyday greed, the corporate elite of tobacco chose to orchestrate a campaign against science(they labeled it “junk science”) so as to convince the public that it was just an (often faulty) opinion. And more than that,
Philip Morris would reach across the aisle to everyone with a grudge against science and scientists, against research when the cards were flipped over and the deal had not been in your favor. “This is the toughest challenge of all,” the strategy read. “And the one that should be treated wit the greatest urgency. The credibility of EPA is defeatable, but not on the basis of EPA alone. It must be part of a larger mosaic that concentrates all of the EPA’s enemies against it at one time.” 242
So, when Phillip Morris launched their campaign, it was global and high on the hit list was global warming.
“The vilification of any research that might threaten corporate interests as ‘junk science,’ . . . has worked wonders. And Naomi Oreskes’ classic Merchants of Doubt handles personnel. “Perhaps not surprisingly, ”Oreskes writes, the same people who “defended tobacco now attacked the science of global warning . . . The ‘coalition’ created by Philip Morris,” [George] Monbiot writes in Heat, was the most important of the corporate-funded organizations denying that climate change is taking place. It has done more damage to the campaign to halt it than any other body.” 245
And the list of professional (that is, paid by industry) climate science deniers grew and grew. In the book, we are treated to the stories of Fred Seitz and S. Fred Singer as well as Jim Tozzi and even Reverend Moon – all shills paid to deny science and lead the chorus. As well, you will hear about organizations like the Global Climate Coalition, which sounds like a bunch of environmentalists but was “really a manufacturer’s clubhouse [where] you’d shake hands with the Aluminum Association (sponsor of Iron Eyes Cody and Keep America Beautiful),wave to the National Coal Association and Western Fuels, . . . grunt at Ford and General Motors (the showrooms), share a drink with Chevron, Exxon, and Shell (the pumps).” 125 You’ll here hear how the first tentative government moves to do anything about the problem were hijacked by the Phillips lighting company to make themselves a ton of money – and that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?
I will give one example of how it works, from the book. A man named Arthur Rubinstein created the “Oregon Petition”, the “signatures” of 19,000 “scientists” against Climate Change. Rubinstein ran (runs) something called The Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (website still online) which has eight “faculty” of which two are dead and two are Mr.Robinson’s sons. Plus there’s him! He was a biochemist on bad terms with evolution which he described as “a hypothesis that is unproven, pseudo-science and “pornography.” 300 He is also an “expert” on Home Schooling and “Nuclear War Survival.” His homeschooling curriculum included world history according to a Victorian novelist named G. A. Henty who wrote about post-civil war America: “freed slaves soon discovered that their lot was a far harder one than it had been before, and that freedom so suddenly given was a curse rather than a blessing.” 301
And it is this man’s (Robinson’s) list of names that caused the United States to withdraw from the Kyoto Agreement on climate. And who were on this list of ‘expert climate scientists’ who denied warming?
One was Dr. T. Ball, “climatologist” from the University of Winnipeg. Who was actually a geographer who had only published in “Social Science Teacher” and the powerhouse “Manitoba Social Science Teachers Journal” and Dr. Ball was “a paid promoter of the agenda of the oil and gas industry rather than a practicing scientist.” But he was interviewed on Fox News as an expert. 298 And the others?
In 2001, Scientific American went through his signature books. Present on Arthur’s list were names submitted in a spirit of substitute-teacher abuse. (Arthur told the Associated Press that he had taken out the fakes.) There was Shirl E. Cook and Richard Cool and Dr. House, and the presumably dependable Knight and the presumably less steady Dr. Red Wine, also the accommodating Betty Will, the in-terrible-distress W. C. Lust. Also, someone who gave their name only as Looney. Plus a dash of celebrity like Michael J. Fox and John Grisham and the dramatis personae of the medical series M*A*S*H. … the magazine estimated that Arthur had managed about two hundred climate researchers, ”a small fraction of the climatological community.” 326-7
Yet it stopped the U.S. from signing Kyoto.
And this is one of the lesser know climate deniers.
Put all together – as this book cleverly and remorselessly does – and it is THE cautionary tale for the ages and should be required reding before people are allowed to vote (or post). If you are, like me, subject to periods of deep existential sadness at where we are headed (and the answer is not a new form of therapy – just climate action!) then there is some (limited) support at the end when Lipsky confesses:
I became a very unpleasant person writing this book. There’s something about reading about people who are lying that makes you suspicious and argumentative company. My back was always up. I was always starting fights, demanding agreement - I would tell friends what they’d said a day or a year before, contrasting it with what they’d said just now. It is proof of the decency of the world that I retained any friendships at all. I became one more voice arguing about global warming. Everyone had known. And nothing had been done. It seemed a metaphor, the largest, for all the things we know we should fix but never get around to, or think we can’t fix or hope we’ll somehow be excused ever really having to try. I started writing this book to find out the reason. 405
This is a very believable statement. But as Mark Serreze once said, “We keep going further and further into the hole, and it’s getting harder and harder to get out of it.” In 2007 the Arctic Sea ice had contracted to half its 1957 area. You can find crows and salmon in the Arctic, beech trees and grass growing on the Antarctic peninsula. The melt “will be within our lives, not our grandchildren’s,” another scientist told reporters. “Things are on more of a hair trigger than we thought!
The warming and the melting is occurring much faster than the models predicted…. Have you looked into the eyes of a climate scientist recently? They look really scared.”125-6
One Final Thing
I said at the beginning that this was a slightly flawed book, so I need to address that. I do not mean the occasional excessive language – it is an excessive topic. But I think that Lipsky missed the ultimate summation of why deniers with so little real plausibility are so successful in his country; and that is because he is an American himself. Although we are all more or less gullible, Americans are the most scam-able people on the planet and also produce the most scammers. Melville noted it (The Confidence Man was his last novel). Mark Twain wrote about it throughout his life (a large part of Huckleberry Finn is about confidence men). The Ponzi scheme from Charles Ponzi to Bernie Madoff to Sam Bankman-Fried is a pillar of American investment and we all know the large role that Snake Oil plays in big time American religion. Just look at all the rows of private Jesus Jets at the airports. There’s a little bit of scam artist in every Famous American, like Linus Pauling. And then there’s the Trump. Confidence Trickery is wildly successful in the land of Disrationality.
See also
Spencer Weart The Discovery of Global Warming
Elizabeth Kolbert Field Notes from a Catastrophe
Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway Merchants of Doubt
George Monbiot Heat
The Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America 1754-1766. Fred Anderson. 2001
Here is one of the great ironies of teaching history: if you keep it simple in order not to “drone on” it can be (and usually is) inexpressibly boring. If you explore all the fascinating details and know how to tell them interestingly, it is fascinating, but few will read it because itis daunting in magnitude. This is the dilemma faced by all historians who actually stand back and think about it before plunging in. Fred Anderson has chosen to tell his story in detail and it is compelling, although huge. Here’s the normal short version. “War breaks out between England and France. Wolfe beats Montcalm. Canada (North America East) goes English. Troubles between the American colonies and Aboriginal peoples. Americans don’t like tea and revolt.” Short quick, boring and (mostly) wrong and very misleading.
Now for a few details that Fred Anderson brings to light.
The seven years war (as we call it in Canada), which included Russia and Austria and Prussia and Hanover and Portugal and Spain, and was fought all over the World including in India, was actually started by an Iroquois war chief named Tanaghrisson in the Ohio valley over a land dispute with the French. He was, by birth, a Catawba but was captured as a child and raised as a Seneca. The ongoing theft of aboriginal lands by American settlers(sometimes aided by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy for their own political ends) is a constant backbeat to the history of this era.
The fact that Wolfe (or rather his soldiers – particularly the78th Fraser Highlanders) won the battle of the plains of Abraham was largely irrelevant. Wolfe got what he wanted: victory, martyrdom and relief from chronic medical problems that he was dying of anyway. The survivors of the battle on both sides were about equal in numbers and what decided who really won was which side’s fleet would sail up the St. Laurence in the Spring. And that had already been decided when the English won the naval battle of Quiberon Bay in the previous October. The French navy had been eliminated as a force and the British controlled the Atlantic. That is why Canada fell.
Among a multitude of shady American land “deals” (thefts),the most infamous is the so-called “Walking Purchase.” Anderson is very clear on the entire subterfuge used to steal an enormous tract of land – state sized – from the Delaware people. In fact, if had he allowed himself the time he might have told the story of Pennsylvania, initially set up as 17th century Quaker commune by the Penn family but then it descended into shady land thefts and controversies that led the Quakers to regret the whole thing. But the existing book is already over 800 pages and you can’t cover everything.
