Politics and Press

An apology that might mean something

My brother Doug and I are suspicious of official apologies by governments who are convinced by election polls that they might win some ethnic votes if they recall how miserably a specific ethnic group was treated a century ago. But this week the Canadian government made an official apology that might actually have been meant and which might have a meaningul impact. Prime Minister Stephen Harper read off an unambiguous apology to the assembled First Nations Chiefs in the House of Parliament regarding the way native peoples have been treated since Canada existed and in particular with regard to what happened during the lengthy period when residential schools were used to “take the Indian out of the Indians” as Harper put it. Children were removed from their families and their homes and transported to remote live-in schools where they were punished for using their native languiage, taught the ways of the white man and untaught the ways of their parents. Even worse, if that can be imagined, is that these children in far too many cases, were also sexually exploited by the people who were supposed to be teaching them.

It was a miserable cultural performance of the highest order, and its abject failure can still be felt a generation after the last residential school was closed. Not only have many of the former students never really recoverd from their ordeal, in many cases they have passed on their existential disillusionment to their own children. The results can be seen in many of the poverty-stricken reserves, particularly in the north, that remain Canada’s darkest secret, though it is no secret to any alert Canadian living today. For the problems are also sadly present in the drug-dominated sections of too many Canadian cities. where the attempt at enforced assimilation has led only to despair. Some natives were not interested in Harper’s belated apology, but many more seemed to be genuinely attentive, no doubt in the hope that a page is finally turning and that the native peoples can soon regain their rightful place on their home turf. Let’s hope they are right.

Sports and Politics - Part Four - Demographics and Football teams

The current European football championships offer a fascinating look at the changing demographics of nations both in and out of the European Union. Some of the countries offer team rosters in which every single player has a name that reflects the traditional ethnic line that once formed the critical mass of almost any country in the map of Europe as we know it. Turkey, Greece, Romania, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Austria and Poland are all nations without colonial ambitions (in two cases we should probably add “since the end of World War One”), and none of them has a team that includes any sign of the immigration of populations from former colonies. And none of them has been much interested in encouraging new immigrants, though Poland has a rushed-through a New Pole from Brazil on its roster (he has scored their only goal so far), and Austria has a collection of names from the old Habsburg Empire, plus a couple of Turkish ones. But none of these countries has a single non-Caucasian player unlike the rainbow teams of the powerhouses.

In general one can conclude that the lesser football powers have not benefited from either having had a former colonial empire or a desire to bring in fresh blood, while the major powers have. France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Germany - the favourites - all certainly do, as would the English team if it had managed to qualify, which it didn’t. There is an exception that proves the rule, world champion Italy, which certainly has had colonial ambitions in the past and has much immigration these days, but no player on its national team has a non-italian name. And Switzerland, with a team as multicultural as France, plays a neutral role, even on the football pitch, and has already been eliminated. Russia is a world of its own, more in Asia than in Europe, but its football team seems to be made up of European Russians.

Obama speaks at Wesleyan as Belichick joins Hall of Fame - Sports and Politics, part 3

Just when it seemed that the US Democratic primary campaign was going to sink into the quicksand of complete disinterest, Barack Obama has made a deft move that is sure to focus attention on more interesting topics than the exact delegate vote not including Michigan, American Samoa, the Virgins Islands and Florida. My brother and I, lost in the snows of the tundra, haven’t been able to grasp the nuances of that mathematical formula. What we have figured out is that Middletown, Connecticut will be the centre of world attention this afternoon as Obama steps in in relief of his stricken brother-in-arms Ted Kennedy, who will be sitting in the first row as his stepdaughter graduates from one of the premier US East coast elite liberal Arts universities and his son celebrates the 15th anniversary of his graduation. But Wesleyan is also probably the premier elite small university in another area: sports, and my brother Doug thinks that Obama is hoping to gain stature by being in the presence of some of the heroic figures who are already in the Wesleyan Hall of Fame as Bill Belichick joins it along with legendary marathon runner Bill Rodgers.

