Wednesday, June 2, 2021
RAILROAD BLOCKADED IN SOLIDARITY WITH PALESTINE
By It's Going Down.
June 1, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/railroad-blockaded-in-solidarity-with-palestine/
Coastal Cities Vow To ‘Block The Boat.’
For several hours on Sunday, May 30th, hundreds of pro-Palestinian activists blockaded the Lisgar GO railway, located in so-called Mississauga, Ontario. The GO train system serves millions of commuters between different hubs throughout Canada. Activists were protesting to demand that the Canadian government stop supplying arms to the State of Israel.
One activist on social media posted following the demonstration:
After a three-hour shutdown of the railway, surrounded by police, with trains stopped dead in their tracks, we’ve dispersed with our heads held high. Thanks to all those who stood in solidarity with us. We will continue to fight for our families in Palestine. #StopArmingIsrael
This is not the first time anti-colonial movements have utilized train blockades as a tactic in struggle across so-called Canada. In the Spring of 2020, #ShutDownCanada demonstrators and Native warriors shutdown GO trains throughout Canada in protest against attacks on Wet’suwet’en sovereignty by the state of Canada and extraction industries.
The recent rail blockades are only the latest in a series of mass demonstrations in solidarity with Palestine, not only in the Mississauga area, but across the world. It would also seem as if the tactics of blockading are spreading, as multiple cities on various coasts have signaled they are ready to “Block the Boat,” in an effort to blockade Israeli goods from being imported into the US. Already in Oakland, California, where mass demonstrations in 2014 blocked a similar boat, just the threat of repeat blockades has prevented the “Israeli-operated ZIM cargo ship from docking” for 10 days. Port workers with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) have also issued statements in solidarity with “Palestine and Palestinian communities across the world.”
‘DYING FOR AN IPHONE’
By Chris Hedges, ScheerPost.
June 1, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/dying-for-an-iphone/
The Suffering Of The Working Class, Within And Outside The United States, Is Ignored By Our Corporatized Media.
And yet, it is one of the most important human rights issues of our era.
NOTE: Hedges mentions the “genocide” of the Uyghurs without stating that this is a myth promoted by the United States to demonize China. He also quotes Kristof from the New York Times without giving more context for his remarks. For more information about the Uyghurs, read the articles here. For more information about China, visit the Qiao Collective. – MF
Global capitalists have turned back the clock to the early days of the Industrial Revolution. The working class is increasingly bereft of rights, blocked from forming unions, paid starvation wages, subject to wage theft, under constant surveillance, fired for minor infractions, exposed to dangerous carcinogens, forced to work overtime, given punishing quotas and abandoned when they are sick and old. Workers have become, here and abroad, disposable cogs to corporate oligarchs, who wallow in obscene personal wealth that dwarfs the worst excesses of the Robber Barons.
In fashionable liberal circles there are, as Noam Chomsky notes, worthy and unworthy victims. Nancy Pelosi has called on global leaders not to attend the Winter Olympics, scheduled to be held in Beijing in February, because of what she called a “genocide” being carried out by the Chinese government against the Uyghur minority. New York Times columnist Nick Kristof in a column rattled off a list of human rights violations overseen by China’s leader Xi Jinping, writing “[Xi] eviscerates Hong Kong freedoms, jails lawyers and journalists, seizes Canadian hostages, threatens Taiwan and, most horrifying, presides over crimes against humanity in the far western region of Xinjiang that is home to several Muslim minorities.”
Not a word about the millions of workers in China who are treated little better than serfs. They live separated from their families, including their children, and housed in overcrowded company dormitories, which sees rent deducted from their paychecks, next to factories that have round-the-clock production, often making products for U.S. corporations. Workers are abused, underpaid and sickened from exposure to chemicals and toxins such as aluminum dust.
The suffering of the working class, within and outside the United States, is as ignored by our corporatized media as the suffering of the Palestinians. And yet, I would argue, it is one of the most important human rights issues of our era, since once workers are empowered, they can fend off other human rights violations. Unless workers can organize, here and in countries such as China, and achieve basic rights and living wages, it will cement into place a global serfdom that will leave workers trapped in the appalling conditions described by Friedrich Engels in his 1845 book “The Conditions of the Working Class in England” or Émile Zola‘s 1885 masterpiece “Germinal.”
As long as China can pay slave wages it will be impossible to raise wages anywhere else. Any trade agreement has to include the right of workers to organize, otherwise all the promises by Joe Biden to rebuild the American middle class is a lie. Between 2001-2011, 2.7 million jobs were lost to China with 2.1 million in manufacturing. None are coming back if workers in China and other countries that allow corporations to exploit labor and skirt basic environmental and labor regulations are locked in corporate servitude. And while we can chastise China for its labor policies, the United States has crushed its own union movement, allowed its corporations to move manufacturing overseas to profit from the Chinese manufacturing models, suppressed wages, passed anti-labor right-to-work laws, and demolished regulations that once protected workers. The war on workers is not a Chinese phenomenon. It is a global one. And U.S. corporations are complicit. Apple has 46 percent of its suppliers in China. Walmart has 80 percent of its suppliers in China. Amazon has 63 percent of its suppliers in China.
The largest U.S. corporations are full partners in the exploitation of Chinese labor, and the abandonment and impoverishment of the American working class. U.S. corporations and Chinese manufacturers kept millions of Chinese workers crammed into factories at the height of a global pandemic. Their health was of no concern. Apple’s profits more than doubled to $23.6 billion in the most recent quarter. Its revenues rose by 54 percent to $89.6 billion, which meant Apple sold more than $1 billion on average each day. Until these corporations are held accountable, which the Biden administration will not do, nothing will change for workers here or in China. Economic justice is global or it does not exist.
Workers in Chinese industrial centers—self-contained company cities with up to a half million people—drive the huge profits of two of the world’s most powerful companies, Foxconn, ****the world’s largest provider of electronics manufacturing services, and Apple, with $ 2 trillion dollars in market value. Foxconn’s largest customer is Apple, but it also produces products for Alphabet (formerly Google), Amazon, which owns more than 400 private-label brands, BlackBerry, Cisco, Dell, Fujitsu, GE, HP, IBM, Intel, LG, Microsoft, Nintendo, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Sony, and Toshiba, as well as leading Chinese firms including Lenovo, Huawei, ZTE, and Xiaomi. Foxconn assembles iPhones, iPads, iPods, Macs, TVs, Xboxes, PlayStations, Wii U’s, Kindles, printers, as well as numerous digital devices.
Jenny Chan, Mark Selden, and Pun Ngai spent a decade conducting undercover research at Foxconn’s major manufacturing sites in the Chinese cities of Shenzhen, Shanghai, Kunshan, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Tianjin, Langfang, Taiyuan, and Wuhan for their book “Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn, and The Lives of China’s Workers”. What they describe is an Orwellian dystopia, one where global corporations have perfected the techniques for a disempowered work force. These vast worker cities are little more than labor penal colonies. Yes, it is possible to leave, but to incur the ire of the bosses, especially by speaking out or attempting to organize, is to be blacklisted for life throughout China’s archipelago of industrial centers and cast to the margins of society or often prison.