A considerable amount of time is spent on the English cabinet under George II and George III that first won the war and then lost the colonies. While tea drinking may have been an issue in Boston, it was colonial mob rule and the notorious Stamp Act that started the American Revolution and a nasty story it is.
One interesting revelation to me was how the French relationship with first nations from Detroit and further west, differed from the English one (brought in by Generals Amherst and then Gage). Amherst, by the way was a nasty piece of work and tried to spread smallpox among the peoples of Pontiac’s uprising (that war is covered in admirable detail here). By refusing to send “presents” (including hunting ammunition) the English alienated the peoples of the “pays d’en haut” opening a window for Scottish merchants to create the NWC trading company.
This is a great telling of a history that is often glossed over or badly recounted. Not for the timid. but be brave; like Montcalm and Wolfe.
Kidnapped. Robert Louis Stevenson. Any complete edition. 1886
Just to take a break from some serious historical reading (and in anticipation of visiting Stevenson’s Edinburgh this summer) I decided to pick up and read Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped and I am glad that I did. Originally published as a Young Person’s novel it is a story for anyone at any age. I was so pleased that I will move on to Treasure Island (“Ahar”)and perhaps even The Master of Ballantrae. Some people may not be aware of this but Stevenson was an enormous best-selling sensation during his tragically short life and made enough money to retire to Samoa and away from the cold winters and even colder Presbyterians of Auld Reekie – as Edinburgh was called by its inhabitants.
All this I had remembered, but what I had forgotten was just how great a writer R. L. was. In fact, he was considered a Master by many of his contemporaries including Joseph Conrad and Henry James. He had such an easy command of lucid prose that he was always able to achieve the goal that Conrad considered the top of novelistic form: the ability to “make you see.” After the modernist era, led in prose by James Joyce, this talent was somewhat obscured by other objectives and was only later recaptured (most notably in the essay form) by people like George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway and even Margaret Atwood.
The story of Kidnapped is based on a real-life assassination and some real-life people (like James of the Glens, who was hanged for it) not only presents us with the extraordinary character of Alan Breck Stuart but also the true appearance of the Scottish Highlands and the people of the clans, soon after the ’45, who were destined for extinction. In a very real sense, he portrays the disappearing Highland life in a way that refutes the earlier fantasies of Sir Walter Scott, even though Stevenson was chronologically farther from it.
N.B. Actually. I feel I should revise my comment on Joyce as incomplete. I thoroughly enjoyed Ulysses, as opaque as it can be. And Joyce's prose in Dubliners is chrystalline.
Exodus. Leon Uris. 1958
The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust. Tom Segev. 1990
With the on-going horror in Gaza, subsequent to the horror of Oct. 7, 2023, I have done some considerable thinking about my position on the entire geopolitical situation in the region. While I have always maintained a strong support for the existence of Israel, as the years passed the enthusiasm of that support has waxed with terrorist acts (like Munich) and waned with the growth of colonial settlements on the west bank and in Gaza and the lack of any Israeli inclination to settle on a two-state solution, or even to return lands and farms taken from Palestinians. The recent growth of apparent apartheid in the occupied territories and a fascist like government under Netanyahu has made any support for Israeli policies a heavy weight to heft. And that makes one start to think…
Where did the powerful urge in the west to support Israel come from initially. Part of it was a profound sense of justice (and guilt) stemming from the Holocaust. The west could have done much more to preserve Jewish lives, at the very least, by accepting immigration from those who could have fled the coming slaughter in Germany. But it is important to remember that antisemitism was also rife in North America – if not as excessively destructive as it was in many European countries. Also, there was a massive about-face in how the west saw Jews in the post-war era. Suddenly they were no longer the black-clad, ringlet wearing stereotypes of the ghetto. They became the lean, tanned kibbutzim desert fighters of the Haganah who could whip any army sent against them. And part of this transformation was accomplished by books –popular fiction read and accepted as popular but accurate propaganda. And I was not immune to this. I remember as a young man reading with great avidity the novels of Leon Uris, particularly Exodus.
So, I lately re-read the book to see what it would reveal about this process of image making. The story was as I remembered, a mix of contemporary post-WW2 scenes with lengthy flashbacks to various pre-war origins of early Zionists creating a new life in the British Mandate of the Middle East and ending in the triumph of a new state of Israel. What was more noticeable this time around was the overt anti-Arab racism of the book and the historical distortions and outright lies.
A few examples will make this very clear.
The first approach in the novel to an Arab village is made by two brothers, who have walked all the way from a Polish ghetto, and goes like this: “The village was as it must have been a thousand years before. The distant beauty of the village faded with each step they took nearer and was soon replaced by an overwhelming stench.” 213 In fact bad smells are an instant flag throughout the novel of “primitive savagery.” This is neither an accident nor an attempt at realism. In one classic scenario two meals are placed literally back-to-back and the actual ingredients of the two meals are identical. But the descriptions are not. In the first meal our American heroine, Kitty is invited to dine in a Bedouin tent. The hero (Ari Ben Canaan) warns her: “We must go in or he will be insulted. Be a good girl and eat whatever he offers you. You can throw it up later. The inside of the tent stank even more: They sat down on goat-hair and sheep-wool rugs and exchanged amenities. A greasy lamb leg was thrust into Kitty’s hand together with marrow mixed with rice. Kitty nibbled; the sheik watched expectantly. Unwashed fruits were served, and the meal was ended with thick, sickeningly sweet coffee in cups so filthy they were crusted. And after a bit more conversation Ari begged leave.” 353. In the second scene, immediately afterwards, a group of Haganah climb Mount Tabor and dine on delicious lamb and delightful coffee. Kitty muses: “It was the army of Israel, and no force on earth could stop them for the power of God was within them! “ 357 Such culinary diversity! At no time is it explained how Kitty knew that the Arab fruit was unwashed.
The other occupants of Palestine are briefly disposed of. The Druse are simply clean Arabs (the only ones), their villages are “sparkling white and clean in comparison to the filth and decay of most Arab villages”. 435 Christian Arabs (of which there were (and are) large numbers) do not make an appearance in the book. As for the Arabs as soldiers, Uris has contempt. Speaking about the “Arab Revolt” made famous by (T. E.) Lawrence of Arabia (not to mention the film version made two years before the film version of Exodus) Uris has this to say:
With Allenby’s successful campaign, the long-overdue, much-heralded, very costly, and highly overrated Arab revolt began. Faisal, son of the sherif of Mecca, brought in tribes from the desert when it was obvious that the Turks were losing. With the Ottomans on their backs, the Arabs dropped their cloak of neutrality so that they could share in the coming spoils. Faisal’s “rebels” made a good deal of noise and hacked up an unguarded rail line but never put it out of commission. Never once did Arab “rebels” engage in a major or minor battle. 249
Now Lawrence was famous for playing fast and loose with the facts but this is just lies. The “rebels” fought for and seized the port of Aqaba and were in Damascus before Allenby. The first World War and afterwards was a time when the western powers, particularly France and England, used every group in the Middle East mercilessly to promote the interests of England and France. But in Exodus everybody is bad except the Yishuv (and the distant, naive Americans).
The Arabs are dirty, “ninety-nine per cent illiterate” 253 and can be, once captured, heroically beaten and shot in the head 286 because they are “hysterical” and led by men who “are vile, underhanded schemers”. 253 There are no good Arabs in the book – in fact, that was so obvious that a good Arab had to be created for the movie version and played by a blond and beautiful Hollywood actor (John Derek) – the Arabs in the movie destroy him and carve a cross of David on his body. Uris, originally hired to write the screenplay, had to be replaced.
Even more ominous is the recurring riff that the Yishuv represent civilization while the Arabs are savage and vile and deserve replacement. The similarity to colonizers in 19th cent North America is extraordinary. One passage gives the picture: “the Jews had raised the standard of living of the entire Arab community, and . . . Palestine had lain neglected and unwanted for a thousand years in fruitless despair until the Jews rebuilt it”. 266 And when mention is made – and how can it be avoided – of the terrorism by “The Maccabees” (This is a cover name for the Stern Gang, the Irgun and other Jewish terrorist groups) the magnitude of their acts is underplayed. The historical bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on July 22, 1946 by the Irgun is, in the novel, an occasion for mocking the British authorities – whose headquarters it was – for their “bad security”. Not a mention is made of the death toll of 91 of various nationalities and 46 injured. A leader of this terrorist group, Menachem Begun, was to become the Prime Minister of Israel and to launch the 1982 war on Lebanon which resulted in the camp massacres of Sabra and Shatila. The Arab armies, on the other hand are (according to Uris) “the dregs of humanity, thieves, slavers”.
I will give one more quote to elucidate the belief structure of this novel. At the end of the war for the creation of an Israeli state comes the Nakba. While the argument today rages on about the exact details of what happened no one can credit the version given by Uris: ‘It was a strange spectacle to see whole Arab populations stampeding for the Lebanese border, with no one pursuing them.’ 515 The Arabs just ran away.