But it is not only Rogers and Belichick, the winner of four Super Bowls with the New England Patriots and the most successful football coach in recent NFL history, who will be present, but also former Wesleyan student and current arch Belichick nemesis Coach Eric Mangini of NFL’s New York Jets, who will be there for his fifteenth reunion. For Wesleyan is the only university to have produced two current NFL coaches, and Doug and many scouts feel that Wesleyan’s combination of intellectual depth and athletic grace has led to the development of a number of quarterbacks wearing the red and black, who would surely have dominated the football fields of America if they hadn’t gone into more scholarly pursuits.

So give credit where it is due. Obama has made a very smart political move by moving into this territory. He will surely deliver an excellent commencement address, and do his friend Ted a favour while doing it, even if his own elite university background is limited to mainstream Harvard. But with any luck, the sports journalists will also be there to keep watch over Belichick and Mangini, and to see how Rodgers is running along these days. Obama can relax in the afterglow of some heavy hitters from the world of sports, whose chumminess would be most helpful to his popularity among the blue collar working folk.

Michaelle Jean makes a visit to France

My brother and I are afraid that our headline may not mean much to our wide readership outside of Canada and Bavaria. Therefore some background information. Michaelle Jean is the splendidly photogenic Governor-General of Canada, whom the separatist Parti Quebecois likes to identify as “the Queen of England’s representative in Canada”. But Michaelle Jean is no easy target for that once revolutionary party that is beginning to look more than a little frumpy and is losing support because of it. She is currently representing Canada in Paris at celebrations jointly celebrating the 400th anniversary of the founding of Quebec City, the end of the Second World War and France’s national Day on Saturday marking the end of slavery in 1848. Michaelle Jean causes the separatistes great problems. She is an immigrant from Haiti, speaks French natively and English with Gaulic charm, and she is a very articulate and intelligent commentator in both national languages on cultural matters. In a luncheon speech before the French Senate, given of course in French, she identified herself in a way that few (no?) other western leaders could do: “The great-great-granddaughter of slaves, I cannot remain indifferent to the legacy of racism and intolerance left behind by decades of slavery and that continues to be felt in our communities, at times openly, at times more insidiously.” Eat your heart out, Senator Obama.

She also happens to be the best-looking First Lady in the world, a fair distance ahead of the second-place French First Lady, something that seems to have stunned the French so deeply that photos prove that Nicolas Sarkozy could not have bent over more deeply while kissing her hand. Le Monde wrote that Canada’s titular head of state was “La presque reine du Canada” - “the enlightened face of humanity, intelligence and beauty’. Holy moley! Michaelle Jean has done more to foster French/Canada relations in one week of public appearances than decades of those boring old kind of Canuck politicians, including the endlessly whining separatisten that France used to love to coddle. As for M. Sarkozy, he not only accompanied Mme Jean to the Normandy D-Day landing sites, but also asked if he could join her at the Canadian military cemetery at Beny-Riviers near Juno Beach where 2000 Canadians died in the D-Day invasion. When was the last time that a French prime Minister knew it was good politics to be seen with the Governor-General of Canada? A word of advice to M. Obama. As far as Canadians can tell, he has only made one reference to Canada in his career as a politician, saying that he would love to meet the (non-existent) President of Canada when he becomes President of the US. This was taken as a bad omen for the future of US foreign policy given the last 8 years, but perhaps Obama can do a little research about his neighbours in the next months. If he doesn’t he is in for a monumental surprise when he meets the Governor-General of stodgy old Canada.

