The Truth and How to Deal With it When Studying History
November 19, 2013 § 6 Comments
In two of the books I’ve read recently I found myself incredibly frustrated by the authors’ insistence on “The Truth” and the “True Story.” It is worth noting that neither book was written by a professional historian, despite the fact that both dealt with historical subjects. So I began to think about how we historians are trained to think about “truth” in graduate school, how we deal with various truths in the documents, and by obvious attempts at obfuscation by historical actors. And how we deal with gaps in the sources.
Each author deal with these problems differently. In Jack Weatherford’s Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, I was troubled by Weatherford’s inability to deal with at least one of his sources critically. Weatherford makes great use of a source called “The Secret History”, which covers the early history of the Mongols in Temujin’s (Chinggis Khan) rise. I found myself continuously wondering if The Secret History was actually verifiably true, or if it was something to be taken with a grain of salt, which is what my sense was in reading Weatherford’s book.
But the bigger problem came in C.J. Chivers’ The Gun. Chivers was understandably frustrated throughout his research and writing process by the varying story of the development and proliferation of the AK-47 in the Soviet Union. Mikhail Kalashnikov himself has published multiple autobiographies, both during the Soviet era and after, and has given countless interviews to the media, both before and after the fall of the USSR. And in almost everyone of them, he gave different versions of his own biography, of his development of the AK-47 and so on. I would’ve been frustrated in Chivers’ shoes.
For example, Kalasknikov’s brother, Nikolai, was sent to a Stalin-era prison camp when they were young. Chivers is frustrated in figuring out what Nikolai’s sentence was. At the end of the day, I found myself wondering “who cares”? I am less interested in what sentence Nikolai Kalashnikov received than the fact that he was sentenced to a labour camp in the first place. And I felt that Chivers spent too much time and space in the book expressing his frustration and inability to get to the fact of the matter there to the detriment of a discussion of the Kalashnikov family’s status as kulaks during Collectivisation during the Stalin era.
Chivers also spends the most time and effort complaining about Kalashnikov’s biography. He also is downright naïve in expressing his frustration with Soviet-era sources and the multiple truths of the era, as if nothing like that ever happened in the US or any other Western nation. At any rate, Chivers goes on a long rant about Kalashnikov co-operating with Soviet authorities in the re-crafting of his biography (Chivers prefers the term “white-washing”, which, while being accurate is ahistorical). Kalashnikov’s family were kulaks, enemies of the state. They were exiled to Siberia. No kidding Kalashnikov needed a new biography when he became the inventor of the AK-47, which Chivers makes a strong and compelling argument as the greatest invention of the USSR. His background as the son of kulaks had to be deleted from the story and a new version be created for public consumption. To criticise Kalashnikov for participating in this process is almost laughable. Obviously he had to participate. He didn’t have a choice in a totalitarian dictatorship. At least not if he wanted to keep living.
At any rate, it just so happens that, as a public historian, this is the kind of thing I study. Public historians spend a lot of time looking at how stories get created, whether they are wider cultural stories or individual ones. If Chivers thinks that what Kalashnikov participated in only happened in totalitarian communist states, he’s deeply, deeply mistaken. Manufactured histories are part and parcel of almost daily life in Canada and the USA.
But the question of truth is what I’m interested in here. Fact. Statistics don’t speak for themselves. Numbers don’t speak for themselves. A picture is not worth a thousand words. Facts are simple things. Fact: Canadian Confederation happened on 1 July 1867. But why? And what did it mean? The why can be answered in many ways, both narrowly and widely. It can be answered looking at what was happening in the United States, it can be answered looking at British colonial politics. Or by what was happening in Canada. Or a combination thereof. The standard interpretation of what it means is that it was the birth of Canada. But Canada in 1867 was four provinces, comprised of three colonies. That’s about it. It didn’t mean that Canada now had control of its own internal affairs. That happened in 1848. It didn’t mean that Canada gained control of foreign affairs. That happened in 1931. There was no such thing as Canadian citizenship until 1948. Nor was the Supreme Court of Canada the highest court of appeal until then. Canada did not control its own constitution until 1982. So, in short, facts only cover a very simple corner of the story. Interpretation is necessary.