And so, we begin to move towards the present situation in Palestine. We – the world – has moved a long way from 1958. But the attitude of the settler communities on the west bank towards the Palestinians has not changed. They still see themselves a superior, entitled to take whatever land they want because they (often with a lot of American money and technology) can “improve” it. After all, “Palestine had lain neglected and unwanted for a thousand years in fruitless despair until the Jews rebuilt it”.
And now, I need to take an even more personal position. The generation that ran things before the Second World War and through it, carried a deep burden of antisemitism within them and were, I believe, profoundly shocked at how far that could go with the force of a modern state behind it in the revelations of the Shoah. They were prepared to pay for their prejudices with the support of Israel and the next generation even more so; in a sort of expiation of the errors of the parents. This is a huge over-simplification but, partially at least, true.
It fills me with considerable shame that, in a feeling of support for the founding of Israel, I was prepared to overlook the terrible racism of this book and the subsequent movie. It was wrong and I regret it. Today I can see how the survival of many of these attitudes (strengthened by some horrific acts of terror against Israeli citizens) can underpin much of what is going on today in Gaza and the West Bank. I still support the existence of Israel but I cannot accept what is happening to the Palestinians – especially the women and children.
As a kind of balancing act against the propaganda/fiction of Exodus I chose to read an historical study by Israeli historian Tom Segev and was totally unprepared for what I had taken on. In certain ways it is a caustic rebuke of the Exodus fantasies (although clearly not intended for that role) and in certain ways it illuminates some of the speculation raised by Uris. This is an extraordinary work and I cannot do it credit here – it needs to be read and I look forward to reading some of Segev’s other work. But briefly I will bring up a few points it elucidates. And I will let Segev speak for himself rather than be accused of putting words in his mouth (pen)(keyboard).
The subject of the book is the impact of the holocaust on the state of Israel from before statehood until the present. And Segev’s conclusions are somewhat shocking.
The matter of the Exodus, the transportation of the surviving Jews (the titular seventh million) is dealt with from the point of view of the Zionists in Israel – the sabra heroes of Uris’ novel. Using the words of David Ben Gurion and others Segev makes it clear that the entire transport phenomenon was staged as it was in order to raise support for the Zionist project of a country of Israel in Palestine. Here Segev’s summation:
In the three years between the end of the war and Israel’s declaration of independence, some 140 ships sailed from Europe, carrying more than 70,000 maapilim. Yet most of the vessels were apprehended before reaching the shores of Palestine. The British commandeered them and put the passengers in prison camps, first in Atlit, near Haifa, and then in Cyprus. About half these prisoners were eventually allowed to enter Palestine as part of the monthly quota of legal immigrants. The illegal operation did not, then, bring the Yishuv many more people than would have come legally; from that point of view it was futile. It also did not ensure better “human material.” The British authorities rarely interfered with the choice of candidates for immigration, leaving it to the Jewish Agency: The same people could have been sent legally. The Jewish Agency and the Haganah did not generally try to use force to resist the apprehension of the ships and their passengers; the detention of the illegals in the internment camps and their deportation to Cyprus were carried out more or less in accordance with established rules, generally without violence. The deportations did not cause any real difficulties in relations between the Jewish Agency leadership and the authorities. In general, these continued to be, as before, practical and correct. The reason was that smuggling people into the country was no longer the operation’s major goal. The major purpose of illegal immigration after the Holocaust was the operation itself - as a weapon in the struggle for the creation and control of a Jewish state. 132
It seems that Ben Gurion and his leadership felt that the refugees would be somehow unfit material to build the new state of Israel and in large numbers could become a burden. But they made excellent press for the Zionist goals. If this sounds a bit shocking there is a later passage in the book that details how many of the yishuv looked on the Holocaust survivors.
A few days after he came home from his mission to Hungary, paratrooper Yoel Palgi went to a veterans’ club in Tel Aviv. It was June 1945. Everyone received him warmly and with admiration, he later wrote. They all wanted to hear what had happened over there. But no one was interested in accounts of Jewish suffering. They wanted a different story, about the few who had fought like lions. “Everywhere I turned,” Palgi wrote, “the question was fired at me: why did the Jews not rebel? Why did they go like lambs to the slaughter? Suddenly I realized that we were ashamed of those who were tortured, shot, burned. There is a kind of general agreement that the Holocaust dead were worthless people. Unconsciously, we have accepted the Nazi view that the Jews were subhuman. Six million on trial?” The bluntest expression of this was in yishuv slang. At some point the word sabon, “soap,” came to be used to refer to Holocaust survivors. There is some dispute as to when it first appeared, but there is no denying that it was widespread. It reflected the general belief that the Nazis used the bodies of murdered Jews to produce soap, a charge that was constantly repeated and became an accepted truth that also found its way into Knesset speeches, textbooks, and Israeli literature (“On the shelf in the store, wrapped in yellow paper with olive trees drawn on it, lies the Rabinowitz family,” wrote Yoram Kaniuk in Man, Son of Dog). It seems unlikely that anything could better express the contempt that native-born Israelis felt toward the survivors.” 183
The issue is complicated and so is the book. Again and again (at the trial of Eichmann in particular) the issue of why the Jews o fEurope di not fight back more than they did (Warsaw ghetto excepted) is raised to create a gap between the self-image of the Zionists of Palestine and the European Jews of the Holocaust and the results are often tragic. The book was published in the early 1990’s so this may have changed considerably since then.
In Exodus a nasty (and accurate) charge is laid against the Mufti of Jerusalem: that he was an active Nazi collaborator, but the world is never a s simple as a novelist would like it to be. There is a dark side to Israeli politics that has been mentioned a number of times. Ben Gurion, the Haganah and the early Zionists tended to be of the lef tpolitically. But there has always been a strong minority conservative, right-wing movement that never merged easily with Ben Gurion’s party. In Exodus, they are referred to as the “Maccabees” but were in reality the Irgun (or Etzel), the Stern Gang and various other groups – many of them terrorists (the same term they like to use for Palestinian groups). From them emerged the “democratic” right wing of the Likud; Menachem Begin and Netanyahu. In their less well known past reside some nasty secrets that Segev reveals:
In the second half of 1940, a few members of the Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization)-the anti-British terrorist group sponsored by the Revisionists and known by its acronym Etzel, and to the British simply as the Irgun - made contact with representatives of Fascist Italy, offering to cooperate against the British. Soon the Etzel split, and the group headed by Avraham “Yair” Stern formed itself into the Lehi (from the initials of its Hebrew name, Lohamei Herut Yisrael-Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), also known as the Stern Gang. A representative of this group met with a German foreign ministry official and offered to help Nazi Germany in its war against the British. The Germans understood that the group aimed to establish an independent state based on the totalitarian principles of the Fascist and Nazi regimes. Many years after he tried to forge this link with the Nazis, a former Lehi leader explained what had guided his men at the time:“ Our obligation was to fight the enemy. We were justified in taking aid from the Nazi oppressor, who was in this case the enemy of our enemy - the British.” 208
It was the Irgun government, Under Begin, that pursued the1985 war in Lebanon (another politically contorted country) with a disastrous alliance with Lebanese Christian militia groups. Here’s what Tom Segev has to say about that war:
The war in Lebanon divided the country deeply. The Holocaust was inevitably dragged into the political debate. “Hitler is already dead, Mr. Prime Minister,” wrote author Amos Oz, in response to one of Begin’s defenses of the bombing of Beirut. Adolf Hitler destroyed a third of the Jewish people, among them Your parents and relatives, among them my family. Often I, like many Jews, find at the bottom of my soul a dull sense of pain because I did not kill Hitler with my own hands. I am sure that in Your soul a similar fantasy hovers. There is not and will never be a cure for this open wound in our souls. Tens of thousands of dead Arabs will not heal that wound. But, Mr. Begin, Adolf Hitler died thirty-seven years ago. Unfortunately or not, it is a fact: Hitler is not in hiding in Nabatea, in Sidon, or in Beirut. He is dead and gone.
