Polanski's 'The Pianist'

A very good movie.  Mostly based on the memoirs of Wladyslaw Szpilman a classical pianist who managed to survive the Warsaw Ghetto and the holocaust. Parts of the story came from Roman Polanski's childhood memories of Poland during the war.  These type of movies are so heartbreaking.

Please recommend this post

Sunday Night Marxism

Given all I've been reading about wiki-leaks, I can't help but thinking we would have been no worse off with Rufus T. Firefly as our leader. We've always been at war with Sylvania.

That and the unbelievably quiet revelation that former Canadian Ambassador Ken Taylor was the de facto CIA station chief in Tehran under the Joe Clarke government.

Come back Mrs. Teasdale, we need you

Twitter Please recommend this post

Shortest Post Ever

I don't believe a single thing Stephen Harper says about Afghanistan. Please recommend this post

James Travers: Remembrance,Country

James Travers is such a great writer. Here he says exactly what needs to be said, at a politically incorrect time.

There are many things my father and uncle wouldn’t recognize. They wouldn’t understand a country where patriotism is partisan, where men and women in uniform are used as political props or where death and sports are shamelessly conflated on Hockey Night in Canada.

Every year on Remembrance day there's that one thing that I see or read that just caves me in.

Cross posted Please recommend this post

Destroyers of Cities

Near the end of Ray Bradbury's classic novel Fahrenheit 451 the main character, Guy Montag, leaves his city for the countryside and joins up with a band of exiled hobo/intellectuals. While sitting around a fire talking they see the sky light up as the city is destroyed. In Bradbury's imaginary future world there is never ending war and sudden destruction.

The group's leaders Granger, has a soliloquy near the end of the novel that kind of nails it all together:

"Now, let's get on upstream," said Granger. "And hold on to one thought: You're not important. You're not anything. Some day the load we're carrying with us may help someone. But even when we had the books on hand, a long time ago, we didn't use what we got out of them. We went right on insulting the dead. We went right on spitting in the graves of all the poor ones who died before us. We're going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, We're remembering. That's where we'll win out in the long run. And some day we'll remember so much that we'll build the biggest goddam steam-shovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in and cover it up. Come on now, we're going to go build a mirror-factory first and put out nothing but mirrors for the next year and take a long look in them."

Mirrors, not bombs. Please recommend this post

December 6 and Hong Kong

Our Prime Minister should have been in Ottawa on December 6 to honour the 20^th Anniversary of the Montreal Massacre. This is a very solemn and significant day for Canadians and the absence of Mr. Harper is deplorable to me. My hopes were never high, but still.

One of my father's good friends when we were growing up was a Canadian soldier in Hong Kong when it fell to the Japanese on Christmas Day 1941. He survived the battle but remained a prisoner of war until liberation in 1945. He and the other Commonwealth POW's were beaten, tortured and starved contrary to international war conventions. He had lifelong health problems from malnutrition and died too young. It chills me to think what went on in his head all those years. I suspect there are a lot of Canadians who have some connection to the battle of Hong Kong. In high school I learned about Dieppe, Vimy Ridge and the Normandy and Sicily campaigns. I had no idea until later in University about the Honk Kong veterans.

I welcome the Canadian Prime Minister visiting the Cenotaph in Hong Kong and paying formal respects to our war dead. However, I would prefer that he avoided the hyper-nationalistic manipulation of war imagery. I would prefer that he stop using slanderous rhetoric and smearing Canadians who want to know the truth about detainee issues in Afghanistan. Soldiers, dead or alive are not visuals to be used casually for self aggrandizement.

I don't think our Prime Minister gets the meaning of our history. Please recommend this post

The Decal War of Convenience - Part 1

This evening Calgary City council voted down a proposal to place Support Our Troops decals on city vehicles. The vote was 11-4.

I thought about it last week and decided that I was opposed to the proposal for a number of reasons. While I was pleased that they were sensible enough to see through this pro-war nonsense, at the same time it is unfortunate that the debate and its tone can end up sending the wrong message.

Support Our Troops is a political slogan invented by the Republicans in the United States and co-opted by Canadian Conservatives not long after Canada's New Government was elected.

Like all political language, as George Orwell pointed out, the meaning is not literal. Support Our Troops is a euphemism for supporting Mr. Harper and his pro-warfare policies. Deceptive language is used to confuse people and get them to buy into things without having to explain all the details.

This type of political language is also intended to divide people into good vs. evil factions, based on a delusional sense of self-righteousness. If you don't agree with the slogan, you will likely end up being accused of many things. We know from the American experience with the Iraq war that people who did not support the war were accused of bizarre things, such as supporting terrorism. To me this is a reprehensible thing to do to a fellow citizen.

I think you would have a hard time finding a Canadian who does not believe in the literal premise of supporting the troops. What does supporting our troops literally mean when you strip away the brain dead jingoism.

In my opinion, it means:

1. Providing them with the skills and equipment they need to do their jobs safely.
2. Providing them with a proper salary so their families don't have to live in rat traps or use food banks.
3. Support their families while they are on mission.
4. If a soldier should be killed in action provide proper death benefits.
5. Providing proper health care to injured soldiers.
6. Providing proper pensions and health care to veterans. Don't make an 80 year old spend years in court suing the Government for an entitlement.
7. Not putting soldiers in harms way merely because you as a politician believe in an outdated notion of the glory of war, or because you think an agressive war posture will get you more votes.

You could easily argue that our Government has failed on any number of the above requirements. And you could also argue that pushing decals with slogans does nothing to actually help the troops.

The City Council's compromise was to allow the sale of the decals in City Of Calgary facilites. And yes, I know that the proceeds of those sales go to a well know charity that helps military families. And yes, I agree with this compromise.

However, I'd like Canada's New Government to explain why military families have to be supported by private charity while Mr Harper's supporters and the frat-boy tabloids lecture the rest of us with bumper sticker slogans. Apparently they don't support the troops, at least not literally.

It seems ironic that many of our war dead gave their lives because of a threat to our basic freedoms, the most basic of which is the freedom of opinion. Something to think about the next time the Calgary Sun tells us all how we have to think about our troops and Harpers war. Please recommend this post