To use an example from The Gun: The Ak-47 was developed in 1947. Or was it? Chivers does a wonderful job teasing out the details of the weapon’s creation in the late 1940s, to say nothing of the massive re-tooling of the gun that continued into the 1950s. Even nailing down 1947 as the date of the gun’s creation isn’t as straight-forward as one would think, at least according to Chivers.
So, the truth. Or the true story. In my experience, rarely is something billed as the “true story” actually that. Truth is a messy concept. And this is what we historians are trained in. We recognise that the honest truth isn’t necessarily a possibility (or even desirable) in telling a story. Other things are more important, such as in the case of Nikolai Kalashnikov’s trip to the gulag. Again, the actual sentence doesn’t interest me as much as why he was sent to the gulag. In other words, there are varying shades of grey in sorting out the historical story. And sometimes the actual straight truth isn’t that important to the story. In the end, Chivers’ story is made all the more interesting for all the work he does in developing and elucidating the various stories of the development of the AK-47 and the various biographies and stories to be told about its inventor (or maybe he wasn’t the inventor, another version of the story could just as easily been that the gun was the result of a collective team), Mikhail Kalashnikov.
The Dehumanising Process of Imperialism
November 7, 2013 § 2 Comments
I’m reading CJ Shivers’ book, The Gun, which is essentially a history and biography of the machine gun, though he focuses primarily on the AK-47. Shivers, though, goes into great depth about the development of machine guns, back to the attempts of Richard Gatling’s attempts back in the 1860s to develop an automated firing system. So far, I have to admit, this book is worth the hype it received when it came out in 2010.
However. Shivers spends some time discussing the deployment of the Gatling Gun, as well as the Maxim, amongst others in colonial endeavours in Africa in the late 19th century during the Scramble for Africa. For the most part, Shivers follows British troops on their attempts to pacify the natives. The descriptions of the efficacy of the guns are chilling. Shivers quotes one British soldier who casually mentions the piling up of African bodies as the British advanced with their Maxim guns. Numbers get thrown around, here 3,000 dead, there 1,500, and so on and so forth. These are from single battles, large African forces against small British ones. And yet the British win, because of the guns.
The book summary on the back cover says that this is “a richly human account of the evolution of the very experience of war.” It is, at least so far, if we are talking about white Europeans and Americans. When it comes to the black Africans, however, they’re no more than body counts. This, however, is NOT really Shivers’ fault. This is the nature of imperialism, this is the very core of imperialism. The colonised “other” is a faceless, shapeless mass. The imperialist dehumanises the victims of the imperial process. The colonised are reduced to something not quite human. The fault here doesn’t lie with Shivers (let me state that again), it lies with colonial sources. By design, the Africans were dehumanised by the British (or the French, the Italians, the Germans, or whomever) during the Scramble. They were reduced to an irritant in the forward march of progress.
None of this is news to anyone who knows anything about imperialism. It’s not news to me, but sometimes I feel like I’ve just been smacked in the face with this knowledge. It is almost like reading it again for the first time. And reading The Gun, I feel that way.
Lest We Forget: Red and White Poppies
November 6, 2013 § 2 Comments
Twitter’s a wonderful thing. Sometimes. Today it is. I just learned about a movement in Canada to distribute white poppies for Remembrance Day. This apparently comes from the Rideau Institute, which is a left-of-centre think tank in Ottawa.
Flanders Field, World War I
White poppies have a long history in the United Kingdom, they date back to the immediate post-First World War era, when pacifists decided they wanted to commemorate the dead of the war and to put forward the hope that the War to End All Wars was in fact a war to end all wars (we know how that turned out). These pacifists wanted to remember all war dead, not just the British dead, which is what their problem with the red poppy was. The red poppy also took on sectarian tones in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, where it was a largely Unionist symbol.