The editor of the YediotAharonot newspaper responded:
Arafat, were he only to get enough power, would do to us things that even Hitler never imagined. This is not rhetoric on our part. If Hitler killed us with a certain restraint - were Arafat ever to come to power, he would not merely play at such matters. He would cut off our children’s heads with a war shriek, rape our women in broad daylight before tearing them to shreds, and throw us off every roof into the street and skin us like hungry tigers in the jungle wherever he came across us, without German “order” and Eichmann’s organized transports. . 400
Abraham Stern appears in exodus as one of two brothers who walked from Poland to Palestine. One comes to represent the Haganah – a kind of Ben Gurion figure. The other, the Stern brother, breaks away to form the Maccabees; more radical in approach but still “good” in the hierarchy of the novel. He is killed in the famous Acre prison escape – which appears, incongruously, in the middle of the desert in the film. This kind of image making in the novel, and in its portrayal of Arabs as Nazis and their leaders as Hitlers, eventually has consequences, as Segev (and others) point out:
Columnist Evron Boaz wrote:
“Since the world is always presented as: hating and persecuting us, we see ourselves as released from the need for any moral consideration in our attitudes to it.” The paranoid isolation from mankind and its laws, Evron cautioned, was apt to bring certain Jews to the point where, if they had power, they would relate to non-Jews as subhuman and, for all practical purposes, emulate the racist approach of the Nazis. Evron warned also against the growing tendency to identify Arab hostility to Israel with Nazi anti-Semitism. “A leadership cannot be detached from its propaganda; it sees its own propaganda as a reflection of reality,” he wrote. “Thus, the leadership acts within a world of myths and monsters of its own creation.” 402
This may be, in part, what is playing out today in Gaza and may, in the end, cost Israel a great deal among the supporters of democracy. Already some European democracies are beginning to announce their recognition of a state of Palestine – something that no one would have imagined happening after October 7 last year.
Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach meets Frederick the Great in the Age of the Enlightenment. James R. Gaines. 2005
One of a handful of recent books that I can call, unreservedly, brilliant. Deeply insightful into the lives and personalities of both Back and Frederick, it is also masterful in its analysis of the music that is involved as well as Frederick’s military adventurism. Some of what is revealed is a bit surprising and revelatory of the fact that human beings do not really change very much from era to era. The over-layer of the book is the ostensible collision between the old-fashioned genius of Bach and the “new,” rational enlightenment of Frederick (and his buddy, Voltaire).
The book is structured (more or less) as alternating chapters on the lives of JSB and the Prince starting in childhood and leading up to the singular encounter that is he climax of the tale. Frederick, having survived his own insanely brutal father, invites the elderly Bach to an evening of musical challenge (Frederick loves music – French mostly – and plays the flute) where, after a 48-hour sleepless coach ride Bach is challenged to improvise on the spot. He is given an “impossible” theme (prepared in advance by Frederick) and asked to improvise a fugue in three voices. Gaines explains what all of this means so I won’t even try. The point is that all of the important musicians in the room – and Frederick has gathered them all there for this moment, including Bach’s own talented son Carl – know immediately that what is being asked is utterly impossible and intended to humiliate the “old man”. And yet . . . JSB, who is quite aware that he has been publicly entrapped, does what is asked of him, and beautifully. The musicians in the room are “seized with astonishment” as the contemporary account puts it. Frederick, who is enraged at Bach’s extraordinary musical escape, demands a fugue in six voices – something that had never been done before. Bach pleads (quite reasonably) exhaustion and is given leave to retire and return home. Bach 1 Frederick 0.
And yet, it’s not over. When “old Bach” gets home he puts together a series of interlocking pieces which he calls a “Musical Offering” and sends it off to Frederick. It includes the asked for 6 voice fugue. Bach 2 Frederick 0. The “old” guy wins.
There is considerable discussion about Bach’s life and his extraordinary stubbornness, piety, hard work . . . Pretty much everything about JSB was extraordinary. This is partly because it is very difficult to talk about his music – it is so profound. There is also a great deal of discussion about Frederick’s horrific, abused childhood and his sexuality. The monster of a king that he became was probably the product of his father’s treatment. In the end Gaines quotes another biographer in agreement: “Through all of his life – in his councils, in his despair, in his triumph, and in his death – Frederick, almost beyond parallel in the record of human history, was alone.” In the end, it is Frederick who we feel sorry for – Bach is self-sufficient.
Bach’s end is fairly predictable – he was killed by his doctor. The same quack “oculist” who blinded Handel (“Dr.” John Taylor) operated twice on the deteriorating eyes of Bach and it killed him, in addition to impoverishing him. The list of artists killed by quacks is almost endless.
Having done all this – and it’s a lot – Gaines muses on the enlightenment and the end of the age of belief and I think I will just quote him here:
There being no settled agreement between them, the tension continues between reason and faith, ratio and sensus, Frederick and Bach. In this struggle, Frederick usually seems to have the upper hand. The world of the early twenty-first century has no trouble knowing Frederick: that mocking, not really, self-effacing skepticism, the head-fake toward principle during a headlong rush toward the glamour of deeds. His mask and his loneliness are all too familiar. Bach is more of a stranger, a refugee from “God’s time” displaced to a world where religion can be limited to a building and a day of the week, or dispensed with altogether. The chasm that opened with the Enlightenment between the secular and the sacred has grown only wider, to the point of making a commonplace of what would have been unthinkable for Bach: a sense of the world as something unremittingly solid and factual. Modern history has shown what such objectification cam do - without it, how could there have been concentration camps? But the history of ideas has at least so far, provide no clinching argument against it. . . . Whether in the thrilling exuberance of his polyphonic Credo or in the single voice of an unaccompanied cello, in works extravagantly expressive and as intimate as a whisper, Bach’s music makes no argument that the world is more than a ticking clock, yet leaves no doubt of it. P.272-3
I am off to the Artic for the last two weeks in August and so I am reading and re-reading some of the many books on the Franklin expedition. I will include here (and add as I go along) some brief words on each of them.
Erebus. Michael Palin
Yes, the Monty Python guy. He has become very interested in the historical and natural world and Erebus is actually a great book. It’s the history of the Franklin expedition ship in Antarctica and then in the Arctic and its re-discovery off King William Island a few years ago. Palin has got a lot to say, all of it worth listening to, and is now the official patron of the John Rae Society -- more of Rae later.
Frozen In Time. Beattie and Geiger
A real breakthrough book when it was first published and it really re-opened the Franklin case. Unfortunately, its case for lead poisoning has gone the way of many Franklin “theories.” Still, I intend to make a stop at Beechy Island because of the discoveries of this book.
Fatal Passage. Ken McGoogan
This is actually a book about Dr. John Rae who was from Orkney by way of the Hudson Bay Company (that’s where they got all their best employees). Rae was the most prodigious land traveler of the Victorian era – particularly by snowshoe – and, as the discoverer of Rae strait, he could be considered as the man who filled in the last missing piece of the Northwest Passage (although he never sailed it). He is certainly the one who, through his close proximity and his careful listening skills, first learned from the Innuit the fate of the Franklin expedition: starvation and cannibalism. When he presented his evidence in England he was rewarded by the Admiralty (for taking the case off their hands) and then savaged in the press for suggesting that Englishmen would even consider eating each other to stay alive. Lady Franklin leaned on Charles Dickens to excoriate Rae publicly and (in the most shameful act of his writing career) suggest that it was ridiculous to believe the testimony of the “savages” of the Arctic against “civilized” English naval men. Rae’s reputation never really recovered. Meanwhile, in another part of the Arctic one Captain McClure had managed to get his ship, the Investigator, locked in the ice. After a winter there and with no signs of getting free McClure found that a substantial portion of his crew was getting extremely sick with scurvy and since he might be forced to abandon ship (like Franklin – who he was searching for) he decided to improve his odds by sending all of the sick marching hopelessly south towards “Canada” in something resembling the “death march” out of Auschwitz. About three days before he planned to launch his despicable plan he was rescued by another ship. This being an example of how the “civilized” British sailors acted in comparison to the “savages” of the Arctic. McGoogan is always fun to read.
The Voyage of the Fox in the Arctic Seas: A Narrative of the Discovery of the Fate of Sir John Franklin and His Companions. Captain Francis Leopold McClintock. 1859 (1998)
This can be a hard book to locate but it is worth the hunt (pun intended). Captain McClintock was hired by Lady Franklin to search for the answer to the question of what happened to her husband (and his crew) after the Admiralty had declared Franklin dead and the search over. She purchased a private luxury yacht – steam (or screw) powered, although it still was essentially a sailboat– to find out what had happened. She ardently hoped (I am sure) to achieve three things. To find the corpse of her husband and bring it home for burial. To retrieve the journals and any other records of the disaster, including the proof that Franklin had found the (by then universally acknowledged as utterly impractical) Northwest Passage. And finally, to disprove the story of cannibalism brought back by Dr. John Rae from first-hand testimony by the Inuit. In the end, she succeeded in none of these goals (except that of finding that Franklin had died before any cannibalism had taken place). But she did, through her extraordinary persistence in the face of male Admiralty intransigence, succeed in discovering enough of the dismal tale of the disaster to put the entire matter (temporarily) to rest.
There is also another historical significance here when we remember that a young boy in Poland named Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski recalls reading this book and credited it with being the inspiration for his nautical career which then led to his achievements as an author named Joseph Conrad.
