[LINK] The Unrepresentated Nations & People's Organization

Over at Open Democracy, Andrew Mueller has an interesting introduction to this organization. While I agree with its aims, I wonder how representative many of its member organizations are, for instance, Scania. Do Scanians really think of themselves as a distinctive people oppressed by Swedes?

[NON BLOG] Drink: Annihilator of Personality or Liberator of the Id?

I went to Woody's last night to meet with a friend. Fun was certainly had, and I managed to stagger south to the westbound Queen Street streetcar in due time and walking in a straight line, no less. I did feel the mildly dissociative feeling associated with the intake of three beers on an empty stomach, granted, but it wasn't too bad even though I think I'm starting to notice my mild hangovers for the first time.

One thing I've never quite understood about alcoholic beverages in society, on a related theme, is how people feel at all able to use inebriation as an excuse ("Honey, I didn't mean to sleep with your mother, it was the demon whiskey"). I wrote last March that while alcohol certainly does enable the id it doesn't create new desires out of wholecloth. I still think that heraclitus is right about his observation that people who drink excessively simply lack a proper appreciation for the consequences of the stupid things that they do while drunk. The intention to sin, I suppose I might say if I was a believing Christian, is in us already.

[NON BLOG] Odd and Familiar

I had thought, last night, that I was listening to Gwen Stefani's "What You Waiting For" in the background, but as the song progressed I picked up the very characteristic guitar of Yes' "Owner of a Lonely Heart." A mashup, then, of those two songs, separated by their performers' genders and by two decades of time. Was it wrong for me to have liked it?

[BRIEF NOTE] A New Wave of Migration to Russia?

The Guardian suggests that a second wave of ethnically Russian immigrants to the Russian Federation is beginning, echoing the 1990s' wave of Russophone migration from the non-Russian ex-Soviet republics.

The number of Russians returning to their homeland is increasing for the first time since the mass emigration that followed the fall of the Soviet Union, some fleeing a tide of anti-Russian sentiment stirred by pro-western revolutions across the country's former empire.

Figures from the federal state statistics service for the first three months of this year show net migration into Russia has more than doubled compared with the same period last year. Analysts said that many of these migrants would be ethnic Russians.

The service said that from January to March there was a net migration into Russia of 29,505 people. A total of 11,661 people was recorded in the same period of 2004. Until the start of this year, annual figures for net migration into Russia had fallen consistently for more than 10 years.

The turnaround has been attributed partly to economic reasons: although Russia's economic growth is slowing, it is still outstripping many of its neighbours. But popular unrest has also been a factor, analysts said.

The article goes on to cite specific examples from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Ukraine. It might be important to distinguish between Russophone migration from the Central Asian republics and Russophone migration from Ukraine, since the divide between ethnic Ukrainians and ethnic Russians in that country is fairly small. One thing that would be interesting to discover is Russia's migrational balance with the Baltic States: How big is it, what direction is it in, and how much has it changed?

[BRIEF NOTE] On Hiroshima Day

Today is the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The book Shockwave, rightly positively reviewed in the book section of today's Globe and Mail for its powerful hour-by-hour examination of the lives of the people caught up Hiroshima--the victims, the pilots, the politicians--and should be read concurrently with today's Globe and Mail powerful interview with Setsuko Thurlow, victim and survivor. For a broader view, I recommend Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's Racing the Enemy, which provides a much-needed overview of the decision-making surrounding the dropping of the bomb in proto-Cold War politics.

The debate on the ethics of the American attack have been debated extensively. As an anonymous editorialist at The Globe and Mail noted, the blame question is something that is as the least bad option. The American government didn't drop the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at a whim. Those two Japanese cities were considered for attack at all only because they were located in a country that had been waging an enthusiastic war in Asia with the intent of colonizing Asia without much regard for the lives of Asians. It wasn't exactly as if the decimation of cities and the gratuitous use of weapons of mass destruction were foreign to Japan's warmaking tradition; indeed, the Rape of Nanjing and the testing of biological weapons upon civilians by Unit 731 were almost quotidian events, though worthy only of somewhat more note than the unremarkable starvation and massacre of Chinese and Vietnamese and Burmese civilians by the tens of millions. Hasegawa convincingly demonstrates that the Japanese government at the time had not only ignored previous opportunities to surrender, it was enthusiastically planning to implement Okinawa's pattern of the mass death in the Home Islands when the time came for Operation Downfall, the American invasion of Japan planned on 1 November 1945. Did the bomb save Japan from further decimation at home, this and the contemporary Soviet invasion of Manchuria forcing militarists in the Japanese government to agree to peace? I suspect so.