But Canada does not have this history, it does not have the politicisation of something like the Troubles. The poppy is a pretty apolitical statement. I wore a red poppy in Canada, and now, living in the US, I feel slightly awkward in late October and November without my poppy. I have great fondness of memories of getting poppies, I liked to go to Second World War veterans, who pinned the poppy onto my lapel. There was something profound about that little ceremony, I felt like it connected me, however ephemerally, to my grandparents’ generation (both my grandmother and grandfather served in the Second World War). And it tied me to our history as a nation.
I generally oppose war, though I do believe there is such a thing as a just war. And the two world wars of the last century are, to my mind, just wars. But I don’t think my preference for peace is compromised by wearing a poppy.
The Rideau Institute says that its white poppies are for those who don’t want to celebrate war. That is not what the red poppy symbolises. The red poppy commemorates the dead of the wars, those who served. The white poppy confuses the means with the end. It politicises Remembrance Day in Canada, the very thing that should not happen. That the Rideau Institute thinks this is a good idea saddens me somewhat.
Rural Palimpsests: Amity, Missouri
October 24, 2013 § 9 Comments
Amity is a blink-and-you-miss it tiny town on Route J in northwestern Missouri. The last census put its population at 54, though it has since shrunk to 47 (though, in the stupidity of American metropolitan areas, it is apart of the St. Joseph MO-KS Metropolitan Statistical Area, despite the fact that there is 30 miles of relatively empty farmland between St. Joseph and Amity). It looks, for all intents and purposes, like a dying town. Amity was founded in 1872, but when the Chicago and Rock Island Railway was completed in 1885, the townsite moved about a mile north to straddle the tracks. In its new location, Amity thrived, as general stores, hotels, banks, schools, and churches popped up as the town became an important stop on the railway. A stockyard for the Rock developed and the town became a waystation and loading zone for agricultural products from DeKalb County onto the railway. Similarly, consumer items were unloaded in Amity for the stores there and for DeKalb County in general. The town’s population rose to a high of 225 in the 1920s.
But Amity was a victim of circumstances, as it lived with the Rock, it also died with it. The Chicago Rock Island and Pacific (as it was eventually called) was a notoriously poorly-run and inefficient railway. By the 1970s, the gig was up. It had been run into the ground, and it pulled out of Amity in 1975. But the Rock (and Amity) were the victims of more than just poor management. Deindustrialisation was also central to the story here. As factories shut down in the major cities of the MidWest, from Chicago to Kansas City and beyond, the railways became increasingly less important to the heartland of the United States. And Amitysuffered. Even before the railway pulled out, the stores were suffering, the schools and churches were closing.
The former site of the Chicago Rock Island Pacific Railway through Amity
Today, Amity is barely hanging on. During our cross-country trip in August, we stayed with friends in Amity, Sam and Monica. To my city eyes, Amity was a piece of rural paradise. But Sam and I got talking about the history of the town. Sam is a native of Amity and Monica is from nearby Maysville. The longer we talked, the more fascinated with Amity’s past and present I became. I have written before on the changing rural landscape in North America (Hawley, Massachusetts, Phoenix, British Columbia, and Sainte-Sylvestre, Québec), but in talking with Sam I began to think about the costs of deindustrialisation in North America.
Abandoned home, Amity
Reams of work has been done on deindustrialisation in major cities (Buffalo, Cleveland, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Toronto, Hamilton), and my own work has looked at the cost of deindustrialisation on Griffintown, Montréal. But there was a real trickle-down effect at work here. The landscape of the MidWest (to say nothing of the rest of the continent) is cluttered with Amitys, places that were once important waystations on the railways, or homes to factories themselves (Monica’s mother worked at a Quaker Oats plant packaging instant oatmeal for two decades before it closed down). But their stories are in danger of being lost through little more than negligence.
