https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peLd_jtMdrc
Thursday, June 3, 2021
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.
Wednesday, June 2, 2021
Cyber Censorship Goes Global
MAY 31, 2021 RISHIKA PARDIKAR
Content depicting COVID-related dissent in India and protests in Colombia and Palestine have been taken down with little explanation.
https://www.dailyposter.com/instagram-suppressing-posts-on-global-unrest/
On May 6 and 7, Instagram users in India noticed that some of their posts were starting to vanish. Gone were their COVID-19-related posts that demanded improved conditions for overworked crematorium workers, publicized volunteer-led relief efforts, and linked coronavirus deaths in the country to “abject callousness” of the government. Stranger still was the removal of private chats on the matter.
“There is a growing trend of internet shutdowns, takedown of social media content, particularly around political speech in India over the last few years,” said Vidushi Marda, global AI research and advocacy lead at ARTICLE 19, an international freedom of expression organization that has been tracking the deleted content.
In India right now, whether or not people have access to COVID-19 information on social media is a matter of life and death. Such censorship, however, is not unique to the country. Over the past month, activists and researchers have also collected numerous examples of suppressed content related to unrest in Palestine and Colombia, as well as posts related to the National Day of Awareness of Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women in the U.S. and Canada.
On May 7, Instagram said that “this is a widespread global technical issue not related to any particular topic” and that the issue had been “fixed.”
But the following day, the company acknowledged that there were issues with posts relating to unrest in Colombia and Palestine.
“We are so sorry this happened,” Instagram noted in a statement. “Especially to those in Colombia, East Jerusalem, and Indigenous communities who felt this was an intentional suppression of their voices and stories — that was not our intent whatsoever.”
But Instagram failed to acknowledge reports of censorship in India.
A representative of Facebook, which owns Instagram, wrote in response to questions about why dissent in India, Colombia, and Palestine seemed to have been disproportionately impacted: “This was a widespread global technical issue that affected users around the world, regardless of the topic of their Stories. We fixed it as fast as we could so users around the world could continue expressing themselves and connecting with each other through Stories.”
Despite the company’s claims that the takedowns were automatic and universal, Marda said there was “overwhelming evidence of the disproportionate impact these takedowns have had on political speech and dissent.”
In India, she noted that ARTICLE 19 observed “significant overlap between posts about activism, COVID-19 relief and government critique.” All of this, she said, points to “a significantly larger problem than just a single automation tool,” and noted “the opacity of content moderation practices” means that there are gaps in accountability.
Such digital suppression isn’t simply a matter of being able to speak freely. In each of these countries, thanks to government failures and limited media coverage, people have come to rely on social media to share information, track resources, and protect themselves from violence.
Part of the problem is automated content moderation, which uses machine learning to filter content. The systems are blunt instruments that often misunderstand context and remove too much or too little content, noted a report by the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation. These developments, adds the report, can negatively impact minority groups because these tools are often trained on English-language datasets, so they have trouble properly parsing dialects and rarely-used languages.
“[There is] overwhelming evidence of the disproportionate impact these takedowns have had on political speech and dissent,” said Marda. “[This is] precisely why… human rights organizations and defenders around the world have pointed to the dangers of automated content moderation for years.”
India’s History Of Digital Censorship
Because of the Indian government’s monumental failure in tackling the coronavirus, people in the country have come to rely on social media to seek and provide COVID-related help like oxygen supplies and vaccinations. Many people have also used social media to collate lists of supplies into a larger, searchable database.
Silicon Valley-driven censorship in India, therefore, has become a matter of survival, despite the fact that Instagram has yet to acknowledge it.
“Despite documented instances of censorship [in India] and Instagram users highlighting them very prominently, there was a complete lack of recognition [by Instagram] of what’s happening in India,” said Apar Gupta, Executive Director, Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), a New Delhi-based organization that seeks to ensure that technology respects fundamental rights.
Digital suppression in the country isn’t new, despite the fact that the Indian Constitution guarantees the right to freedom of speech and expression.
In 2020, India had the highest number of government-instigated internet shutdowns in the world. The digital crackdowns were one of the reasons Reporters Without Borders recently ranked India 142 out of 180 countries in terms of press freedoms.
On April 28, Facebook temporarily hid posts critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi that included the hashtag #ResignModi for “violating its community standards.” A Facebook spokesperson later said that the posts were hidden “by mistake, not because the Indian government asked us to.”
“Silicon Valley platforms have a very natural interest in keeping governments happy in the regions that they operate,” Gupta said, pointing to the fact that India is Facebook’s biggest market.