The book is a wonderful story if we put aside the fact that the author was a sailor and not a writer of genius. In fact, therein lies the principal weakness and strength of the book. There are long accounts of weather and ice adventures and dangers which have nothing to do with Franklin and seem impediments to the tale. On the other hand, it is utterly refreshing to read an account by someone who was in that place and of that time rather than the usual reflections jotted down in the study of a well-heated urban home. I partially except the books of McGoogan and a few others since they have spent considerable time in the Arctic. But McClintock knows of what he speaks and was actually in considerable danger on this voyage as he had no back-up ship with him.
In addition, McClintock makes some shrewd guesses that did not get picked up on for almost one hundred and fifty years. Among them was his belief that a number of the crew attempted, or even succeeded at a return to one or both of the ships. A member of the National Geographic Society who was a member of the team that found the Erebus told me in conversation (off the coast of Beechey Island) that, given the patterns of movement of ice, wind and water, there is no way that Terror could have gotten to where she was found without being sailed there.
McClintock raises many questions that have not yet been answered despite all the books that have been written on the subject.
Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage. Ken McGoogan. 2017
This is a putative outline of all the searches for the Northwest passage and how they (almost) all came to failure and death. For Henry Hudson, Jens Munk and the Franklin people death did come – but most of the others managed to escape with their lives. People often seem to forget that “over-wintering” for one or more years in the Arctic was actually part of the plan. But catastrophes are always more interesting reads than loss-free failures. McGoogan spins a good yarn with the caveat that there are certain topics that always sway his narrative.
Like many Canadian authors, he doesn’t like Franklin “the hefty lieutenant” and seems to blame the fate of his crew on him although he had died months before they abandoned their ships to a death march. He is a passionate fan of Dr. James Rae, which for him means that Rae discovered the Northwest Passage and those who steal his spotlight (like Leopold McClintock) are bad guys forever. This wouldn’t matter much – in many ways its charming – but it colours his otherwise clear view. As a result he can say that it’s a new idea (post the discovery of Erebus and Terror) that many of the crew returned to the ships and may have even have sailed them to their present, watery locations. But McClintock suggests a return to the ships in the Voyage of the Fox (published 1859). The third McGoogan quirk is the common need to find a novel reason for the disaster: in Ken’s case it is trichinosis caused by the consumption of under-cooked polar bear meat.
It is true that there were elevated lead levels among the men of the expedition. It’s true that there was scurvy. Ditto malnutrition, possibly trichinosis, certainly rampaging tuberculosis – all these things would have contributed to forgetfulness, bad decisions, errors of judgement – possibly acts of murder. They were ALL present. If you want a single cause to encapsulate everything then try out geography. Winters of cold so harsh it could make you weep and endless darkness: at least three winters of it before they began to break. In the words of Barry Lopez: “the extreme winter depression the Polar Eskimo call perlerorneq.” A combination of all of these could lead to societal collapse among men who were used to the weather of Great Britain.
Despite these difficulties, McGoogan is a skilled popular historian and this book covers areas of Arctic exploration that are otherwise largely ignored – like the Simpson/Dease adventure and the sad tale of Jens Munk and the almost as sad tale of Elisha Kent Kane.
Just a short addendum on the subject of tourism. McGoogan isa passionate supporter of Arctic tourism and for all the right reasons. The Arctic that supported the original lifestyle and culture of the people there is rapidly disappearing. I have sat in zodiacs in places where (at the same time of year) in the not-so-distant past there were vast icefields and arctic explorers were frozen in for several years and now the temperature is 11 degrees C. and there is no ice or snow to be seen except on the peaks or in the form of passing bergs. And my experience is not unique. Those that live there can describe the change in great detail.
So, they need a new way to live and art and tourism are likely alternatives. The Artic is still, visually, like no place else on earth and ravishes everyone who sees it. But tourism brings its own costs – as the people of Venice and Athens can tell you. Right now, it’s just starting and is well regulated. Adventure Canada does a superb job of protecting and supporting the arctic from the tourists it brings. But if the popularity grows, other, less scrupulous companies, may cut a swath of destruction through the north. Vigilance is fundamentally important.
Sir John Franklin’s Erebus and Terror Expedition: Lost and Found. Gillian Hutchinson. National Maritime Museum Greenwich. 2017
This is a picture book but a great one. If you are into the details, look here. Complete deck plans of both ships, crew lists, facts, pictures, documents, drawings, photographs of retrieved relics – everything except Dr. John Rae – but then this is the English version. Well worth a look.
Andy Borowitz. Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber. 2023
This is a very funny book. I have been an Andy Borowitz fan for a longtime and while occasionally his daily sallies fall a little bit short, he is consistently the funniest on-line presence (I realize that that is not much of a compliment, but we’ll let that pass). It was once said – about Richard Nixon, I think –that satire is dead. Nothing can be more ridiculous than reality. Time has, sadly, proven this to be wrong and no one can exploit this better than Andy. Reagan, Quayle, Bush and Palin have served as grist for the Borowitz humour mill. And Trump is served up as desert. Here’s a sample form page 188:
Trump thought Colorado bordered Mexico. He thought Finland was a part of Russia, and that Belgium is a city. He pronounced Namibia “Nambia” and called Thailand “Thighland,” as if it were a strip club. He thought Nepal and Bhutan were parts of India, and called them “Nipple” and “Button.” His confusion about India ran a bit deeper; before a 2017 White House visit by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Trump asked a staffer whether the Indian leader’s wife would be joining him on the trip. After being told that Modi and his wife were estranged, Trump responded, “Ah, I think I can set him up with somebody.” He was less friendly during a 2018 meeting with the leaders of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, whom he accused of starting the wars in the Balkans during the 1990s; it eventually dawned on the perplexed trio that he’d confused the Balkans with the Baltics. This mix-up suggested that Trump hadn’t engaged in long geopolitical discussions with his Balkan wife, “Melanie”.
Behind the humour is a deep knowledge of the history of American politics and the dangers that lurk within it. He knows the characters at play and the secret messages that they use. For example, he shows how what appears to be a random series of “colourful” personalities are linked together by the same manipulators that go back in the Republican party even before Nixon:
Reagan and Trump availed themselves of the same deep bench of sociopathic henchmen, from the corrupt Roy Cohn to the predatory Roger Ailes to the felonious Paul Manafort and Roger Stone. As for Reagan’s “civility and personal grace,” as Peter Wehner put it, which Reagan, exactly, was he describing? The one who used racist dog whistles like “states’ rights” and “welfare queen”? The one who said, of student protesters, “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with”? The one who wished that California’s hungry would contract botulism? The one who permitted his press secretary to turn AIDS into a joke? The one who called African leaders cannibals and monkeys? The Party of Reagan seems pretty recognizable to me. P. 229
So, enjoy this book but it may be a little tough on the Republican digestion (and a Maga supporter – but then, do they read? Their boss doesn’t).
Oh, and one last piece of advice from Borowitz that I strongly endorse:
Liberals and conservatives alike get some of their nuttiest ideas from social media. If we were looking to reverse the ravages of the Age of Ignorance, a good first step might be to stop spending so much of time on these platforms. During the Trump years, some members of the “Resistance” thought they were accomplishing something by arguing with their opposite numbers on Facebook and Twitter. Actually, the minute you get into an argument online, the other side automatically wins, because you’re expending energy that could have been applied to political activities that are productive and not just symbolic. P. 235
The Lumumba Plot. Stuart Reid. 2024
When I first read (a long time ago) The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (a truly great novel), I became fascinated with the history of the Belgian Congo (later Zaire and now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Later I read King Leopold’s Ghost, Adam Hochschild’s riveting and horrifying history of the Congo as King Leopold of Belgium’s private storehouse of wealth and murder – and I re-read and reviewed it in 2023. One of the enduring mysteries of the Congo’s emergence as free state from the brutal Belgian grip was the fate of the only elected Prime Minister of that country, Patrice Lumumba, who disappeared in 1961.
The rumours were rife that he was disposed of by the CIA (that was Kingsolver’s belief) and it wasn’t a heavy lift to believe it, as it would have been the first of a series of murders that the agency committed against inconvenient political figures in third world countries. Reid sets the record straight and presents definitive proof that the CIA didn’t do it (although they were planning, itching and equipped with various poisons and weapons TO do it, including having the permission of President Eisenhower). I won’t reveal who the murderers were but for once the CIA was sort of in the clear; they didn't do it but the could have stopped it.