As a culture, we don’t pay attention to these forgotten places, hell, we don’t even pay attention to the MidWest, at least outside of Chicago. For the life of me, I cannot call to mind a single TV show or movie set in a Midwestern city that’s not Chicago in the past quarter century. No wonder the people of the MidWest feel left out.
2nd Street, Amity, looking north towards where the railway used to be
But there is history here (I realise that sounds like a dead obvious statement) and the stories from places like Amity are important, as they speak to the human and cultural cost of deindustrialisation in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s just as much as those stories that arise out of Buffalo and Hamilton and Milwaukee. They place a human cost on the depopulation of rural areas of North America, and they place a cost on the loss of culture. The four of us (my wife, Margo, and I, Sam and Monica) are barely into our 40s, but we have lived through a series of cultural revolutions, from politics to technology. We are a transitional generation between the old ways of doing things and the (post)modern, post-industrial culture that we live in today. We remember rotary telephones and a world before the internet. Hard to imagine. But we’re also glued to our iPhones and lost without the internet when it goes down. Sam’s work as an artist seeks to preserve what he calls “obscure” technologies, printmaking and pottery. And I am an historian, my entire professional life is centred on the past. As a public historian, my work is centred on how we remember that past.
I am currently working on a research project that looks at the relationship between the far right of American politics and its relationship to history. But once that wraps up, hopefully in the next 6-8 months, I am going to begin work on my next project, which will be based on Amity and DeKalb County, looking at the cost of deindustrialisation on these rural spaces in the MidWest.
The Failure of Urban Redevelopment and the Chance at Redemption: Worcester
October 22, 2013 § 4 Comments
Worcester, Massachusetts, is like pretty much every city in New England not named Boston or Providence, and kinda like those Easter Bunnies I used to get when I was a kid: hollow centre. The downtowns of Hartford, New Haven, Springfield, Worcester, etc. were done in by deindustrialisation and horrid, horrid urban redevelopment schemes. The urban redevelopments schemes of the 70s, in hindsight, look as though they were especially created to destroy urban centres, not save them. Boston’s Government Center, for example, is one of the most hideous examples of neo-brutalist architecture I’ve ever seen.
Water/Fire, Providence, RI
Government Center, Boston
Worcester’s other problem is that it’s near Boston, less than an hour away. In fact, before I moved to Massachusetts, I thought Worcester was just a suburb of Boston. Boston is by far the biggest city in New England, over 5 times as big as the number 2 city, which just so happens to be Worcester (in fact, Worcester is the western boundary of the ridiculous Boston-Worcester-Manchester Combined Statistical Area). Worcester gets by, it is the home to several universities, including the University of Massachusetts Medical School, plus hospitals. But the downtown is a disaster.
City Hall Plaza, Boston
Worcester attempted and failed miserably to redesign its downtown in the 70s. It made sense at the time, as Paul McMorrow points out in today’s Boston Globe, the city erected a shopping mall downtown to counter the growth of suburban shopping malls. This was a common tactic. In some places, usually Canadian cities, this worked. Vancouver, Toronto, Montréal, Calgary, Ottawa all have shopping malls downtown. And in those cities, the malls are successful. Those are also very large cities, Ottawa is the smallest and its urban centre is still over 1 million people. It is worth noting, however, that I cannot think, off the top of my head, of a large American city with a successful shopping mall at its core. Boston has a small shopping concourse in the Prudential Center, but that’s it.
Nevertheless, the Worcester Center Galleria was a valiant effort. But it failed. Twice.
Worcester Center Galleria
The mall, when it was constructed, obliterated the street grid and landscape of downtown Worcester. But now, it’s been town down and the old street grid is being restored. The new CitySquare development is designed to do what most new urban redevelopments do: provide shopping, office space, and urban condos. All to convince a new, wealthy, demographic to move downtown, and stay downtown. McMorrow is hopeful for Worcester, as am I. And as Providence shows, urban redevelopment can be done and can be successful. But Worcester has the same problems as the rest of Massachusetts outside of Boston: the economy.