Workers live under constant surveillance. They are policed by company security units. They sleep in segregated male and female dormitories with eight or more people to a room. The multi-story dormitories have bars on the windows and nets below, put up to halt the spate of worker suicides that afflicted these factory cities a few years ago.
“The workplace and living space are compressed to facilitate high-speed, round-the-clock production,” the authors write. “The dormitory warehouses a massive migrant labor force without the care and love of family. Whether single or married, the worker is assigned a bunk space for one person. The ‘private space’ consists simply of one’s own bed behind a self-made curtain with little common living space.”
Workers, who earn about $2 an hour and an average of $390 a month, are paid in wage debit cards, an updated version of company scrip. The bank card allows a worker to deposit, withdraw, and transfer money from 24-hour ATM machines that are accessible at Foxconn facilities.
Managers, foremen, and line leaders prohibit conversation on the assembly floor that operates on a 24-hour cycle of 10- or 12-hour shifts. Workers are reprimanded if they work “too slowly” on the line. They are punished for turning out defective products. Workers are often forced to remain behind after a shift if a worker committed an infraction. The worker who violated the rules is required to stand before his or her co-workers and read a statement of self-criticism. Any worker issued a “D” grade in their review for “unsatisfactory performance” is fired. The workers receive one day off every second week, or two rest days a month. They can be summarily shifted between the night and day shifts.
The authors describe the daily routine of a worker entering a Foxconn factory at 7 a.m. with hundreds of thousands of other Foxconn employees. Each person, prohibited from entering the factory complex with electronic devices, is checked by facial recognition systems to confirm his or her identity.
The human flow continues for more than an hour. Night-shift workers cross the footbridge and pour into the shopping malls and street markets that have sprung up around the factory. Day-shift workers cross the same footbridge, in the opposite direction, heading to work. From the moment they enter the factory gate, workers are monitored by a security system more intrusive than any that we found in the neighboring smaller electronics-processing factories. “Foxconn has its own security force, just as a country has an army,” a stern faced, broad-shouldered security officer stated as a matter of fact. Workers pass through successive electronic gates and Special Security Zones before arriving at their workshops to start work.
Once inside, the authors write, workers endure a familiar ritual:
As workers prepare to begin a shift, managers call out: “How are you?” Workers must respond by shouting in unison, “Good! Very good! Very, very good!” This drill is said to foster disciplined workers. A laser-soldering worker reported, “Before shift-time, a whistle sounds three times. At the first whistle we must rise and put our stools in order. At the second whistle we prepare to work and put on special gloves or equipment. At the third whistle we sit and work. “No talking, no laughing, no eating, no sleeping” during work hours is the number one factory rule. Any behavior that violates discipline is penalized. “Going to the toilet for more than ten minutes incurs an oral warning, and chatting during work time incurs a written warning,” a line leader explained.
The work is exhausting, stressful and repetitive. An iPhone has more than one hundred parts. “Every worker,” the authors write, “specializes in one task and performs repetitive motions at high speed, hourly, daily, ten hours or more on many working days, for months on end.”
A woman interviewed in the book described her life on the assembly line:
I am a cog in the visual inspection workstation, which is part of the static electricity assembly line. As the adjacent soldering oven delivers smartphone motherboards, both my hands extend to take the motherboard, then my head starts shifting from left to right, my eyes move from the left side of the motherboard to the right side, then stare from the top to the bottom, without interruption, and when something is off, I call out, and another human part similar to myself will run over, ask about the cause of the error, and fix it. I repeat the same task thousands of times a day. My brain rusts.
The work can also be hazardous. The polishing machine emits aluminum dust as it grinds the casings. This dust gets into the eyes and causes irritation and tiny tears. Workers suffer from respiratory problems, sore throats and chronic coughs. “Microscopic aluminum dust coats workers’ faces and clothes,” the authors write. “A worker described the situation this way: ‘I’m breathing aluminum dust at Foxconn like a vacuum cleaner. With the workshop windows tightly shut, workers felt that they were suffocating.’”
The aluminum dust can also cause fires, such as one on May 20, 2011 when an accumulation of aluminum dust in the air duct on the third floor at Foxconn Chengdu Building A5 was ignited by a spark from an electric switch. Four workers died. Dozens were injured. It was not the only explosion, which Foxconn managed to largely hide by imposing a near total media blackout. “Seven months after the Foxconn tragedy, on December 17, 2011, combustible aluminum dust fueled another blast, this time at iPhone maker Pegatron in Shanghai, injuring sixty-one workers. In the blast, young men and women suffered severe burns and shattered bones, leaving many permanently disabled,” the authors write.
Workers are required to clean one thousand iPhone touchscreens per shift. They were cleaned for years with the chemical n-hexane, which evaporates faster than industrial alcohol. Prolonged exposure to n-hexane damages peripheral nerves, leading to painful muscle cramps, headaches, uncontrollable shaking, blurred vision and difficulties walking. It should only be applied in well ventilated areas by workers wearing respirators. Thousands of Foxconn workers applied n-hexane in sealed rooms without ventilators and were sickened, finally leading to its ban.
These vast industrial complexes also discharge huge amounts of heavy metals and wastewater into the rivers and ground water. Rivers near plants run black with sewage and are filled with plastic waste. Workers complain that the drinking water is discolored and smells.
The United States cast its workers aside in the 1990s with de-industrialization. China did the same by dismantling socialism in favor of state-controlled capitalism. State and collective sector jobs in China fell from 76 percent in 1995 to 27 percent in 2005. Tens of millions of laid off workers were left to compete for jobs run by corporations such as Foxconn. But even these jobs are now under threat, partly from automation, with workers on assembly lines replaced by robotic automatons that can spray, weld, press, polish, do quality testing and assemble printed circuit boards. Foxconn has installed over 40,000 industrial robots in its factories, along with hundreds of thousands of other automated machines.
But over the past decade, the authors note, “the major changes inside Foxconn were not the replacement of workers with robots but the replacement of full-time employees with growing numbers of student interns and contingent subcontracted laborers.”
These workers, part of the gig economy familiar in the United States, have even less job stability and security than full time employees. As many as 150,000 high-school age vocational students are employed in Foxconn plants. They are paid the minimum wage, but are not entitled to the 400-yuan-per-month skills subsidy, even if they pass the probationary period. Foxconn is also not required to enroll them in social security.
Those who lead these corporate behemoths often replicate the behavior of despots, not only exerting total control over every aspect of their workers lives but dispensing folksy wisdom to the masses. They are often treated by a fawning media as gurus, asked to opine–as Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos do–on a range of social, economic, political and cultural issues. Their immense fortunes confer to them in our Mammon-worshipping society a sage-like status.