This is a fine, balanced and well-researched book and has the surprise bonus of giving a truly complex and believable look at the character of Lumumba, Mobuto Sese Seko and (surprisingly) Dag Hammarskjold, the then head of the United Nations, who also died somewhat mysteriously. Let’s just say that conspiracy theories are nothing new. All these men are tied together, along with John F Kennedy, and Moise Tshombe in the nightmare that was the “liberation” of the Congo. These three books would be a great trio read, especially since the Congo will become more and more important in the future with its mineral wealth.
Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare. James Shapiro. 2010.
In the course of teaching Shakespeare and writing a book on auditioning using Shakespeare, I have run up against the Shakespeare deniers quite a lot. I have never been seriously concerned with them or their arguments because they seemed so utterly ridiculous and unnecessary. But gradually I came to the realization that this “alternate” scenario – starting with Ireland’s forgeries and growing with Delia Bacon’s theory about Francis Bacon – was the prototypical conspiracy theory and therefore should be countered for all the reasons laid out in this book. So, here’s synopsis.
How did it start?
Step one was the idolization of Shakespeare. This began, in a very small way in the years after his death. The act of creating a Folio of all his plays (as they were numbered at the time) by his friends and fellow actors was an unusual step; never before had a playwright been so honoured. David Garrick (1717-1779), actor extraordinaire, launched the cult on a much wider scale and it was legitimized and spread further by the father of all Shakespeare criticism Edmond Malone (1741-1812). Shakespeare was on his way to the status of “the greatest writer of all time.” This led to the inevitable attempts to cash in on it – such as the Ireland forgeries that Malone was instrumental in exposing. Despite all of the proof (real scholarly, scientific proof) that they were forgeries, many people continued to believe in them. Which leads to a fundamental truth that the book will return to again and again: some people will persist in believing what they want to believe no matter what. How well we understand that today.
Step two. As Shakespeare ascended the ladder of greatness it became unbearably enticing to learn more about the private life of this great artist. It became the universal (almost) assumption that voice of Shakespeare’s heroes was the voice of the poet. Hamlet was his expression of existential anguish, Prospero his farewell to the theatre (even though a bunch of plays followed) and Lear his anguish and personal folly and failure (?).This led to the enormous and perverse folly that Shakespeare could only write about what he had personally experienced. So how did he know about all the details of law, falconry, Italian geography, foreign Jews, Latin etc. etc. etc.
Step three was the gradual revelation that Shakespeare was (in addition to being a playwright and an actor) a moneylender, a crafty businessman and a hoarder of malt. This did not go over well with the general public. How could the GREAT POET and knower of the human heart be a Shylock instead of a Prospero. Now Elizabethan scholars knew that everyone in the middle class did a little money lending, and EVERYONE in Stratford hoarded malt at that time (in fact it is highly likely that the hoarding was done by his wife, Anne Hathaway but he, as head of the household, would be held responsible). In other words, the idolized Shakespeare was a clever money maker who was not above taking a fellow townsman to court over an unpaid loan. Shocking.
In short by 1857, says Shapiro:
an unbearable tension had developed between Shakespeare the poet and Shakespeare the businessman; between the London playwright and the Stratford haggler; between Shakespeare as Prospero and Shakespeare as Shylock; between the kind of man revealed in the “autobiographical” poems and plays, and the one revealed in tax, court, and real estate records; between a deified Shakespeare and depressingly mundaneone.69
And so, step four, the problem was solved, the Gordian knot was cut. Someone else wrote the plays and used the guy from Stratford as afront. (Shapiro does not go down this road but I believe another strong element in this developing conspiracy theory was the general sense, particularly in the19th century and particularly in Britain, that a great poet could not possibly be from the working or middle class and self-educated. Although the standard school education that William got in the school of Stratfor, though narrow, would qualify for University arts today.)
Shapiro is absolutely wonderful as he unravels the story of the Delia/Francis Bacon story and the sub-stories of those who espoused it. Particularly fascinated is a section on Mark Twain, Anne Sullivan (The Miracle Worker) and Helen Keller. He describes how (and why) they found their way into the Bacon cult and how it impacted on their own lives.
Ironically; in her desire to move beyond autobiography; Keller joined a movement committed to the belief that literature was ultimately confessional. Yet Keller was living evidence that a great writer didn’t need to see or hear things herself to write about them. Though she knew this, she remained unable to accept that it was Shakespeare’s ability to imagine things that mattered - and that what he found in books, as much as or more than what he experienced firsthand, stimulated his imagination, as it had hers. 129
As enthusiasm for Bacon waned (there are still Bacon-ites out there today) the focus shifted to a newer, more aristocratic, more exciting and a more ridiculous candidate: Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. At the same time the backstory became more convoluted, bizarre and unchallengeable – a bit like Qanon. I won’t go into all the details because there isn’t the space but briefly it goes like this: Oxford wrote the plays, they are all about his own life, but for various extraordinary reasons he had to keep his authorship secret so he published them under the name of the actor William Shakespeare. He (Oxford) is, also, alternatively, the son of Queen of Elizabeth or the lover of Queen Elizabeth or, with her, the father of the Earl of Southampton – or all of the above.
Of course, “evidence” was produced to substantiate the Oxford theory. One example concerns the doctoral thesis of a man named Stritmatter:
An annotated Geneva Bible from around 1570 that Oxford once owned had been acquired by the Folger Shakespeare Library. Most of its annotations consisted of underlinings, which Stritmatter argued closely corresponded to allusions to biblical passages in Shakespeare’s plays, thereby confirming that de Vere was their author. Stritmatter also argued that some of the underlined passages had an autobiographical component, conveying the familiar Oxfordian “inner story” of “a man whose name has been erased from history” and which set forth the divine promise of his eventual redemption.
When independent scholars David Kathman, Tom Veal, and Terry Ross looked at the evidence, they pointed out a good deal that Stritmatter’s dissertation committee had apparently failed to notice. For starters, the conclusion that the underlining matched biblical allusions in Shakespeare was unwarranted, since “only about 10 percent of Shakespeare’s Biblical allusions are marked in the Bible, and only about 20 percent of the verses marked in the Bible are alluded to in Shakespeare.” . . . And, on closer examination, it wasn’t even obvious that de Vere himself had underlined these passages, since the marginalia appeared in different-colored inks and might easily been made by anyone who owned the Bible after de Vere’s death in 1604. Doubts had already been raised after Alan Nelson, the leading expert on Oxford’s handwriting, examined the marginalia and concluded that the “hand is simply not the same hand that wrote [Oxford’s] letters.” 214-5
What is clear from this story is that those looking for “evidence” will find it whether it is there or not and will brook no opposition. Objective examination by experts – and there are experts – leads to different conclusions of a kind that the cultists dismiss. The bizarre nature of the cult is equaled only by its tenaciousness. Here’s a bit of a discussion from Shapiro’s researches:
When Boyle added that it was impossible “to imagine a piece of evidence that could disprove the theory to its adherents, ”Lardner asked, “What about a letter in Oxford’s hand…congratulating William Shakespeare of Stratford on his achievements as a playwright?” Boyle didn’t skip a beat, mimicking an Oxfordian response: “What an unlikely communication between an earl and a common player! . .. Obviously something designed to carry on the conspiracy of concealment. The very fact that he wrote such a letter presents the strongest proof we could possibly have!’” 207
Again, it is clear, some people will persist in believing what they want to believe no matter what
There is a great deal more discussion in the book about how some very clever and interesting people inclined to the Oxfordian position, from Sigmund Freud to Derek Jacobi. It is fascinating how the theory of authorship grows out of personal needs. With Freud it was vastly important since his baseline theory of the Oedipus Complex hinged as much on Hamlet as it did on Sophocles’ play.
In the end Shapiro presents the reasons why he believes that William Shakespeare was William Shakespeare, and the reasons are evidence based.
When asked how I can be so confident that Shakespeare was their author, I point to several kinds of evidence. “The first is what early printed texts reveal; the second, what writers who knew Shakespeare said about him. Either of these, to my mind, suffices to confirm his authorship and the stories they tell corroborate each other. All this is reinforced by additional evidence from the closing years of his career, when he began writing for a new kind of playhouse, in a different style, in active collaboration with other writers. 223
Many of the simplest arguments against Shakespeare’s authorship are simply disposed of – because they are based on a lack of knowledge about everyday life in the Elizabethan/Jacobean era.
Why does Shakespeare not mention his books in his will? Because books (like most furniture) were not listed in wills. They went in another document as part of disposable property and would have been sold when his house was sold.
Why have none of his books or manuscripts survived? Don’t know. But none of the books or manuscripts of ANY Elizabethan/Jacobean playwright have survived. The manuscripts did not belong to the author. They were sold to the theatre that bought the play. They were the play and the theatres owned the play. Shakespeare only had some limited control over publication because he was a shareholder in the theatre company.