Hiroshima's suffering shouldn't be denied. Hiroshima's suffering also shouldn't be abstracted, subtracted from the context of a war that Japan had happily launched and brutally waged.The 150 thousand dead of Hiroshima are the equivalent of a month's worth of Chinese civilian dead. The Sino-Japanese theatre of the Pacific War lasted for a hundred months. By the standards set by the Japanese military Hiroshima got off lightly, its inhabitants avoiding horrors like, say, enemy soldiers enthusiastically gang-raping the wounded to death. The ethics of whether or not Hiroshima can't be separated from the ethics of the Second World War and of total war in general. I'm just not convinced that Hiroshima constitutes anything but another example of the horrors of war, and that as a strategic choice by Truman it's anything but the least bad scenario. Your outcome may vary, of course.

Hasegawa calls the removal of Hiroshima part of a complex of "inverted nationalism" in Japan, manifested not in a proclamation of Japanese superiority per se but in terms of exceptional Japanese victimhood. The nuclear bombings of August 1945 and by the Soviet annexation of the Kuril Islands are equally important in this complex, starting as it does with the assumption of a unique depth of suffering. Writing (as I acknowledge ahead of time) with little specialist knowledge, I wonder if this mindset might explain why many Japanese have such a hard time recognizing the suffering of their country's wartime and colonial victims, with needed apologies being repeatedly undercut by provisos or by contradictory statements from other responsibles.

That said, Hiroshima's suffering was unique in that its suffering was such an easy thing to cause, created as the outcome of a highly bureaucratized and scientific technocratic culture that culminated in a single primitive fission warhead. Hiroshima's suffering was easy, and this ease is worrying. At the peak of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union and the United States possessed tens of thousands of nuclear warheads, I suspect that the Soviets, perhaps aware of having reached overkill levels with existing targets and having warheads to spare, planned to attack Prince Edward Island, sparing a warhead or two for Charlottetown (Prince Edward Island's capital and home to an airport) and Summerside (home to the CFB Summerside military base). Why not? It would be easy enough to spare a warhead or two for this task, and it wouldn't be good form to leave the Island untouched, a strategic asset for post-Third World War North America. When a technology enables a strategy that includes, as a secondary or even tertiary element. the intensive bombardment of Prince Edward Island and the immediate death of one-third of the province's population, you know that this technology is extraordinarily dangerous.

[REVIEW] Gail Bowen's The Last Good Day

I've been a fan of Saskatchewan-based mystery writer Gail Bowen ever since I heard her third novel, 1992's The Wandering Soul Murders, serialized on CBC Radio. Bowen's protagonist, university teacher, mother, and political widow Joanne Kilbourne, is an appealing figure, investigating the mysterious and deadly events that surround her in Saskatchewan. Kilbourne's plausibility, like that of other long-running mysterty protagonists, is somewhat undermined by the sheer number of murderous conspiracies that she stumbles across (nine to date), but Kilbourne remains a realistic character embedded in a recognizable and realistic environment and a pleasure to read.

I was sorry to finish her most recent novel, The Last Good Day, today. Bowen consistently improves as a writer with each novel. I was so caught up by 2002's The Glass Coffin when I first read it, for instance, that not only did I abandon my workout but I got to my then-job late. The theme of responsibility is something that has always been prominent in the Joanne Kilbourne novels, but the most recent titles do a superlative job of exploring what happens when people fail to live up to their responsibilities. The Glass Coffin dealt with the failures of the artist excessively devoted to his craft. The Last Good Day is concerned with the responsibility to care as seen through the discipline of the law, perhaps the single professional discipline most concerned with ethics. I enjoyed following Kilbourne's discovery of these hidden failures found in the most unexpected places, starting with Chapter 1.

The cosmos should send forth a sign when a good man approaches death, but the night Chris Altieri joined me in the gazebo to watch the sun set on Lawyers’ Bay, there was nothing. No fiery letters flaming across the wide prairie sky; no angels with bright hair beckoning from the clouds. The evening was innocent, sweet with summer dreams and the promise of life at a cottage in a season just begun. It was July 1, Canada Day. The lake was full of fish. The paint on the Muskoka chairs was crayon bright; the paddles, sticky with fresh varnish, were on their hooks in the boathouse; and the board games and croquet sets still had all their pieces. September with its tether of routine and responsibility was a thousand years away. Anything was possible, and the gentle-voiced man who dropped into the chair next to mine seemed favoured by fortune to seize the best that summer had to offer.

Bright, successful, and charming, Chris Altieri was, in E.A. Robinson’s poignant phrase, everything to make us wish that we were in his place. Yet this graceful man wouldn’t live to see the rising of the orange sun that was now plunging towards the horizon, and when I learned that he was dead, I wasn’t surprised.

Bowen, like the best mystery writers everywhere, is a writer who wonderfully portrays how decisions made in haste or with good intentions matter, how unspoken hurts and public crimes condition people to react in certain ways, how the little things of everyday life can lead to great crimes with only a few missteps. The Last Good Day is her best so far. What obligations do we have to those we protect? Kilbourne's unwitting explorations on the shores of Lawyers' Bay make up one wonderfully readable answer to that question.