What’s right about Bavaria

My bother and I recently returned from a lengthy stay in Germany’s most engaging city, Munich, and decided it was time to admit that the citizens of Bavaria have made a wise decision. They have decided to go along with the tourist ploy that Berlin is the city to visit if you are going to make a brief sojourn into that nasty country that only one generation ago came close to wiping out European civilization. For European cities that become apples of tourist organizers’ eyes pay a heavy, sometimes fatal, price for paving their streets with the gold left behind by the hordes. For 8 months of the year, Florence and Venice, surely two of the world’s most splendid cities, cease to exist under the conditions that once made them so splendid, as they are overwhelmed with tourists anxious to have their pictures taken in front of nude David or a yodeling gondolier or two. Really big cities, like New York, Paris or London, not to mention gigantic ones like Shanghai or Tokyo, and even somewhat isolated cities like Stockholm, Vancouver and Helsinki, can brush aside the potential carnage by offering more space than the tourists can fill. But middle size cities like Munich, full of the cultural monuments that tourists crave and sitting right on the main road of the grand tour, run the danger of sinking like Venice.

And so Munich and Bavaria, the beautiful “free state” of which it is the capital, have made a deal that convinces the rest of the world to come in once a year for a couple of weeks in late September and early October and spend its money like drunken sailors, in fact spend their weeks like that as well, and then depart deliriously happy having had a time they can hardly remember. The coffers of Munich bulge at the seams, the countryside round about counts up the spillage from the overflow, and the local citizenry returns to going about its business, having limited the damage to the 17 days of the Oktoberfest, which most of them never visit unless it’s on business, while suggesting that Berlin would be a better place to visit the rest of the year. And off they go. Meanwhile we Münchners and our Upper- and Lower-Bavarian relatives and friends spend the splendid spring, summer and autumn evenings in beer gardens and quiet corners that other places can only dream about, quaffing a liter of Augustiner, Spatenbräu or Paulaner that other breweries , content to spend their money on marketing some kind of liquid that one could not give way under the chestnut trees of Bavaria, cannot even begin to try to copy. So pass the word - be sure to visit Europe’s most wonderful city, but be sure to do it during the Oktoberfest and don’t bother visiting the Hirschgarten, Taxisgarten, or even the Hofbräuhausgarten am Wiener Platz - the other one am Platzl you should definitely visit - because all you’ll find there are boring locals.

Playing Doctor in Germany

US-American biologist Ian Baldwin has found out the black comic way that it is not true that the Germans don’t have a sense of humour. He made the mistake of responding to German attempts to make their leading research institutes more international by recruiting experts from around the civilized world, which Baldwin undoubtedly assumed included the elite US educational system out of which he came. The German academic selection committee must have considered him to have had an appropriate academic background, since they offered him the plum position of Director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena. In fact Dr. (whoops!) Baldwin had a cv and a list of publications that made him just the right kind of internationalist to lend prestige to the faltering reputation of the German academic system on the international stage.

Imagine then his surprise when on January 9 as new Director he received a letter from the criminal inspection division of the Jena Police ordering him to appear before them for an “interrogation as an accused ” (Vornehmung als Beschuldeter), which involved a process which could only have reminded him of his undergraduate reading of Kafka’s The Trial. On Feb. 18 he was informed by the Culture Ministry of Thüringen that he had been accused of the following: “Im Rahmen Ihrer Tätigkeit führten Sie Ihren amerikanischen Hochschulgrad ‘Doctor of Philosophy’ in Form der Abkürzung ‘Ph.D’ (”In the framework of your activities you used your American (Presumably they meant US-American) title of ‘Doctor of Philosophy’ in its abbreviated form Ph.D.” But only those with Doctorates from EU countries could use such titles, not Americans. (My brother Doug failed to get a response from Thuringian cultural bureaucrats when he asked about Canadian titles.) Thus Mr. Baldwin discovered that if he had gotten his degree from a Latvian, Romanian or Bulgarian university he could call himself Doctor in Germany but not if it was from a university in Massachusetts, even if he was now the director of one of Germany’s premier academic research institutes, a position which of course demanded that he have a doctorate. And they say that you can’t write like Kafka any more. As is turned out, just as in “The Trial”, the process seems to have been initiated by a revengeful foreigner who also had a doctorate from a non-EU country and had been ordered not to use it on the basis of a law passed during Nazi time.