Most doubters also brush off the overwhelming evidence offered by the title pages of these dozens of publications by claiming that “Shakespeare”- -or as some would have it, “Shake-speare” - was simply the pseudonym of another writer - that hyphen a dead giveaway.
But such arguments are impossible to reconcile with what we now know about how publishing worked at the time. This was not a world in which a dramatist could secretly arrange with a publisher to bring out a play under an assumed name. In fact, Shakespeare had almost no control over the publication of his plays, because strange as it as it may sound today, he didn’t own them. 215
But the plays that were published did hold authorship clues and they all point at William Shakespeare.
Playing companies turned over to printers different sorts of manuscripts. Scholars have spent lifetimes poring over the resulting printed texts, reconstructing from the smallest details the lost originals – whether one play or another was printed from “foul papers” (a nearly modern term for an author’s rough draft), “fair copy” (an author’s or more likely a scribe’s neater transcription of that earlier draft), or “prompt copy” (either foul or fair copy that would have been marked up and used in the playhouse). Plays set from “foul papers” often reveal a great deal about an author’s writing habits. … There were times when Shakespeare was thinking so intently about the part he was writing for a particular actor that in jotting down the speech headings he mistakenly wrote the actor’s name rather than his character’s. We know this because compositors passed on some of these slips when typesetting his foul papers. Take, for example, the stage direction in the First Folio edition of that early history play The Third Part of Henry the Sixth, which reads: “Enter Sinklo and Humfrey.” John Sinklo was a regular hired man for whom Shakespeare wrote lots of skinny man parts. 228
Only a writer who was a member of the company could do this.
You couldn’t write Rosalind’s part in As You Like It unless you had absolute confidence that the boy who spoke her seven hundred lines, a quarter of the play, could manage it. You couldn’t write apart requiring the boy playing Lady Mortimer in The First Part of Henry the Fourth to sing in Welsh unless you knew that the company had a young actor who could handle a tune and was a native of Wales. Whoever wrote these plays had an intimate, firsthand knowledge of everyone in the company, and must have been a shrewd judge of each actor’s talents. 229
Another example:
How could anyone but a shareholder in the company know to stop writing comic parts for Will Kemp the moment he quit the company in 1599 - and start writing parts in advance of the arrival of his replacement, Robert Armin, whose comic gifts couldn’t have been more different. Kemp was another one of those actors Shakespeare kept confusing with his characters - easy enough to do, since Kemp always partly played himself no matter what role Shakespeare had written for him. The 1599 quarto of Romeo and Juliet identifies the Nurses comic sidekick Peter, first as “The Clown” and then, in an ensuing stage direction, as “Will Kemp.” The same sort of slip occurs in the quarto of Much Ado about Northing, where we learn that the comic roles of Dogberry and Verges had been written for Kemp and Richard Cowley. 230
And then there were his contemporary playwrights who wrote about him and left (like Ben Jonson) extensive personal tributes to him. Are the Oxfordians claiming that this was, too, was faked? For who? For why? Oxford was long dead. Shapiro does not invoke the principal of Occam’s Razer, but I certainly do. (Look it up.)
One last point, and it is Shapiro’s starting and ending point: the role of imagination. Yes, someone wrote the part of Hamlet. But they did not have to live it to write it. That same person wrote Claudius and Laertes and Ophelia and Gertrude. Did they have to live those too? Is the idea so outrageous that someone can look into a book, find a story and have the genius to turn it into great art without having to go through it all personally? If that were so there would be no historical fiction and no science fiction; no Dune and no I, Claudius or Mask of Apollo.
Shapiro remembers the words of Theseus in Midsummer’s Night’s Dream and so do I:
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;
That’s the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives toa airy nothing
A local habitation and a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination
That, if it would apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy.
Shapiro provides a great deal of interesting Bibliographical material out of which I will add a very few here:
Stanley Wells, Shakespeare and Co. (London, 2006)
Andrew Gurr, The Shakespeare Company: 1594-1642 (Cambridge, U.K., 2004)
W. Baldwin, William Shakespeare’s Small Latine and Lesser Greeke, 2 vols. (Urbana, Illinois, 1944)
David Crystal, ‘Think on My Words’: Exploring Shakespeare’s Language (Cambridge, U.K., 2008).
The Grey Wolf. Louise Penny. 2024
I have read every Louise Penny novel from Still Life to The Grey Wolf, withe exception of the book she wrote with Hillary Clinton (Clinton has always bothered me as a privileged politician and I am very uninterested in her ‘writing’). I have a soft spot for Penny because I have enjoyed her particular perspective in the early books and because I know the Eastern Townships very well, having lived there, on and off, for five or six years and often visit. I have also toured there with a few shows and I really love the place.
So, it is sad for me to read The Grey Wolf and admit that, after all these years, I am really growing tired of the direction that Penny is taking lately. It is not Three Pines and it is not the branching out into various other areas of Quebec (like Blancs Sablons). It has more to do with the huge and pretty much motiveless plot lines that she has chosen to follow. Perhaps she picked something up from Clinton, who knows!
My biggest issue with the book is that in the bulk of it –over 300 pages – pretty much nothing happens. There is such a thing as long, drawn-out, suspense and then again there is such a thing as long, drawn-out, who-cares boredom. The latter is the case here.
And, in the end, and I am trying not to spoil it but, within a few pages we get “It can’t be stopped!”, “Maybe, it can be stopped!”, “It can’t be stopped!”, “I know how to stop it!” Please!
And one more thing, there’s got to be another way to write gunshots other than: “bang, bang, bang”
The Knowing. Tanya Talaga. 2024
This was a much-anticipated book and I was truly looking forward to reading it. I have been a reader of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its Report and also, I have a strong interest in the history of the fur trade in North America. The book was presented as doing several things and some of them it does extremely well and some not so well. Let’s start with the positive.
Ms. Talaga’s search for her missing ancestor’s is riveting and does not suffer unduly from being scattered a bit throughout the book. It presents a model of how the search is done – although she is fortunate in that she has had much assistance from friends and relations – and the culmination in discovering a near-lost cemetery is wonderful. If you want to trace your ancestry, indigenous or not, she’s got some great advice.
Secondly, the drawing attention to the multiple discoveries of hidden graveyards attached to residential schools across the country is an important service to all Canadians. It is vitally important that we know and take ownership of our history. Too few Canadians understand how truly awful were the things done in our collective name to the indigenous people of this country and The Knowing helps, in part, to set the record straight AND prepare us for the horrors to come when these once hidden graves are exhumed.
The book has been touted as a history of the residential school system and it is not that; but that is not Talaga’s fault. Such a history would be a vast and monumental undertaking but there have been two attempts at beginning the task and I will refer you to them here. The first, and most obvious, is the Truth and Reconciliation Report (in several volumes), largely the work of Murray Sinclair (recently deceased and much missed). It is well written and available free on line. I would make it compulsory reading for Canadians if I had the means to do so. The second source is John Milloy’s A National Crime, which is reasonably comprehensive over all but does not get very specific about individual schools, dealing rather with systemic issues and crimes. But it does give the history and development of that insidious system. There is still a huge gap in this area.
Having said that, I do need to take Talaga to task for her historical backgrounds in two areas. It is clear that she is (justifiably) enraged by the role that the churches took in the engagement with indigenous people (conversion) and more specifically in administering a large number of the residential schools. But her historical analysis of the background to this is extremely bizarre. I will give one quote from the book to illustrate:
Hundreds of years earlier, from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, Europeans had engaged in the Crusades, conquering the Middle East and North Africa in the name of the cross. The Crusaders were violent, rampaging soldiers sanctioned by popes to steal, loot and take non-Christian land. Towards the end of the thirteenth century, the list of who could be conquered had expanded: it now extended to pagans and commoners, including the European peasantry. Entire nations were colonized: Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Bohemia, the Basque Country and Catalonia. Peasants were evicted from lands, while languages and songs were banned and cultures destroyed. The English even paid bounties for the heads of the Irish (a practice that was later adopted in the United States, where bounties were given for scalps). P. 78
I would not know where to begin to critique this statement except by saying that the Crusades were the greatest blunder committed in the Middle Ages and achieved (with the brief exception of the first) absolutely nothing at a colossal expenditure of life. Nothing was conquered. The rest of the paragraph is ‘sort of’ true but has absolutely nothing to do with the crusades.