Terry Gou, the founder and CEO of Foxconn, has published a list of slogans and aphorisms that adorn the walls of his factories, along with his portraits. Workers are required to write out passages from “Gou’s Quotations.” While Mao Zedong called for class struggle and rebellion, Gou calls for conformity and blind obedience. “Growth thy name is suffering,” reads one of his quotes. The Wall Street Journal reporter Jason Dean, in a 2007 interview with Gou, characterized Gao as a “warlord,” and noted that “he wears a beaded bracelet he got from a temple dedicated to Genghis Khan, the thirteenth-century Mongolian conqueror whom he calls a personal hero.”
“A harsh environment is a good thing,” one of Gou’s quotes reads. “Achieve goals or the sun will no longer rise. Value efficiency every minute, every second. Execution is the integration of speed, accuracy, and precision.”
His more than one million employees, as is true at Amazon and other large corporations, are subjected to mandatory company meetings where they are taught to obey company rules, pay fealty to the interests of the corporation and, as the authors note, strive for “the individualistic model of success.” Those who heed the rules, workers are told, are rewarded. Those who do not, are punished or banished.
Workers in these global sweatshops are organizing underground and protesting. There were 8,700 incidents of labor unrest in China in 1993, the first year for which official data is available, to 32,000 in 1999, the authors write. “The number ‘continued to increase at more than 20 percent a year’ between 2000 and 2003. In 2005, the official record noted 87,000 cases, rising to 127,000 in 2008 during the world recession–the last time the Chinese Ministry of Public Security released figures.”
In Hubei’s East Lake High-Tech Development Zone, the authors note, known as Optics Valley, on January 3, 2012, 150 Foxconn workers threatened to jump from the roof of the factory and commit mass suicide if the managers refused to address their demands, which included protests over forced transfers to other factories’ cities and a wage dispute.
Strikes, protests and work stoppages that take place now are state secrets, but the past statistics seem to indicate that they are growing. Strikes are usually swiftly and brutally broken by company security and police, with strike leaders being fired and often imprisoned.
We will not save ourselves through the perverted individualism, sold to us by our corporate masters and a compliant mass media, which encourages our advancement at the expense of others. We will save ourselves by working in solidarity with workers inside and outside the United States. This collective power is our only hope. Amazon workers from the Hulu Garment factory in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and Global Garments factory in Chittagong, Bangladesh, recently led a global day of action to make Amazon pay all its workers, no matter where they live, fair wages. This has to be our model. Otherwise, workers in one country will be pitted against workers in another country. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels got it right. Workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains.
In this confrontation with apartheid Israel, the Palestinians won
The unity which Palestinians demonstrated in the past few weeks marks the rise of a new national consciousness.
Haidar Eid
Haidar Eid is an associate Professor at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza.
31 May 2021
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/5/31/palestinian-victory
After the latest genocidal onslaught by apartheid Israel, some serious questions have been raised, once again, about the usefulness of resistance and whether the outcome of the war can, or cannot, be considered a victory for the Palestinian people. Those same questions were raised in 2009, 2012, and 2014, when Israel launched massive attacks against Gaza, and even during the non-violent 2018 Great March of Return, when Palestinians marched towards the fence around the Strip and were shot and killed by Israeli snipers.
Some “liberals” resorted to the usual proclamations, blaming the “two sides of the conflict” – ie, the coloniser and the colonised, and concluding that Palestinians must stop launching rockets from Gaza.
Once again, we were being challenged by those same “neutral” voices about the very definition of resistance. They fail to see, for ideological reasons, that resistance, broadly speaking, is not only the ability to fight back against a militarily more powerful oppressor, but also the ability to creatively resist the colonisation of one’s land. They fail to understand peoples’ power, in our case, “sumud” (steadfastness), or even to see that it exists.
In other words, they accept Israel’s narrative, where there are “two sides of the conflict” with equal military power and moral standing. They reject the reality that this is a Western-backed settler colonialist and apartheid project which the Palestinian people are resisting. They also ignore all our moral “weapons”: that we are the natives of the land, that we have international law supporting our claims, that we have the moral high ground, and increasingly the support of international civil society, and others.
Edward Said once said that the intellectual is supposed to be, “someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d’etre is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug.”
Those “liberal” voices that have been condemning Palestinian “violence” in the latest confrontation with apartheid Israel are anti-intellectual. They refuse to see that Palestinians are able to be agents of change in their present and future. They are ideologically unable to acknowledge Palestinian agency because they refuse to respect the will of the people as expressed in the popular support given to resistance in its various forms – in Gaza, the West Bank and the areas Israel occupied during its creation in 1948.
They are also unable to see the Palestinian victory over apartheid Israel in the recent events. They side with the Israeli fascist, ruling class who believe they “won” because they killed a huge number of “terrorists”: 253 Palestinians, including 66 children, 39 women, and 17 elderly.
Yet, none of the so-called “objectives” of the Israeli war on Gaza – putting an end to the rocket fire from Gaza and destroying the tunnels used by the resistance fighters and obfuscating any form of unity between Jerusalem and Gaza – has been achieved. Rockets are still being launched and the resistance movement proved to be strong enough to respond to the call to action by the Jerusalemites of Sheikh Jarrah who are facing imminent ethnically cleansing by Israel.
As one frustrated Israeli pilot, who bombed Gaza, said in an interview for the Israeli Channel 12: “I went on a mission to carry out air strikes with a feeling that destroying the towers is a way to vent frustration over what is happening to us and over the success of the groups in Gaza in kicking us… We failed to stop the rocket fire and to harm the leadership of these groups, so we destroyed the towers.”
But more importantly, Gaza 2021 bust the carefully constructed and zealously defended myths that Israel has been promoting for decades: that it has the “most moral” army in the world; that its Iron Dome is invincible; and that the Palestinians are just “Arabs” that have no common identity and would give up their claim to the land once the old generations die out.
It is obvious that those “neutral voices” that blame “both sides” are under the “spell” of these myths and that is why they see Palestinian resistance as “unjustified violence” and “terrorism”. But as Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire wrote in his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed:
“With the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun. Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators, if they themselves are the result of violence? … There would be no oppressed had there been no prior situation of violence to establish their subjugation. Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognize others as persons -not by those who are oppressed, exploited, and unrecognized.”
It is apparent to all but the Western liberals and the Israeli elite they support that the Palestinians have emerged from protests across historic Palestine and the onslaught in Gaza victorious.
These events put an end to the infamous “deal of the century” by re-affirming that Palestinians will not give up their claim on Jerusalem, put another nail in the coffin of the fictional two-state solution, and brought liberation and the rights of third-class Palestinian citizens of Israel and five million refugees back to the top of the international community’s agenda. They have also brought to the fore a new Palestinian consciousness that defies the ossified hegemony of the 1993 Oslo Accords.