OMG! Seriously?: On Language and Swearing
October 21, 2013 § 2 Comments
In today’s Boston Globe, I read a column that I thought had been printed by mistake. Or maybe it was a leftover from 1976. Jennifer Graham, a columnist for the venerable (and quite good) Boston daily, is upset that OMG and it’s more offensive variety, “Oh my God!” are lingua franca in our culture today. She’s upset that blasphemy is everyday language. To which I say, where have you been for the past 40 years, lady?
I am from a culture where all the choice swear words are religious-based. French Canadians have a whole range of blasphemous and offensive words for all situations, the worst of which is “Tabarnak!” That literally means “tabernacle.” Other highlights are “câlisse!” and “osti!” (chalice and the holy host, respectively). If you really wanna set grandma’s wig on fire: “osti de tabarnak câlisse” will do the trick. Once more, in English, that’s “holy host of the tabernacle, chalice!” Sounds much better in québécois French, trust me. When I was a kid, these were very bad words (even Anglos in Québec swear in French, it’s much more fun), respectable people did not use them. But, by the time I was an adult, they were everywhere, even in polite company, including in newspapers, on TV, and even my dear great aunt once said “tabarnak!” (I nearly fell over).
It doesn’t take a linguist to figure out that the ramping up of swearing is due to the general breakdown of authority in western culture as a whole in the past 40 years. Sometimes even I am stunned by what I hear coming out of the mouths of my students in the hallways and around campus. Some of the names they call each other, even in jest, would flip the wig of my grandmothers, I can tell you that much.
But. Oh my god? Seriously? Graham is upset by this one because she thinks it insults people’s value systems. Oddly, I learned this particular gem within my Catholic family as a kid. For that matter, my memory of this gem of a swear is that I have tended to hear it from the mouths of Catholics, especially devout ones. Sacrilegious? Oh, heck yes. But spend an hour watching Irish TV and you’ll see what I mean.
It seems to me that Jennifer Graham is about a generation or two late in her hand-wringing over the use of oh my god in pop culture.
“Jobs Not Welfare” — UPDATED
October 20, 2013 § 2 Comments
In reading an issue of The Times Literary Supplement from September recently, I came across a review of an economics treatise, Ending Poverty: Jobs, Not Welfare, by Hyman P. Minsky. The very title of the book struck me as an absurdity (as much of economic theory does, to be frank). But then I realised that as ridiculous as Minsky’s title is, this reflects a larger problem in our society. Welfare was never meant to replace jobs. Ever. That’s not the point. Welfare was meant to provide a social safety net for workers when the economy failed, they lost their jobs, etc. Welfare was never meant to be a permanent situation.
But the problem is that politicians, economists, and bureaucrats have, in the years since welfare states were created around the time of the Second World War, decided that welfare is a permanent state. And, of course, someone reading this right now is going to argue that some people actually prefer to live on welfare permanently. This is a stupid argument, to be blunt. There are also some people who prefer to murder their fellow human beings. This is not a reason to cut welfare.
People who complain about welfare and the cost to taxpayers (and those who claim that people on welfare are lazy, etc.) tend not to be people who have ever actually lived on welfare. When I was a kid, my family did. It wasn’t pretty. Any study I’ve ever seen of poverty are very clear that it is nigh impossible to survive on welfare in any urban centre anywhere in the Western world.
Permanent welfare is NOT an option, nor should it be, nor should it ever be. And yet, politicians and bureaucrats seem to think it is. People on welfare don’t. Thus, Minsky might actually have a point. Of course, Minsky, a maverick economist if ever there was one (he died in 1996), argues for massive government intervention to create jobs, not exactly an argument that’s going to make him a lot of friends in today’s neoconservative orthodoxy.