Talaga’s historical rendering of the fur trade is confusing and inaccurate. For one example (and there are others):
The creation of something called Rupert’s Land, a monstrous plantation for the British and for what was to become the fur-trading giant, the Hudson’s Bay Company, a vast area encompassing nearly eight million square kilometers. Europe’s greed for furs would feast off of a sinister combination of colonial hunger and slave-based economics. It would feed off of racism, classism, cultural superiority and Christianity’s belief in its right to dominate and convert. Ultimately, it would lead to residential schools and to the tragic consequences of that supposed system of “education” that remain so potent today. P. 57
Talaga has decided that the Lord Selkirk colony story (and only parts of it) will stand in for the story of The Hudson Bay Company and the fur trade. In the first place Lord Selkirk had little interest in the fur trade and the HBC had little interest in colonizing – bad for the fur trade.. Selkirk was only interested in settling his own people (the poor Scots mentioned in the quote from page 78 above) in the “New World” since they were being kicked out of their own country. And yes, his wife’s fortune did come from the slave trade but his story is a difficult and complex one and does not in any way justify nominating the HBC as a slaving company. In fact, the slavery accusation is a very dangerous two-edged sword to wield. There is considerable evidence (although not proof) that various indigenous nations engaged in slavery as well – particularly in the west.
Talaga suggests that “the creation of something called Rupert’s Land, a monstrous plantation for the British” would allow Europe’s greed for furs to create “a sinister combination of colonial hunger and slave-based economics. It would feed off of racism, classism, cultural superiority and Christianity’s belief in its right to dominate and convert. Ultimately, it would lead to residential schools and to the tragic consequences of that supposed system of “education” that remain so potent today”. P. 57 In other words, the fur trade created the residential school system – a giant and unsubstantiated leap. Talaga also charges the HBC with wanting to colonize Canada and turn it into a huge slave plantation (P.67) which is preposterous as the HBC (until Selkirk bought the company) resisted colonization with every fibre of its being.
In the early histories of the fur trade, past authors suggested that the clever white traders took advantage of the poor “native people” and duped them to make vast profits for themselves. Starting with historians like Bruce Trigger, it was pointed out that the indigenous people of Canada had already developed vast trade networks long before the Europeans arrived and that they were just as clever at the fur trade (or any other trade) as their European counterparts. In fact, it was the indigenous peoples who controlled the trade network between the HBC and the nations further west.
As for George Simpson, the last and most powerful Governor of the HBC, he deserved everything that Talaga throws at him:
George Simpson openly referred to Indigenous women and those who were called “half-breeds” at the time as “brown bits,” “commodities and “brown jugs.” He had at least thirteen children whose mothers were Indigenous. After the women gave birth to his offspring, he threw them - and the kids - away. He tried to marry women off to subordinate employees, begged his friends to help cover up his behaviour, or he just walked out. “If you can dispose of the Lady it will be satisfactory as she is an unnecessary and expensive appendage, no fun in keeping a Woman, without enjoying her charms… but if she if she is unmarketable I have no wish that she should be a general accommodation shop to all the young bucks at the Factory and in addition to her own chastity a padlock may be useful.” Page 87
Simpson was, indeed, a nasty piece of work – and he did bring his ideas of race from an acquaintance with the slave trade. However, the actual fur traders, mostly poor lads from the Orkney Islands, hated Simpson -- particularly because they wanted to keep their beloved indigenous wives and children and Simpson wanted them to dispose of them. Talaga quotes the work here of Sylvia Van Kirk (Many Tender Ties) but the book by Van Kirk doe not really back her up.
One last criticism. Talaga includes that infamous quote attributed to Duncan Campbell Scott in the book: “It is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose their natural resistance to illness by habituating so closely in residential schools and that they die at a much higher rate than in their villages. But this does not justify a change in the policy of this department which is geared toward a final solution of our Indian problem.” Page 34 But everyone who has tried to track down this 1918 quote (because of the “final solution” reference) has been unable to trace it to Scott. (See Mark Abley’s book Conversations With a Dead Man.) This does not make what happened under Scott’s watch less of a genocide, but accuracy is important in a journalist.
Where Talaga absolutely nails it is when she talks about what actually happened in the residential schools, in human terms; how it broke, abused and destroyed people. The school at St. Anne’s: “among the litany of abuses that happened there, children were whipped until they bled, they were forced to eat their own vomit, and the institution had a homemade electric chair that they used on students, whom they called “inmates.” Page 41 Forcing children to eat their own vomit recurs again and again in accounts of Catholic schools and orphanages. The horror that was St. Joseph’s School is presented:
Belleau went to St. Joseph’s Mission residential school, outside Williams Lake First Nation in B.C., roughly five hundred kilometers northeast of Vancouver and a three-hour drive north of Kamloops on the rolling Cariboo Highway. The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, notorious for their operations of numerous residential schools, opened the mission in 1867. By 1891, they had raised the funds to open the St. Joseph’s Indian residential school. It closed ninety years later, in 1981. The school was rife with sexual abusers. In fact, what happened at St. Joseph’s gave rise to some of the first charges and convictions against priests and religious brothers for abusing children in their care at residential schools. In 1989, Brother Harold McIntee pleaded guilty to abusing seventeen children, thirteen of them at the mission. In 1996, the school’s former principal, Bishop Hubert O’Connor, was charged with six counts of sexual abuse from his time at the mission in the 1960s. He was convicted of rape and indecent assault on two young First Nations women. O’Connor resigned as a bishop in 1991 after he was charged with sex crimes, and he served six months in jail for the two convictions. Brother Glen Doughty was charged with dozens of sexual offences against children at two residential schools, one of them St. Joseph’s¸ In 1991 he was convicted of four counts of gross indecency against children at St. Joseph’s. P. !57-8
Not only the abuse is recounted but the fact that many people got away with it and the ones that were caught received only light sentences. “Beyond damaging” says Talaga, and she’s right. I don’t suppose that it would be any consolation that the story was exactly the same in Boston (Spotlight), Louisiana (now a Parish bankrupt from lawsuits) and Mount Cashel. No, it would just be another shame for the church.
So, despite the historical issues I’ve mentioned, I would recommend this book to everyone. It’s the real stuff, it’s just written by a very angry person. Who has a right to be angry.
The Cave and the Light: Plato vs. Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization. Arthur Herman. 2014
Oooooof, with a title like that, the temptation is to be overwhelmed. And the 600 plus pages doesn’t lessen the intimidation. But, be not afraid. This is really just a history of western philosophy, with a small p, because it is not in any way exhaustive, or over-your-head, and includes science (Galileo and Newton), history and even small c culture). Plato and Aristotle are used as revolving doors to survey western perceptions of knowledge over the centuries.
I have enough awareness of the material to be able to follow and enjoy the argument but I do not have enough depth of knowledge in philosophy to judge the accuracy of Herman’s judgement. Except in two areas.
Herman’ specialty is, in fact, the enlightenment (which he has written about much more extensively in his book How the Scots Invented the Modern World) and here he is most acute. Where he is hopelessly out of date (several centuries) is when he tries to explain Aristotle’s Poetics, based on a very bad 17th century translation. As a result, he wanders off into the now-debunked no-man’s land of the “three unities” and makes an absolute hash of katharsis.
He also has Shelley expelled from Oxford for writing an atheist tract when actually he was expelled for lying about it. And he names the boat that Shelley drowned in the Don Juan, when actually the poet had named it the Ariel. While he gets the facts of Byron’s miserable death at Missolonghi dead right, he totally misses the significance or ramifications of it for the Greek independence that Byron so desperately sought. Which is why the Byron is still more of a hero in Greece today than even Plato.
These errors do raise the spectre of doubt about other things that are harder to check. Herman also has a deep bias towards unfettered market economies but his only detailed argument in support of them is the lack of choice in the Soviet department stores of the past – not a particularly useful example anymore; and he is oblivious to the risks of the monopolist tendencies of the present economic sphere. But setting theses things aside, he does have a knack for keeping what might otherwise become an extremely tedious tale vibrant and alive. So, if you want a survey of western ideas, this is, with the above caveats, a good one.
Psssst. I think Aristotle wins!
Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah. Charles King. 2024
This was a bit of a Christmas present to myself. I was going to wait until the paperback came out, but this year we decided to attend the Messiah at Notre Dame Basilica and after such a wonderful performance, I had to go out and get the book. And I am so glad that I did; because it is a triumph.
I won’t spoil it for you but the interwoven stories are amazing and surprisingly uplifting. Very few people (and I was among the ignorant) know that the libretto for Messiah – and that’s its proper title, not The Messiah – was written by a wealthy, but largely unknown, English gentleman named Charles Jennens and not just plucked from the bible by Handel. That it was Jennens’ project which he proposed to Handel and which Handel presented for the first time – to fill in a gap in the program – in Dublin.
The rest of the stories I will leave to you to discover, but they are well worth it. There is only a minor quibble: despite the fact that Jennens was a Jacobite, the story of the ’45 doesn’t really fit into the narrative and could be dropped without loss, as interesting as it is.
Read this book and then listen to Messiah again – or, for the first time – but actually listen, don’t use it for background music. If you didn’t love Handel before, you will now.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