The new consciousness formed by Palestinian sumud and resistance is clearly characterised by a rejection of the conditions imposed by apartheid Israel on the three components of the Palestinian people, residents of Gaza and the West Bank, the Palestinians in the territories Israel occupied in 1948, and refugees living in camps and in the diaspora. Even more crucially, this is a rejection of the crumbs that are offered as a reward for good behaviour to a select minority of Palestinians.
We have been told to accept Israeli occupation in its ugliest form – the apartheid wall, the colonies, the checkpoints, the segregated roads, the colour-coded number plates, the forced evictions and house demolitions, the “security coordination”, the arrests, torture and imprisonment – or have a medieval blockade imposed on us and be periodically bombed into death and oblivion.
But the answer from Gaza, Jerusalem, Lydda, Haifa and the rest of historic Palestine this spring was very clear: the Palestinian people will not be reduced to only those living in the 1967 occupied territories. We are witnessing a paradigm shift from separatism, as represented by the two-state solution – which aims to establish a Palestinian Bantustan and deny the rights of millions to their land – to full Palestinian unity.
True, the Palestinian victory was very costly, but it was a decisive one. The Palestinian people prevailed over an armed-to-the-teeth apartheid regime and its American-made Iron Dome by breaking through their own “Mental Dome”. Palestine after Gaza 2021 will not be like Palestine before. The Palestinians have begun to decolonise their minds away from the “peace process” and racist two-state solution and with their sumud, they have brought the arrogant Zionist regime in Palestine to its knees.
Indigenous people in Canada grapple with ‘unthinkable loss’
Remains of 215 Indigenous children were found at a former residential school in the province of British Columbia this week.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/5/29/indigenous-people-in-canada-grapple-with-unthinkable-loss
Indigenous people across Canada are grappling with the discovery of the remains of more than 200 Indigenous children, including some as young as three, at the site of a former residential school in the western province of British Columbia this week.
Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation chief Rosanne Casimir announced (PDF) on Thursday that the remains of 215 children were found on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, saying “an unthinkable loss that was spoken about but never documented” had been confirmed.
“To our knowledge, these missing children are undocumented deaths,” Casimir said.
“Some were as young as three years old. We sought out a way to confirm that knowing out of deepest respect and love for those lost children and their families, understanding that Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc is the final resting place of these children.”
The discovery of the mass grave has spurred “a collective pain and trauma” for Indigenous communities across Canada, said Danielle Morrison, an Anishinaabe lawyer. “Currently there [are] fires being lit, pipes are being lit, and ceremonies being held to honour all of those lost lives of those precious children,” she told Al Jazeera.
“This news is a stark reminder of the violence inflicted by the residential school system and the wounds carried by communities, families and Survivors into the present,” the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation at the University of Manitoba also said in a statement.
Play Video
For more than 100 years, Canadian authorities forcibly separated thousands of Indigenous children from their families and made them attend residential schools, which aimed to sever Indigenous family and cultural ties and assimilate the children into white Canadian society.
The schools, which were run by churches from the 1870s until 1996, were rife with physical, mental and sexual abuse, neglect, and other forms of violence, and they created a cycle of intergenerational trauma for Indigenous people across Canada.
Founded in 1890 and run by the Catholic Church, the Kamloops Indian Residential School eventually became the largest school in Canada’s residential school system, counting 500 children at its enrollment peak in the early 1950s.
“The residential schools were opened with the sole purpose of removing the Indian from the child,” Morrison said. “It was to assimilate Indigenous people in Canada and it’s essentially, in the words of one of the superintendents at the time, to get rid of the ‘Indian problem’.”
During an online commemoration on Saturday, Karen Joseph, CEO of the Reconciliation Canada charity, said the discovery in Kamloops marked the first time a “whispered knowing was made real” and its effect is being felt across the country, especially by residential school survivors.
“Although those children that we are referring to right now went to the Kamloops Indian Residential School, we know that all of those children were not from Kamloops. That was the nature of residential schools, it was to take our children as far away from our homelands,” Joseph said.
“The grief is not localised into that community, and it is a huge burden that they are carrying right now.”
‘Cultural genocide’
In 2015, a national truth and reconciliation commission said the Canadian government had committed “cultural genocide” by forcing more than 150,000 Indigenous children to attend residential schools.
“The question of what happened to their loved ones and where they were laid to rest has haunted families and communities,” the commission said in its report, about the children who never returned home. “Throughout the history of Canada’s residential school system, there was no effort to record across the entire system the number of students who died while attending the schools each year.”
More than 4,100 children died due to disease or in an accident at the schools have been identified to date, the commission said, but efforts continue to identify others.
Derek Fox, deputy grand chief of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation in Ontario, said on Saturday that the discovery in Kamloops “shows how the legacy of the Residential School system continues to impact the lives of Residential School survivors and the families of those who never returned home”.
“Even after all these years there are new tragedies of the Residential School system coming to light,” Fox said in a statement.
The Canadian government formally apologised for the residential school system in 2008, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Friday that the discovery of the children’s bodies “is a painful reminder of that dark and shameful chapter of our country’s history”.
In an open letter to Trudeau on Saturday, Chief R Stacey Laforme of Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation urged him to lower flags across Canada and declare a national day of mourning for the children.
But observers have pointed out that residential school survivors have been forced to sue Ottawa to seek reparations and accountability for what happened to them.
Last year, CBC News reported the government had spent 3.2 million Canadian dollars ($2.6m) fighting a group of survivors of St Anne’s Indian Residential School, an Ontario residential school rife with abuse, in court over a 10-year period.
Others have also pointed out that while the residential schools may be closed, Indigenous children continue to be taken away from their families in disproportionate numbers across Canada.
According to census data, more than 52 percent of children in foster care in 2016 were Indigenous, while Indigenous children made up only 7.7 percent of the country’s total population.
“This is not a historical event,” said Joseph during the online event on Saturday. “This continues today – the loss of our children and the loss of our people for no other reason than the colour of our skin.”
The Wuhan lab conspiracy theory: American capitalism’s “big lie”
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/05/29/pers-m29.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws
Statement of the World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board
28 May 2021
Over the past week, the US print and broadcast media, the Biden administration and the US intelligence agencies have launched a furious propaganda campaign aimed at resurrecting the narrative that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese laboratory.
A lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology [Credit: Chinatopix via AP]
This lie defies overwhelming scientific evidence and the findings of a World Health Organization (WHO) investigation released in late March. It will go down as one of the greatest falsehoods in human history—a colossal untruth that eclipses even the Bush administration’s perjured claims about Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction.”
There is no factual or scientific foundation for the claim that the virus originated in a Chinese laboratory. To date, the only evidence presented by the White House, the US intelligence agencies and the media to support the claim is that employees at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became ill in late 2019 with symptoms that a State Department report acknowledged are “consistent with … common seasonal illnesses.”
The illnesses at the Wuhan institute had previously been cited by the Trump administration to claim that China was responsible for deliberately spreading the pandemic—using a “weaponized virus” to inflict mass death on populations throughout the world. It has now been picked up by major media outlets and legitimized by the Biden administration.
