[LINK] Some Friday links

• Andrew at Acts of Minor Treason wonders why Soviet material and cultural kitsch is prized, at least in Toronto, despite its totalitarian associations.


• Far Outliers examines the serious problems facing the 1944 Soviet invasion of Romania and looks at the dispersal of ethnic businesses across multiethnic suburban neighbourhoods in Alabama's Birmingham.


• Inkless Wells' Paul Wells reports that Canada's foreign minister Peter MacKay is barely in the race for NATO secretary-general.


• pauldrye at Passing Strangeness examines Port Nelson, the Manitoba port city on subarctic Hudson's Bay that never quite managed to survive.


• Slap Upside the Head reports a Russian political scientist's contentions that the increasing number of out gay men augurs the imminent doom of American society and that Traditional Anglican Communion wishes to rejoin the Roman Catholic Church over the same-sex issue.


• Windows on Eurasia suggests that Russian bloggers play a more critical role in Russian society than dissidents did in Brezahnev's Soviet Union, whatever that means, and looks at diaspora media in Moscow.
  

[LINK] "The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan"

Lawyers, Guns and Money's Robert Farley refers to a couple of posts by Alex Harrowell (1, 2) suggesting that Western powers should take as their model for their future relations with Afghanistan the staged Soviet withdrawal from that country in 1989.

I recall at the time that predictions of the survival of the Soviet-sponsored Afghan government were measured in weeks or in months, but it turned out that the opposition split, foreign support for the rebels vanished, and the regime was able to win several crucial military victories. Nobody talked much about this after 1989, because nobody really cared much about Afghanistan. I'm thinking that the United States and Europe could do much, much worse than what the Soviets managed; Harrowell thinks (perhaps only half-jokingly) that the Soviet general who managed the post-withdrawal advisory mission should be tracked down and consulted on the future of the NATO mission. A Soviet style operation would concede certain facts about Afghanistan; the central government will never have much control over the hinterland, and a liberal democratic regime is unlikely to exist in any thing but name, but it may be past time to think about such concessions.

Interesting discussion ensues in the comments. The idea appeals to me at least insofar as it would greatly limit the pointless loss of Canadian blood and treasure in a seemingly unwinnable war.

[LINK] "Ottawa anglophones slow to pick up French: study"

More news about Canada's lop-sided bilingualism, this time from the national capital of Ottawa.

The unilingual capital of Quebec appears to be succeeding at promoting bilingualism better than Canada's capital city, reveals a new study released Thursday by the Association for Canadian Studies.

The analysis, based on the latest census figures from Statistics Canada in 2006, found that only 28 per cent of anglophones in the Ottawa region were bilingual, versus about 32 per cent of francophones from the Quebec City region who could speak both official languages.

Ottawa's overall bilingualism rate was slightly higher at 38 per cent, mainly due to the fact that 90 per cent of its francophone residents were bilingual.

But across the river from Ottawa, residents of Gatineau, Que., had a much higher overall rate of bilingualism at 63 per cent.

"I'm kind of surprised that Ottawa would be dragging down Gatineau so much in terms of the level of bilingualism," said Jack Jedwab, the executive director of the association. "I think we're missing opportunities to move forward, and it's unfortunate."

The study, Capital Language, also revealed that residents whose first language is English now make up less than half of the total population in the Ottawa-Gatineau region at 49.3 per cent, compared with 32.2 per cent whose first language is French, and 16.6 per cent whose first language is neither of the two official languages. Anglophones made up 50.3 cent of the region's population in 2001, while allophones — whose first language is neither English nor French — represented only 15.4 per cent at the time. The percentage of francophones was virtually unchanged.

This isn't unexpected, considering that the French language has traditionally been the less-spoken and less prestigious of Canada's two major language groups. A couple of years ago at Demography Matters I pointed to researchers who suggested that French held up as well as it did in the Ottawa-Gatineau region because of the strict language legislation applied to Gatineau making French necessary.

[LINK] "Throwing salt on Windsor's wounds"

The Toronto Star's Bruce Demara reports on how badly the people of Windsor, a southwestern Ontario city that's practically a suburb of American Detroit, are taking the news that they'll be losing CHWI-TV, the private CTV television network's local broadcast station in Windsor.

In the midst of an enduring slump by the Big Three automakers and a main street already pockmarked by empty store fronts, the last thing bordertown Windsor needs is to see its number one source of local television news go silent.

What makes the imminent closure of CHWI-TV – the A-channel affiliate owned by CTV and slated to go off the air in August – even more puzzling is that the station has a loyal viewership three times the size of its only other Canadian competition, the CBC.

As media companies face plunging earnings in a recession-wracked economy, the local news at noon, 6 and 11 p.m. may become the ultimate victim.

"The viewers are puzzled and they don't understand, if the station has been so successful, why it's closing," said Cal Johnstone, A Channel's news director in the city of 200,000.

[. . .]

Viewers are stunned because of the connection they feel to local news, said Johnstone, who has formerly worked in Toronto.

"I sat in an office in Don Mills and I would almost never hear from viewers, even if they had a complaint. Here in town, I get phone calls in the middle of the newscast, from people who liked the story or didn't like the story," he added.

Dave Cooke, a former provincial cabinet minister and Windsor MPP, called the news "quite depressing."

"Psychologically, there's a lot of things that have been happening in town that haven't really been lifting people's spirits. But the symbolism of losing a TV station ... is pretty demoralizing," Cooke said.

As it turns out, CHWI-TV wasn't a money-making operation for CTV and was thus easy prey when that network encountered revenue problems. This is another symbolic blow for Windsor, like Hamilton an industrial city on the skids, with Windsor's fportunes being too heavily invested in the automobile industry by far. (Chrysler threatened to pull out of Canada if it didn't get the deal it wanted from government and the unions; at least one more may follow.)