UPDATE: Brian Bixby published this last week with some factual basis to back up what I have to say here.
On Living in a Gentrifying Neighbourhood, Pt. V
October 2, 2013 § 6 Comments
[I thought I was done with this series (parts I, II, III, and IV and the prequel) when I left Pointe-Saint-Charles last summer and moved to New England. Apparently not.]
In the mid-1980s in Vancouver, the BC provincial government built the SkyTrain, a new light-rail system connecting the western suburbs of New Westminster and Burnaby to the City of Vancouver. SkyTrain caused a lot of disruption when it was built, as you might expect for a brand new system. When it finally opened, just in time for Expo ’86, people were excited. Vancouver finally got rapid trasit! But some people weren’t so happy, the people who lived along the line in New West, Burnaby, and East Vancouver (it’s worth noting the SkyTrain went primarily through working-class neighbourhoods). I recall a news segment that investigated the claims of the noise. In particular, I remember a glass of water on a counter next to an open window as the SkyTrain went by. The water didn’t move. At all.
Nonetheless, I can understand in the inconvenience of the SkyTrain for those whose day-to-day lives were affected by it. They were there before SkyTrain, it moved into their neighbourhood.
But let us now consider Pointe-Saint-Charles. The Pointe has been home to a train yard since the Grand Trunk Railway built its yards there in 1853. For those of you who are mathematically challenged, that’s 160 years ago. In other words, the trains have been in the Pointe for a long, long time. And for much of its history, the trains were part and parcel of the experience of living in the Pointe. There was a train yard there. Life goes on.
But, as I’ve been noting in this series, the Pointe is undergoing redevelopment and gentrification. And nowhere is this clearer than in that part of the southern part of the Pointe which, even a decade ago, was a pretty dodgy part of town. Here, people have been snapping up cheap housing, both the 19th century stock and hideous new condos, and movingin. The Pointe, ever-so-slowly has become a more happening place because of this gentrification and that closer to the north end of the neighbourhood, near the Canal and the Nordelec building (which is in the process of being condofied now). In short, the yuppies (of whom I was obviously one when I lived there) are moving in.
For the most part, the process of gentrification has been more or less smooth in the Pointe, but, then again, I’m not one of the people being priced out of the neighbourhood. But the tension that exists in Saint-Henri was lacking in the Pointe. But, there were subtle changes in the culture of the neighbourhood when I lived there. This was seen most obviously to me in the case of the community garden at the end of our block. A couple of years ago, the arrivistes took control of it and essentially pushed the old-timers out of the garden. Not cool.
So, today I was reading the news on CBC Montréal, and I came across this little gem. Some of the yuppies who’ve moved into that southern part of the Pointe (taking advantage of cheap housing and pushing the poor out) are crying foul over the sound of the trains at all hours of the day. Yup. Imagine that! Trains! In a train yard! One resident hears the trains and he gets afraid of what might happen. Others complain sound like The Grinch, complaining about the noise, noise, noise!
Certainly, some of this is in response to the disaster in Lac Mégantic. But, it is worth noting that in all my years in the sud-ouest, I cannot recall a single accident involving trains in Pointe-Saint-Charles or Saint-Henri. Accidents between cars, bikes, and peoples, certainly. But not trains.
So, these people want Canadian National to reduce the trains and the noise they make. This is not unprecedented. There is a condo building on rue Saint-Ambroise in Saint-Henri, right where the CN tracks go through Saint-Henri. When it was first opened up, the people who bought in there respectfully asked that the Canadian National STOP running trains through their backyards. That line, which is connected to the largely disused yards in the Pointe, remains one of the busiest train tracks in North America, used by CN and ViaRail between Montréal and Ottawa and Toronto. I’m not making that up.