On Thursday, the US Director of National Intelligence wrote that America’s “intelligence community” has “coalesced around two likely scenarios: either it emerged naturally from human contact with infected animals, or it was a laboratory accident.” If COVID-19 had not “emerged naturally,” the disease was, as the Trump State Department asserted in January, created through biological engineering.
As the WHO’s inquiry into the origins of COVID-19 made clear, countless viruses similar to COVID-19 have been identified in bats, including one, RaTG13, that is 96.2 percent similar to Sars-COV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Sars-COV-1 was a bat-derived coronavirus that caused the 2003–2004 SARS outbreak.
In order for the claim that COVID-19 is biologically engineered to have any credibility, there would have to be something about the disease or its origins that is inconsistent with other naturally occurring viruses. But there is nothing to indicate this. As the WHO report on the origins of the disease stated, the “deliberate bioengineering” of COVID-19 has been “ruled out … following analyses of the genome.”
The promotion of the lab-origin theory is driven by political conditions and social interests, motivated by two interrelated purposes.
First, it aims to divert attention from the actions of the US and other governments in implementing policies that led to deaths on a massive scale. As the public begins to recover from the overwhelming shock of the pandemic, there will be demands for explanations for why so many people died, along with accountability for those responsible.
From the beginning, the governments of all the major capitalist powers subordinated the response to the pandemic to the profit interests of the corporations, the greed of the capitalist oligarchs and the geopolitical objectives of imperialism. The measures that all scientists and epidemiologists agreed were necessary—including the shutdown of nonessential production with financial assistance to all those affected—were rejected because they threatened to undermine the financial markets and the interests of the rich.
As a direct consequence, more than three million people have died throughout the world, according to official figures, including more than 600,000 in the United States alone.
This week’s testimony by Dominic Cummings, the former advisor for the UK government of Boris Johnson, made clear that the government carried out a “herd immunity” strategy, with advisors advocating the holding of “chicken pox parties” to spread the disease throughout the public. The government calculated that this policy would lead to the deaths of as many as 800,000 people.
In Brazil, Senate inquiries into the pandemic have further demonstrated that the government of Jair Bolsonaro deliberately pursued a policy of allowing the virus to spread without restraint, anticipating that the death toll could reach as high as 1.4 million (it is currently at 450,000).
In the United States, after initial partial restraints in March of 2020 that were implemented following an upsurge of social unrest, the Trump administration spearheaded the campaign to get workers back to work under the slogan “the cure can’t be worse than the disease.” While this homicidal policy was most clearly articulated by Trump, it received the support of the media and was implemented by state governments run by both Republicans and Democrats.
The leaders of the capitalist governments have blood on their hands, and they are looking for a scapegoat: China.
Second, the Wuhan lab lie seeks to drum up nationalist hatred to support the Biden administration’s central strategic aim: the preparation for economic and potentially military conflict with China.
Since coming into office, the Biden administration has declared that the United States is at an “inflection point,” and that it must carry out a struggle to “win the 21st century” against China. The US media has tried, unsuccessfully, to interest the public in the claim, stoked by the intelligence agencies, that China is carrying out genocide against its Uighur Muslim population. But the campaign has not had its intended effect to date.
It is therefore necessary to concoct a far more visceral and dangerous lie, that China is responsible for a deadly pandemic that has killed so many people that nearly every American knows one of its victims.
The most direct precedent for the promotion of the Wuhan laboratory lie is the Bush administration’s fabricated claims that Iraq was hiding “weapons of mass destruction,” which served as the pretext for the invasion of Iraq. The method was exactly the same. Ambiguously worded findings from the US intelligence agencies, funneled through “anonymous sources” by the media, together with openly perjured statements by administration officials, concocted a pretext for a war that has killed over a million people.
The structure and methods of the “Wuhan lab” conspiracy theory are highly similar to other conspiracy theories promoted for political purposes, with which the propagandists in Washington and other world capitals are very familiar. In December 2017, the New York Times published an article, “Fingerprints of Russian Disinformation: From AIDS to Fake News,” which claimed that Soviet and East German intelligence agencies manufactured a conspiracy theory about the origins of HIV.
“Called Operation Infektion by the East German foreign intelligence services,” the Times wrote, “the 1980s disinformation campaign seeded a conspiracy theory that the virus that causes AIDS was the product of biological weapons experiments conducted by the United States.”
In 1985, an Internal KGB document noted that the Soviet intelligence agency was seeking to spread the view “that this disease is the result of secret experiments by the USA’s secret services and the Pentagon with new types of biological weapons that have spun out of control.” The KGB placed an article in an Indian newspaper titled “AIDS May Invade India: Mystery Disease Caused by U.S. Experiments,” claiming the disease originated in a US military laboratory in Fort Detrick, Maryland.
As a result of this disinformation campaign, a 2005 study by the RAND Corporation and Oregon State University revealed that nearly 50 percent of African Americans thought AIDS was man-made. The prevalence of this conspiracy theory around the world made it more difficult to launch a scientific response to the AIDS epidemic—including in the Soviet Union itself.
The Times quotes historian Thomas Boghardt to explain the disinformation technique: “Throw enough dirt, and some will stick.”
The Times, the Washington Post, and the other major media outlets, along with the Biden administration, are using this technique to spread the Wuhan Lab lie. While the Times article was intended to promote the “fake news” narrative of “Russian meddling,” the fact is that the American ruling class is now the biggest propagator of “fake news.”
The legitimization of the Wuhan Lab lie will have incalculable political consequences within the United States. If the “weaponized virus” claim promoted by the extreme right is now legitimate, what about the other lies and conspiracies promoted by the Trump administration: Trump’s “birther” claim that Obama was not an American citizen, the “pizzagate” conspiracy theory that high-level Democratic Party operatives were engaged in a child prostitution ring, and, above all, the claim that the 2020 election was stolen, which underlay the January 6 fascistic insurrection.
Significantly, the media is now hailing the “sophisticated” fascist Tom Cotton, senator from Arkansas, as an important voice in the “debate” over the origins of the coronavirus. The “history books will reward” Cotton for promoting the Wuhan lab theory, declared the Washington Post’s lead fact-checker Glenn Kessler.
Cotton infamously published an op-ed in July 2020 calling on Trump to “send in the troops” to suppress mass protests against police violence. He is a leading proponent of the lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election, and he objected to the certification of election votes on January 6 in coordination with the mob that stormed the Capitol.
Domestically, this lie will have the effect of delegitimizing popular opposition and preparing the grounds for mass censorship, with all those who criticize government policy being painted as agents of China. Already, an article by the World Socialist Web Site exposing the Washington Post’s promotion of the Wuhan Lab conspiracy theory was censored on Facebook for two months, leading to the suspension of the accounts that tried to share it. Facebook, meanwhile, has announced that it will no longer limit posts promoting the conspiracy theory that the virus was manufactured in a Chinese laboratory.