Fortunately for the German academic scene, Dr. Baldwin, after the intervention of German academic elite who were in a position to overrule Thuringian bureaucrats, can now once again use the title “Ph.D.”. And fortunately for them he also must have known that Kafka was also a great comic writer, even if the comedy had the potential of a dark nightmare if ever those bureaucrats came into power again. However, my brother and I still don’t know what happens to Canuck PhDs if their holders follow the lure of the Loreleis of German academia.

Canada and Kosovo

It took Canada more than a month to recognize Kosovo as an independent state, a clear display of reluctance to follow the lead taken by its closest NATO allies, Germany, France, the UK and the Unites States, almost immediately upon Kosovo’s declaration of independence. Canada is not the only significant power to not follow this lead with any enthusiasm, and the list of those who have declared they will not do so is long and daunting - Russia, China, India, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Indonesia, Israel, Mexico, Cuba, both Koreas, almost all of Africa, Central Asia and most of Kosovo’s neighbours - Serbia, of course, but also Bosnia-Herzogovina, Greece, Macedonia, and Cyprus. Croatia, Hungary and Bulgaria all took longer than Canada to decide and near-neighbours Slovakia, Czech Republic and Ukraine have not recognized Kosovo. Albania, on the other hand, was the first to recognize and remains one of only 3 countries to actually establish an embassy in Pristina, the others being the UK and Germany.
Canada’s reluctance to recognize Kosovo as an independent state is closely related to the absolute refusal of Russia, China, Spain, India, Mexico and Indonesia to do so, a group of politically completely unrelated countries that make up the majority of the world’s population. They have one thing in common; they all have minority ethnic or religious populations striving for independent status. Most dramatically this is now playing out in China, but all these countries have separatist movements which often use violence as a political weapon. As long as there are Basques in Spain, Sikhs in india and Uigurs in China, Spain, India and China will not be recognizing unilaterally-declared separatist states. Quebec was Canada’s problem in this context and, as predictably as the sun will rise, the separatist Bloc Quebecois immediately congratulated the Ottawa federal government for recognizing Kosovo, saying that it had given a separatist government in Quebec the precedent it needed to do something similar. China, India and Spain will not be following that lead.

Martin Norén goes to Disneyland

Some time last August, Martin Norén left his house in Lund, southern Sweden, and got on Iceland Air flight 689 from Copenhagen to Orlando, Florida, where he was scheduled to take part in a conference for computer technicians. He missed this conference as he was ordered to stay in his seat as the other passengers disembarked upon landing in Florida. Mr. Norén, a thin quiet man with no particular political affiliations, had never been in any world hot spots nor had anything at all to do with areas of particular concern to the US border authorities, and therefore had no idea why he was asked to stay seated as the others left for their destinations. His Swedish passport and all travel documents were in order, but he alone was soon escorted from the plane and deposited into the hands of six armed guards who escorted him to an interrogation room.

There all of his documents were taken from him along with his belt and watch. He was bombarded for four hours with questions about his knowledge of Arabic (none), his affiliations with Al-Qaida (none), his religious beliefs (none), his reasons for his hatred of the US (none), and his reasons for wanting to go to Afghanistan (none). His repeated answer was that he was simply a computer technician from Lund and had no idea what they were asking about. Despite his complete inability to answer any of their questions, since none applied to him, he was then escorted to the Seminole State Prison in handcuffs and put into a filthy, cold cell. After six hours he was taken back to the plane and returned to Sweden.

Upon his return to Sweden he laid charges against unknown criminals and the Swedish police were able to trace his misadventures to a FBI website in which citizens are asked to denounce people they suspect to be Al Qaida terrorists or at least sympathizers. Mr. Norén’s father-in-law does not like him and therefore typed in Norén’s name on the website and the rest is history. So that’s how easy it is, as Mr. Norén put it, to think you are on your way to Disneyland and to end up in handcuffs in a cold dirty cell.