It would seem to me that one of the basic facts of living in a city is that there is noise. And if you are on the market for a new condo, you would look at what’s around you in your new neighbourhood and consider the inconvenience of the noise factor, or other things that might upset you. And, if you move into a condo near a train yard, you might want to consider the fact that it’s going to get loud occasionally. Trains are like that, they’re loud (I can hear the Commuter Rail train from my house here at all hours of the day and night, in fact, one is going by right now!). It is asinine and selfish to move into a neighbourhood with a train yard in and then act surprised when there are trains that make lots of noise. It is the height of idiocy, quite frankly. If you don’t like the noise, then go live somewhere else. It’s that simple. And so, that is my solution for these fine people in the Pointe. Sell. Move elsewhere.
The Long View vs. The Immediate View in History
September 13, 2013 § 7 Comments
When I was doing my PhD at Concordia University in Montréal, I TA’d for one of my favourite profs there, Norman Ingram. Norman is a French historian and in the Western Civ class I TA’d for him, he had what I still consider to be a brilliant assignment. He had the students read and compare two books written about the Fall of France in June 1940 during the Second World War. The first book was by eminent French historian, and member of the résistance (and Jew, which is how Bloch ended up being tortured and shot by the Gestapo in June 1944, as the Allies were swiftly re-conquering France), Marc Bloch, the founder of the Annales School. The second book was written in 1996 by an historian at the University of Winnipeg, Robert Young.
Strange Defeat was written by Bloch, a captain in the French Army, in the summer of 1940, immediately following the Fall of France. It is a searing book, almost painful to read, written by a fierce French patriot stunned and shocked his nation collapsed in defeat at the hands of the Nazis. Bloch blames France’s political and military leaders for failing to have prepared for modern warfare. And while Bloch remains an annaliste in writing Strange Defeat, the immediacy of the events he’s describing and his anger and fury are clear.
Young’s France and the Origins of the Second World War was, obviously, written some 50+ years after the fact, with the benefit of a half-century of hindsight, other historical views, as well as archival sources. It is dispassionate, though eminently readable.
The students were then asked to compare and contrast the two books, the immediate view versus the long view.
I think of Norman’s assignment often, both in my own teaching career, as a public historian, and, quite often, on Twitter. When I worked for a now-defunct web magazine based in London, any time we published anything to do with the Bosnian Genocide, without fail, we would get attacked almost immediately by people arguing that there was no genocide, that the suggestion there was a genocide is just Western imperialism and further proof of a conspiracy against Serbia and the Serbian people. It was almost like clockwork.
So, yesterday, when I posted this piece commenting on a New Yorker profile of the Serbian tennis player Novak Djokovic, I expected more of the same. As you can see from the comments, my expectations were met. I also got something a bit different, however. I was indeed assailed on Twitter, by a woman who says she’s from Bosnia, who seemed to be arguing that there was no genocide in Bosnia at all, and that she should know, because she was there. Upon further argument, she was saying something slightly different, that there was a lot of killing going on in Bosnia in the early-to-mid 90s, involving Croats, Serbs, and Bosnians as both aggressors and victims. That was certainly true.
However, it is indisputable that what happened at Srebrenica was a genocide. It is indisputable that the VRS, the Bosnian Serb Army, committed ethnic cleansing in Bosnia as a whole in the 1992-95 period. This has been established by countless experts in the field, it has been confirmed by the ICTY in The Hague.
As the argument carried on, I began to think back to Norman’s assignment, and to think about the difference between the immediate view of the spectator and the big picture view of the analyst. I’m not convinced that it wasn’t clear that the VRS was engaging in ethnic cleansing and genocide. But I am convinced that whatever side of the ethnic divide one was on in Bosnia/Herzogovina in the period from 1992-95, it was something close to hell. And so I am back pondering the difference in what we see based on where we’re standing (there is, of course, also the fact that metric tonnes of ink have been spilled in the past twenty years by journalists, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, and historians about the events). I reject the view that there was no genocide, but I do find myself wondering about what someone who was Bosnian Serb would have seen on the ground in that era.