Once this lie enters the political bloodstream of America, it will have poisonous and uncontrollable effects. It will trigger witch-hunts, threats and violent intimidation against scientists and all those who call for a scientific response to the raging pandemic. Already, incidents of anti-Asian violence are on the rise.
The Chinese government, for its part, cannot but interpret the promotion of this lie as preparation for war, responding in a way that will make escalation more likely, creating a deadly cycle of militarization. A military conflict between the United States and China—the largest economies and militaries in the world—would have catastrophic consequences for all of humanity.
The World Socialist Web Site calls on all workers, scientists and intellectuals to oppose the colossal lie being propagated by the US government and media. Scientists have a duty to educate the public and oppose the xenophobic perversion of science. Journalists must seriously investigate and expose the efforts to promote and disseminate this lie.
Working people must counter the lie of the capitalist oligarchs with the demand for true accountability. Those responsible for the “herd immunity” policy, along with the corporate executives who profited off of it, must be held to account.
We call on workers to reject the efforts by the ruling classes to lay the blame for the crimes of American capitalism at the feet of China. If workers are to stop the pandemic that has killed so many, they must reject the capitalists’ efforts to incite nationalist hatred, ignorance and violence through the struggle to unite the world’s working class on the basis of a socialist perspective.
Ernest Hemingway Was a Leftist Who Was Hounded By the FBI
EILEEN JONES
Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s PBS docuseries Hemingway sheds new light on writer Ernest Hemingway's life. But it leaves out key details of his left-wing political convictions — including the FBI surveillance that haunted him until his suicide.
https://jacobinmag.com/2021/04/ernest-hemingway-ken-burns-docuseries-documentary-review-pbs-fbi
It helps to know that Ernest Hemingway was afraid of the dark. After having been badly wounded in the First World War, he had to keep the light on all night, every night at home, and his sister would sometimes have to sit up with him just to keep him calm. It had been a night battle when he was shot, and he said he felt his soul depart from his body and then mysteriously return. Afterward, he felt sure that if he found himself in total darkness again, his soul would leave his body permanently.
Young Hemingway, as presented in the first episode of the three-part PBS series Hemingway, directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, is actually an interesting figure — a big, ungainly guy most comfortable out in nature, struggling in an odd, troubled family prone to mental illness and suicide. He first tries to find his way as a reporter, then as a writer. It covers the time before he developed the outsized persona he’s best known for, the hard-drinking, two-fisted, he-man writer forever attending bullfights and shooting off his mouth about the weaknesses of rival writers and getting photographed grinning over large, beautiful animals he’d shot. That persona, which made him rich and famous, as well as oppressively egotistical, is explored in the second episode. The third episode covers how the same persona helped exacerbate his alcoholism and mental illness, which eventually led him to suicide.
The series approaches Hemingway with the tone of solemn, even lugubrious reverence that Ken Burns is known for, as if everyone still agreed wholeheartedly that Hemingway was the greatest American writer of the twentieth century, which as far as I know is by no means the case.
By the time I became conscious of debates about the American literary canon, Hemingway’s reputation was already badly damaged:
In the ’80s, writes Mary Dearborn in her richly detailed biography, “Hemingway and his place in the Western literary tradition came under full-on attack, as readers, scholars, urgently questioned what ‘dead white males’ like Hemingway have to say to us in a multicultural era that no longer accords them automatic priority. The so-called Hemingway code — a tough, stoic approach to life that seemingly substitutes physical courage . . . for other forms of accomplishments — increasingly looked insular and tiresomely macho.”
But you can keep going back to even earlier times to find the rot setting in on Hemingway’s once sky-high status as an important writer. The documentary establishes the surprising fact that Hemingway was already wearing out his welcome with various critics by the 1940s. Perhaps it was an inevitable reaction to all that hero worship in the 1920s and ’30s, when he was the most widely admired and slavishly emulated writer in America.
As early as 1974, Orson Welles describes Hemingway’s literary reputation as being “in total eclipse.” It’s a funny interview, with Welles discussing their rather cantankerous friendship that started with an incompetent fistfight during a screening of The Spanish Earth, a documentary directed by Dutch communist Joris Ivens. The film was financed by a group of leftists in support of the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War. The narration was read by Welles and written by Hemingway and his pal John Dos Passos, who ceased being his pal after arguments about the film’s politics. Welles criticized some of the narration, which angered Hemingway. Welles then mocked the writer for being “so big and strong,” setting off a torrent of flying fists, most of them missing their mark.
Welles also notes that, much as he admired Hemingway’s artistry, something valuable about him as a person was sorely lacking from his most famous publications:
The thing you never get from his books is his humor. There’s hardly a word of humor in a Hemingway book, because he’s so tense and solemn and dedicated to what is true and good and all that. But when he relaxed, he was riotously funny, and that was the level that I loved about him.
I think that’s the key to why his most famous novels — The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls — can be such a drag to read. Back in my misspent youth, when I read everything recommended to me by high-literary types, I didn’t care for them. They seemed stiff and strenuous, writerly in a bad way. In fact, the heaviness of Hemingway’s approach is movingly explained in the Burns documentary, which shows how the author would allay his daily anxiety about writing by telling himself, “Just write one true sentence.”
I’ve got much more compassion for the writer’s plight now, and could probably read his novels with greater empathy. But then I hated such tics as his frequent refusal to use contractions, which seemed absurdly affected, alternating statements such as “Nick didn’t look at it” and “Nick did not watch.” Eschewing contractions is clearly meant to add solemnity and emotional heft, in this case to the agonizing birth of a baby in the short story “Indian Camp,” cited often in the Burns-Novick documentary.
Like Charles Dickens, who had a tendency to lapse into the use of “thee” and “thou” in moments of big spiritual significance, Hemingway tried out the same move in For Whom the Bell Tolls, writing the notorious post-coital clunker “And did thou feel the earth move?”
It’s a shame that to get to the interesting stuff about Hemingway — his raw youth, some of his excellent short stories, and his leftist politics — you have to wade through the worst of his writing and then all the guff surrounding his outsized persona. We hear how Hemingway used to go around bragging endlessly about dangerous fighters he’d outboxed and medals he’d won for valor in combat — all lies, as the documentary points out — when according to any reasonable standard of courage, he’d more than already proved himself early in life.
The explanation for this behavior is so obvious it hardly needs a three-part series to cover it. It’s pretty clear now that Hemingway was a bowl of mush inside, scared to death just like us regular people, and was just putting up a big-man front to prevent anyone from noticing.
His once beloved father’s mental breakdowns, which eventually led to suicide, shook Hemingway so badly he turned on him in a vicious manner, condemning him for his “weakness.” He hated and feared his controlling mother, supporting her financially but refusing to see her for many years before her death. He was so broken up about the “Dear John” rejection letter he received from his first fiancée, a WWI army nurse, that he never got over it. He spent the rest of his life desperately trying to control women, pushing each wife into the role of doting housekeeper-nursemaid-concubine, then getting bored and leaving her for another, more adventurous woman.