The lack of institutionalized free speech protections is further compounded by laws and regulations in India that allow the Ministry of Electronics and Information to not disclose censorship orders sent to social media companies, said Gupta.
Users are therefore often given no official explanation why their posts were suppressed.
Content Moderation In Colombia
There have also been numerous reports of censorship related to ongoing protests in Colombia over proposed tax increases and the resulting police crackdowns.
“We identified a specific problem with Instagram,” said Carolina Botero Cabrera, a researcher with Karisma, a Bogotá based civil society organization that works on technology and human rights. “We have over 1,000 reports of censorship, around 90 percent of it was by Instagram and the content was overwhelmingly about the [ongoing] protests,” she added.
Deleted posts reportedly related to the national unrest, unemployment numbers in the country, and the death of a protestor.
For Colombia, a country with a long-lasting civil war, such automated content moderation is all the more contentious because journalists and human rights activists often find that their content is removed, their reach is diminished, or their accounts are blocked because their content is deemed too violent.
Jesus Abad Colorado, an experienced Colombian photojournalist, recently had his Twitter account blocked after he posted photographs of an armed dispute in the Chocó Department in Western Colombia. A few days later, when an independent media outlet livestreamed an interview with Colorado about the dispute, their account was blocked, too.
Another challenge, said Botero, is that the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia — People's Army (FARC), the longtime leftist guerilla group that disarmed and became a political party in 2017, “was flagged as a terrorist organization [by social media companies at the time] even though they were in peace negotiations.”
The peace process spanned about four years, culminating in a peace agreement in 2016. “Any research about the peace process will have to deal with important problems to [understand] FARC’s position, actions, and voice,” said Botero, noting that blocked social media accounts and deleted content hamper documentation of the process.
Suppressing Palestinian Voices
As tensions escalated in Israel and Palestine, digital suppression in the region also appeared to increase.
“We have over 100 reports of censorship on Instagram,” said Alison Carmel Ramer, a researcher at 7amleh, a Haifa-based digital rights organization based in Haifa, Israel.
Ramer’s research and other reports found that most of the censored content was related to Israeli forces storming Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque. Other censored content was related to the eviction of Palestinians from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem.
Muslim, a media publication, also documented blocks on Instagram livestreams related to Palestine.
According to ِRamer, Facebook told 7amleh that a majority of the Instagram takedowns were mistakes because they did not violate community standards and that they have restored the content.
“This means there is a problem in the way content is moderated,” said Ramer. “Why is content which is not against community standards being taken down? [Facebook] also did not tell users under which policy the content was taken down.”
In general, Palestinian content is “over-moderated” Ramer added, noting posts are often suppressed either because they are considered hate speech, or the posts appear to be connected to terrorist organizations. Many Palestinian leaders are designed as terrorists by the United States, meaning Facebook censors content related to them. Ramer also explained how hate speech in the region written in Hebrew is not censored to the same extent as hate speech in Arabic.
A March 2021 report by 7amleh which analysed 574,000 social media conversations in 2020 showed that one out of every 10 Israeli posts about Palestinians and Arabs contained violent speech, a 16 percent increase compared to 2019. “We have sent reports like this one to Facebook for several years and every year, [but] we find that this content just remains online,” Ramer said, adding that Facebook has not informed them of what, if any, actions it intends to take.
A recent report in The Intercept also noted how Facebook censors the word “Zionist.”
“Zionism is a political ideology,” Ramer said. “Political speech must be protected. Words like “Zionist” and “shahid” [martyr in Arabic] should be protected.” Censorship in the region is especially concerning because of the longstanding lack of transparency around Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, political activist Noam Chomsky told The Daily Poster.
“Israel’s brutal repression of Palestinians for many years, with strong support from the U.S. particularly, is a shocking crime in itself and has ominous international repercussions as well,” said Chomsky. “There have been extensive efforts to block efforts to bring the facts and their significance to the general public. These efforts amount to direct participation in the crimes.”
When asked about social media companies’ ability to freely censor content, Chomsky replied, “Their enormous power should not be tolerated.”
The Path Ahead
At ARTICLE 19, Marda said that in order to align itself with international human rights standards, Facebook “must publicly and transparently acknowledge the reasons for recent takedowns” and “provide information for the substantive and legal reasons for takedown.”
Marda added that Facebook should also “restore all blocked content” and “publicly commit to not bowing to governmental or judicial pressure that requires it to act in violation of international human rights standards and jurisdiction-specific standards on freedom of expression.”
Trump Investigation Evidence Will Be Heard by New Grand Jury
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIx668roluA&t=16s
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