When I lived in Vancouver in the late 90s, I talked to this guy, Dragan, a refugee from Sarajevo, at the local café. He wouldn’t say what side of the divide he was from, just that he was Yugoslavia. He was deeply traumatised by the war and genocide. Vancouver had an international fireworks competition in those days, and we lived in the West End, where the fireworks were. On those nights, if Dragan was at the café, he’d flinch, noticeably, with every loud noise from the fireworks. I don’t know what he did in Sarajevo before he escaped in 1995, and I didn’t want to ask. I don’t know if he was a perpetrator, a victim, or both. But I often think of how he described the outbreak of war in his cosmopolitan Yugoslav city in 1992. He said that, quite literally, neighbours of twenty or thirty years turned on each other, that families collapsed in spasms of violence if there was inter-ethnic mixing. And, as Dragan noted, that was very common in a city like Sarajevo. The entire world, he said, fell down, everything that had held up his universe collapsed. He knew very bad things happened in his homeland. I kind of suspected he might have played a role in his steadfast refusal to say anything, and the cold, steely glare that passed over his eyes when the subject came up, which was often, given he talked about home a lot.
And so, as I was arguing with my interlocutor on Twitter yesterday, I thought about Dragan and I thought about Norman’s assignment. I thought about the chaos of war and the view on the ground as opposed to the view from the sky, the micro vs. the macro, and I thought how much they could vary. I don’t have any real answers here, other than the obvious, but I did find the discussion and all it brought up for me rather interesting.
Immigration: The More Common North American Experience
September 6, 2013 § 4 Comments
The scenery as we drove across the United States and back was amazing. So were many of the place names. There is a town in Colorado named Rifle. Another town in Colorado is called Cahones. I kid you not. But perhaps my favourite highway road sign in all of the United States was this one we saw on the side of I-84 in Eastern Oregon.
The sign pretty much says it all. Canadian and American culture is full of stories of the successful immigrant, the ones who came to these shores with nothing and made lives for themselves, who made fortunes and found fame. And while certainly there were a few who experienced this good fortune on North American shores, the majority did not. Most settled somewhere in between fame and fortune and poverty and despair.
Certainly, pop culture contains references to the downside of emigration. In Canada, university students in Canadian history and literature are tortured with perhaps one of the worst books in Christendom, Susanna Moodie’s interminable Roughing It In the Bush, Or, Life in Canada, about the trials and tribulations of Moodie and her husband, John Weddiburn Dunbar Moodie, a down-at-the-heels member of the British gentry, in the wilds of Upper Canada in the 1830s and 40s. While Moodie was a horrible writer and her husband an even worse poet, the book is a key text on the struggles of even wealthy emigrants in the British colonies in the mid-nineteenth century (it worked out ok for the Moodies, they ended up moderately wealthy and living in the thriving town of Belleville, Ontario).
One of my favourite Pogues songs is “Thousands Are Sailing,” which is the story of downtrodden Irish emigrants in New York City in the 19th century. The song is actually kind of heartbreaking.
So this sign for an exit on I-70 in Eastern Oregon struck me as a remarkable site. Old Emigrant Hill Road is on the northern side of I-70, and it runs into Poverty Flat Road on the southern side of the highway. Obviously, these two roads have been there for a lot longer than the Interstate. And, as you can see from the terrain surrounding the sign for the exit on the highway, the landscape around Poverty Flat Road isn’t exactly all that welcoming. This was also a common experience for emigrants to the “New World” in the 19th and 20th centuries: they ended up farming lands that were not conducive to growing much of anything. Generations struggled to make a living on these farms until someone, whether out of optimism or desperation, decided to clear off the land and make his or her fortunes elsewhere.
Perhaps this is the more common story of the immigrant in North America than the one of fame and fortune.
Matthew Barlow 