He met his match in Wife No. 3, Martha Gellhorn (voiced by Meryl Streep), a fellow journalist who was also covering the Spanish Civil War. She left him to cover World War II as well, which Hemingway tried to sit out because he was desperately afraid to go — he felt, not unreasonably, that now in his 40s, he’d pushed his luck far enough in surviving two wars already. But he followed her straight into battle, and was ashamed when she got far better coverage of D-Day than he did — she fearlessly stowed away on a combat vessel heading to Omaha Beach, while Hemingway waited at a safe distance with the other journalists. Probably compensating for getting shown up, he crossed the line from reporter to civilian-soldier and actually fought in the terrible battle of Hurtgen Forest with the 22nd Infantry Regiment.
Ernest Hemingway at the Finca Vigia, his home in Cuba.
It was with Mary Welsh, Wife No. 4 (voiced by Mary-Louise Parker), that he finally achieved a sexual breakthrough, able to admit at last, in his old age, that his preference was for androgynous-looking women and erotic gender role-play, with him playing the role of Catherine and her the role of Peter. He still didn’t treat her much better outside of the bedroom, though, and it’s amazing what most of Hemingway’s wives were willing to put up with. But he tried to write about finding greater sexual freedom in his unfinished last novel, The Garden of Eden.
For many, that book was the first sign that maybe something else was going on underneath all the bluster. For me, it was studying film noir, the roots of which lie with two major American writers: the brilliant master of pulp Dashiell Hammett and the faintly surprising figure of Ernest Hemingway. Both came to prominence in the 1920s writing observational fiction that resembled reportage, combining flatness and vividness to startling effect. This approach made sense coming from Hemingway, a former reporter. Hammett, however, had worked as a Pinkerton detective until he was so disgusted by their strikebreaking services (often involving murder) that he quit. Like Hemingway, he eventually embraced hard left politics, leading to trouble with the American government later on.
Both writers preferred exteriority to interiority. They refused to describe their character’s psychologies, which in their works had to be gleaned from often terse dialogue and the descriptions of physical attributes and actions, the way objects like cigarettes, tools, or glasses were handled.
At least one implication of this writing style was pretty clear — the world only seemed obvious in its showy presentation, but was fantastically difficult to read. People were hard to understand, couldn’t even understand themselves most of the time. In The Maltese Falcon, Hammett’s private detective, Sam Spade, offers what might be a clue to his slippery nature, to the woman he may or may not love, in a story famously known as the Flitcraft parable. It’s about an insurance salesman named Flitcraft who’s walking down a city street and nearly gets killed by a falling construction beam, and in reaction makes a series of dramatic life-altering shifts — deserts his family, changes his name, and moves to a different city. There, after a few years, he gets the same kind of job, marries a similar woman to the one he’d been with before, has the same number of children.
“He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling,” explains Spade. Reams of literary analysis has been generated trying to fathom how the Flitcraft parable represents Spade’s philosophy of life.
Hemingway’s haunting short story “The Killers,” which upset Ken Burns so much he claims it inspired his initial interest in the writer, also inspired a great 1946 film noir adaptation advertised as “Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers,” though Hemingway hated it. Two gangster goons show up at a small-town diner, terrorizing the unfortunate employees and patrons for information about the Swedish ex-prizefighter Ole Anderson, who usually eats there. Hemingway’s alter ego Nick Adams manages to warn the Swede that hit men are after him, but he refuses to run and lies passively awaiting his own murder.
But long before we encounter the mystery of the Swede’s indifference to violent death, Hemingway has established a pervasive state of unease about even the simplest facts — what time it is, what people’s names are, what’s on the menu at the diner versus what can actually be eaten at the diner — exacerbated by the threats of the goons, who speak in rhythmic patter, constantly deploying the insult “bright boy” like some demented comedy routine.While Hemingwa Burns and Novick dism FBI.
The anxiety about being caught inside some dangerously incomprehensible system characterizes some of the best of Hemingway’s early short story work, including the sense of male helplessness at the center of it. It’s a shame there’s so little emphasis on this pulp-fiction crossover and film noir–like point of view in the documentary.
The Burns-Novick documentary also predictably sheds too little light on Hemingway’s left-wing politics. Their documentary stresses the way Hemingway is falling apart at the end of his life, presumably from a combination of inherited factors — nine concussions over the course of his lifetime and worsening alcoholism. While Hemingway was convinced during this time that he was being watched by the government, Burns and Novick dismiss it all as simple paranoia.
But, as it turns out, he was being watched by government agents, and there was a fat FBI file on him dating back decades. As David Masciotra of Salon argues,
Burns did interview the late A. E. Hotchner, a journalist and longtime friend of Hemingway who wrote three books on the author, but never acknowledges that Hotchner expressed remorse over not taking Hemingway’s claims of FBI surveillance seriously. The exposure of the FBI file led Hotchner to write that he “regretfully misjudged” his friend’s fears, and that the FBI’s persecution of Hemingway contributed to “his anguish and suicide.”
The surveillance of Hemingway began, unsurprisingly, back in the 1930s:
Hemingway first drew the attention of the FBI decades earlier, because of his support for the Republican (i.e., socialist) government in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. . . . [J. Edgar] Hoover denounced Hemingway as a “premature anti-fascist” — a bizarre but accurate label of the author’s lifelong political commitment to the destruction of fascist forces.
Imagine how much FBI surveillance must’ve increased late in Hemingway’s life, with his outspoken support for Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba, support that is only briefly mentioned in the Burns-Novick documentary. However, they don’t mention Hemingway’s financial support and activist work on behalf of the revolution, which must’ve done a lot to build up the hundred-plus page FBI file at the time of his death in 1961:
[It] included longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s order to monitor Hemingway, details of plans to tap his phones and even information on how Hemingway’s doctor at the Mayo Clinic was reporting on the author’s condition to the FBI field office in Minnesota. There are also memos from agents offering proposals for how the bureau could destroy the beloved writer’s public reputation.
In an appalling act of journalistic malpractice, the Burns and Novick series never even mentions the FBI file.
It seems that Hemingway’s support for Castro didn’t waver, even after the Bay of Pigs disaster and the US travel ban on Cuba cut the author off forever from returning to his beloved Cuban house where he’d lived for twenty years. Burns and Novick toured the house in preparation for the film, and found “bottles of alcohol half drunk, his records strewn around the record player, and little notations of weight noted in pencil on the wall by his scale in the bathroom.”
Yet the documentary’s emphasis is on the bits of evidence that counter Hemingway’s leftist politics, such as his libertarian-sounding declaration at one point:
I cannot be a communist now because I believe in only one thing: liberty. The state, I care nothing for. All the state has ever meant to me is unjust taxation. I believe in the absolute minimum of government.