A tale of two journeys

If you live in Iceland and wish to travel to Estonia or Bulgaria, or Malta, you can now take a short plane ride and rent a car or take a train and in a couple of days you will arrive at your desired destination without having crossed a single controlled border. But if you get in your car in Vancouver and drive 45 minutes south to Point Roberts, Washington, you will reach a border control very reminiscent of the old European borders between the Soviet-bloc nations and western Europe, but with enough sophisticated and expensive electronic detection equipment to convince even the most sophisticated terrorist to try another route.
if you are lucky and hit this border at a time when there is not a hour-long lineup (or more) and then manage to pass muster at the guard station, by displaying a valid passport and a believable story about why you want to go to Point Roberts (usually to go to the post office as the US postal system is much cheaper and more reliable than the Canadian one), and then drive another 15 minutes in any direction, you will hit salt water since Point Roberts is US territory accessible by land only through Canada. Kids who live there have to be bussed out to US schools in the main part of the US by passing across this border, making the misery of school bus journeys four times as trying as it is for any other US kids, since they now must cross heavily guarded borders 4 times a day.
OK this is the most absurd of all the East German-like US border crossings, but it is not at all funny at places like the Peace Arch Crossing between Seattle and Vancouver, the highway between Winnipeg and Minneapolis, the tunnel between Detroit and Windsor or the bridge at Niagara Falls. In these places, and in many lesser ones all along what used to be an unguarded border, normal travel regularly comes to a complete standstill as cars wait for hours in lineups that, among other things, make any talk about an interest in cutting down pollution from idling cars ridiculous. Does anyone out there know of a single terrorist who has been captured at a Canada/US border crossing?

Belgium - Canada’s Nightmare

Belgium is a country that seems to be incapable of functioning. It has had no government for 6 months and on Dec.1 the leader of the largest party after the last election, Yves Leterme, gave up in his attempt to form a minority centre-right coalition government. This attempt did not break down on political or idealistic grounds, but on linguistic ones, as the Dutch-speaking (Flemish) Christian Democrats could not convince their French-speaking (Walloon) party colleagues to work with them. Recent polls show that there is a great deal of support among the Flemish-speakers of the north for the proposal that they should join their linguistic brethren in The Netherlands where they would surely immediately become a significant force in a larger Greater Netherlands. The Walloons, on the other hand, have no great desire to destroy Belgium, which has existed for 177 years, suspecting that they would become nothing more than a provincial backwater in a slightly larger France. And neither side probably wants to split up into tiny two independent countries, both of which would disappear onto the fringes of an increasingly fragmented Europe. Anyone who doubts that with regard to the supposedly ever-more united Europe of the European Union merely has to look at the unmanageable list of countries who send out national squads for European and World Cup soccer tournaments. In a further ironic twist, Brussels, the Belgian capital and its only truly bilingual place, is also the headquarters of the European Union and Nato, and its dismissal as the capital of an independent country would certainly make a mess of that status.

But there is an increasing suspicion that such subtleties may not actually matter any more and that the decades-long feuding between two linguistic groups that simply cannot get along in a national sense has already become more than a national government can tolerate. In fact there are very few western nations that successfully maintain bilingual societies and two national languages. In Europe, it’s hard to think of any other than quirky Switzerland, which does not govern itself like any other country, and Finland, with an ever-decreasing but still well-served Swedish population, and possibly Italy with its surprisingly successful solution to the once serious problem of the German minority in South Tyrol. Certainly France doesn’t rate, as it has suppressed the rights of any native language other than French. Ask the Scots, Welsh and Irish about the UK, the Catalans and the Basques about Spain, the Spanish-speakers about the US. And then there’s Canada, the world’s second largest country but with only slightly more than three times the population of Belgium. Like Belgium, Canada also has a bilingual national capital, Ottawa, and large sections of the country that are mainly French-speaking. In many ways its national linguistic demographic is much like Belgium’s, but with English taking the place of Dutch. So far, Canada has managed to survive the surge of pressure for the independence of a French-speaking Quebec, and for the moment it seems like the independistes of Quebec are in retreat, or perhaps hiding. But nobody should count them out and the fate of Belgium could have a serious impact in a country whose global and economic importance dwarfs that of the little country that apparently couldn’t.