It’s not that the documentary is uninformative — Burns and Novick seem to have access to every pertinent location, letter, photo, film clip, and interviewee related to their subject. But the overall tone and approach tends to remain no matter what the subject, whether it’s the Civil War, jazz, baseball, the Dust Bowl, or Ernest Hemingway. As always, there’s Peter Coyote’s warm narration, elegiac music, and a fairly simple narrative arc. What it adds up to, though, is a tendency toward depoliticization, but by now Burns is renowned for his ability to sand off the spikier, more interesting parts of his subjects.
Hemingway, despite what you might think of all his bluster, deserves better. And so do we.
It was with Mary Welsh, Wife No. 4 (voiced by Mary-Louise Parker), that he finally achieved a sexual breakthrough, able to admit at last, in his old age, that his preference was for androgynous-looking women and erotic gender role-play, with him playing the role of Catherine and her the role of Peter. He still didn’t treat her much better outside of the bedroom, though, and it’s amazing what most of Hemingway’s wives were willing to put up with. But he tried to write about finding greater sexual freedom in his unfinished last novel, The Garden of Eden.
For many, that book was the first sign that maybe something else was going on underneath all the bluster. For me, it was studying film noir, the roots of which lie with two major American writers: the brilliant master of pulp Dashiell Hammett and the faintly surprising figure of Ernest Hemingway. Both came to prominence in the 1920s writing observational fiction that resembled reportage, combining flatness and vividness to startling effect. This approach made sense coming from Hemingway, a former reporter. Hammett, however, had worked as a Pinkerton detective until he was so disgusted by their strikebreaking services (often involving murder) that he quit. Like Hemingway, he eventually embraced hard left politics, leading to trouble with the American government later on.
Both writers preferred exteriority to interiority. They refused to describe their character’s psychologies, which in their works had to be gleaned from often terse dialogue and the descriptions of physical attributes and actions, the way objects like cigarettes, tools, or glasses were handled.
At least one implication of this writing style was pretty clear — the world only seemed obvious in its showy presentation, but was fantastically difficult to read. People were hard to understand, couldn’t even understand themselves most of the time. In The Maltese Falcon, Hammett’s private detective, Sam Spade, offers what might be a clue to his slippery nature, to the woman he may or may not love, in a story famously known as the Flitcraft parable. It’s about an insurance salesman named Flitcraft who’s walking down a city street and nearly gets killed by a falling construction beam, and in reaction makes a series of dramatic life-altering shifts — deserts his family, changes his name, and moves to a different city. There, after a few years, he gets the same kind of job, marries a similar woman to the one he’d been with before, has the same number of children.
“He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling,” explains Spade. Reams of literary analysis has been generated trying to fathom how the Flitcraft parable represents Spade’s philosophy of life.
Hemingway’s haunting short story “The Killers,” which upset Ken Burns so much he claims it inspired his initial interest in the writer, also inspired a great 1946 film noir adaptation advertised as “Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers,” though Hemingway hated it. Two gangster goons show up at a small-town diner, terrorizing the unfortunate employees and patrons for information about the Swedish ex-prizefighter Ole Anderson, who usually eats there. Hemingway’s alter ego Nick Adams manages to warn the Swede that hit men are after him, but he refuses to run and lies passively awaiting his own murder.
But long before we encounter the mystery of the Swede’s indifference to violent death, Hemingway has established a pervasive state of unease about even the simplest facts — what time it is, what people’s names are, what’s on the menu at the diner versus what can actually be eaten at the diner — exacerbated by the threats of the goons, who speak in rhythmic patter, constantly deploying the insult “bright boy” like some demented comedy routine.While Hemingwa Burns and Novick dism FBI.
The anxiety about being caught inside some dangerously incomprehensible system characterizes some of the best of Hemingway’s early short story work, including the sense of male helplessness at the center of it. It’s a shame there’s so little emphasis on this pulp-fiction crossover and film noir–like point of view in the documentary.
The Burns-Novick documentary also predictably sheds too little light on Hemingway’s left-wing politics. Their documentary stresses the way Hemingway is falling apart at the end of his life, presumably from a combination of inherited factors — nine concussions over the course of his lifetime and worsening alcoholism. While Hemingway was convinced during this time that he was being watched by the government, Burns and Novick dismiss it all as simple paranoia.
But, as it turns out, he was being watched by government agents, and there was a fat FBI file on him dating back decades. As David Masciotra of Salon argues,
Burns did interview the late A. E. Hotchner, a journalist and longtime friend of Hemingway who wrote three books on the author, but never acknowledges that Hotchner expressed remorse over not taking Hemingway’s claims of FBI surveillance seriously. The exposure of the FBI file led Hotchner to write that he “regretfully misjudged” his friend’s fears, and that the FBI’s persecution of Hemingway contributed to “his anguish and suicide.”
The surveillance of Hemingway began, unsurprisingly, back in the 1930s:
Hemingway first drew the attention of the FBI decades earlier, because of his support for the Republican (i.e., socialist) government in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. . . . [J. Edgar] Hoover denounced Hemingway as a “premature anti-fascist” — a bizarre but accurate label of the author’s lifelong political commitment to the destruction of fascist forces.
Imagine how much FBI surveillance must’ve increased late in Hemingway’s life, with his outspoken support for Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba, support that is only briefly mentioned in the Burns-Novick documentary. However, they don’t mention Hemingway’s financial support and activist work on behalf of the revolution, which must’ve done a lot to build up the hundred-plus page FBI file at the time of his death in 1961:
[It] included longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s order to monitor Hemingway, details of plans to tap his phones and even information on how Hemingway’s doctor at the Mayo Clinic was reporting on the author’s condition to the FBI field office in Minnesota. There are also memos from agents offering proposals for how the bureau could destroy the beloved writer’s public reputation.
In an appalling act of journalistic malpractice, the Burns and Novick series never even mentions the FBI file.
It seems that Hemingway’s support for Castro didn’t waver, even after the Bay of Pigs disaster and the US travel ban on Cuba cut the author off forever from returning to his beloved Cuban house where he’d lived for twenty years. Burns and Novick toured the house in preparation for the film, and found “bottles of alcohol half drunk, his records strewn around the record player, and little notations of weight noted in pencil on the wall by his scale in the bathroom.”
Yet the documentary’s emphasis is on the bits of evidence that counter Hemingway’s leftist politics, such as his libertarian-sounding declaration at one point:
I cannot be a communist now because I believe in only one thing: liberty. The state, I care nothing for. All the state has ever meant to me is unjust taxation. I believe in the absolute minimum of government.
It’s not that the documentary is uninformative — Burns and Novick seem to have access to every pertinent location, letter, photo, film clip, and interviewee related to their subject. But the overall tone and approach tends to remain no matter what the subject, whether it’s the Civil War, jazz, baseball, the Dust Bowl, or Ernest Hemingway. As always, there’s Peter Coyote’s warm narration, elegiac music, and a fairly simple narrative arc. What it adds up to, though, is a tendency toward depoliticization, but by now Burns is renowned for his ability to sand off the spikier, more interesting parts of his subjects.
Hemingway, despite what you might think of all his bluster, deserves better. And so do we.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)