The Terror of History
June 8, 2013 § 8 Comments
I’m teaching a summer course, a quick, 6-week course wherein I’m supposed to cover World History from approximately the Enlightenment in Western Europe in the mid-18th century until the late 20th century. It’s impossible to do this topic justice in a 15-week semester, let alone a quick summer course. For that reason, and because I’ve been teaching variations of this course for far too long, I decided to try something new with this class. In essence, my students are my guinea pigs this semester. I am teaching the Terror of History/The History of Terror.
A few years ago, I read a fantastic book by UCLA History Professor Teofilo Ruiz, The Terror of History: On the Uncertainties of Life in Western Civilization. Ruiz expanded on something that had been travelling around the back of my own brain since I first read Boccaccio’s The Decameron some twenty years ago. In his Introduction, Boccaccio lays out the response of people in Florence to the Plague: What they did. According to Boccaccio, there are three basic human responses to terror and misery: 1) Religion; 2) Debauchery; or 3) Flight. To that, Ruiz adds that there’s a 4th category: those who remain in place, who attempt to carry on in the midst of chaos. Since I read Ruiz, I’ve been thinking about this more explicitly, and I have re-read The Decameron (as an aside, I find it rather insulting that my MacBook insists that Decameron is a spelling error). Sometimes it’s hard not to become a miserable cynic when teaching history. We humans have come up with so many ways to terrorise, torture, and kill each other. If you don’t believe me, look at how Romans dealt with traitors: crucifixion. Or the Holocaust or any genocide you want.
Religion, it occurred to me when I was a teenager, was simply a means of ordering the world in order to allow ourselves not to lose our minds, to try to find wider significance and meaning for the bad things that happen. When I was a bit older, I dabbled in Buddhism, which was much more explicit about this. This isn’t to demean religion, it is a powerful force for some, and it allows an ordering of the universe. But, as the Buddha noted, life is suffering. What we control is our response to that.
So, Ruiz pointed out the terror of history, of the endless crashing of shit on our heads. Pretty much everything in our world is predicated on it. We live a comfortable life in North America because my shoes were made in Vietnam in a sweat shop. My car emits pollution into the air. Historically, systems of power are predicated on fear, terror, and awe. That’s how order is kept. Uplifting, isn’t it?
So, this semester, I’ve made that explicit in my class. I cannot even hope to do justice to World History, so I am trying to cherry-pick my way through all the mire. I am focussing on the chaos and terror at moments like the American War of Independence or the French Revolution. Or the terror of slave owners in the American South or in Brazil. Or the use of terror by the world’s first terrorist, Maximillien Robespierre, who explicitly declared that he wanted to terrorise his enemies. Lenin and Trotsky rolled in a very similar manner. So, too, did the Qing Dynasty in China. Or the British imperial system in Africa or India. Or the Belgians in the Congo. But this wasn’t an export of Europe. Slavery has existed since approximately forever, and was an integral part of Ancient Warfare, but it was also central to African warfare in the 18th century. The list goes on and on.
How do we survive in this endless cycle of bad news? We do what Boccaccio said we do. We find religion. We despoil ourselves in debauchery. We find joy in religion or debauchery. Or we find it in flight. Flight doesn’t have to be literal, like the 10 young men and women in The Decameron, flight can be symbolic. It can be a search for beauty, awareness, or knowledge. In many ways, the three categories can overlap, like in the mystic cults of the Roman Republic. But we are remarkably resilient creatures, and we find our joys and happiness in the midst of the shit of life.
Ruiz notes that people almost always attempt to step outside the colossal weight of history by following these paths to religion, debauchery, or flight. Events like Carnival, whether in Medieval Europe or Rio de Janeiro (or Québec City in winter, for that matter), is exactly that, an escape, temporary as it might be, from history. We escape systems of power and oppression for brief moments.
The hard part in teaching the Terror of History is finding the escapes and not making them sound like they are hokey or unimportant or trivial, which is what they sound like in the face of this colossal wave of bad news. But we all do this, we all find means of escaping the news. Right now, the news in my local newspaper concerns the government spying on its own citizens, a war in Syria, and people trying to recover from a bomb going off during a marathon. If I took each at face value, I’m sure I’d be lying prostate on the floor, sucking my thumb. So, clearly, I have coping mechanisms. And humans have always had them. But it remains difficult to talk about these in class without making them sound hokey.
This week, we’re reading Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s, SlaughterHouse 5, which takes place in part at the end of the Second World War and was Vonnegut’s attempt to make sense of having been in Dresden in 1945, when the city was firebombed by the Allies. The terror of that, the horror, the devastation. All throughout the novel, the narrator declares “So it goes” when dealing with death and other calamities. We have a philosophy, then, here, one of stoicism. Stoicism and Buddhism are fairly closely related. This is an attempt to deal with the Terror of History.
At any rate, this is making for an interesting summer course, and it seems as though my students are, if not exactly enjoying it, are learning something. Along with SlaughterHouse 5, we’re also going to watch Triumph of the Will this week.
Diaspora and Terrorism
April 24, 2013 § Leave a comment
Scholars studying diaspora and immigrant communities have noticed that there are some very general, very real trends amongst diasporic immigrant communities. The first generation, the immigrants, arrive in their new home, but find themselves caught between two worlds, struggling to fit into the new home, whilst still maintaining very real and very strong ties to the homeland. Their children, the second generation, are citizens of the new country by birth, and grow up in that host culture, and generally do not express a lot of interest in the culture of the homeland; they are fully integrated into the new homeland. It’s their children, the third generation, that begins to cast an eye back to the old homeland, curious about where their grandparents are from and the culture their grandparents carried with them in the new land until they died. These are trends that have existed in North America since the Irish began coming over here in the mid-19th century, and have been replicated time and again by pretty much every single group that has arrived in the United States and Canada in large numbers since.
Immigrants, their children, and grandchildren, of course, have greatly changed North American culture ever since the Irish. Take, for example, the city I live in now: Boston. Boston is the birthplace of the American independence movement in the 1770s, and was a tight-knit Anglo-Protestant city prior to the Irish arriving. Boston was never the same after the Irish arrived in huge numbers in the mid-19th century. And as the Irish infiltrated the city’s economy, culture, and politics, they left their mark. This can still be seen today: at present Stephen Lynch and Ed Markey are both attempting to gain the Democratic nomination for the special election to replace John Kerry in the US Senate. Both Lynch and Markey are currently Congressmen. Both are Irish Catholics, Markey’s from Malden and Lynch is from South Boston, aka: Southie. He grew up in the same housing projects as Whitey Bulger. The Irish still have their tentacles in the Democratic Party machinery in Boston today, 160-some odd years after they arrived.
Other cities are affected differently. Take, for example, my hometown of Montréal. Montréal has long been the recipient of immigrants, dating back to the Irish, who began arriving there in large numbers in the 1840s. The Irish completely changed the city, adding an Anglophone group that was Catholic to an already divided city. The Catholic Church was also massively changed in Montréal as the Irish muscled their way in. Indeed, they are largely to thank for the fact that there is an English-language Catholic Church in the city today. But Montréal is also being fundamentally changed by immigration from nations in the Francophonie in Africa and the Caribbean today. In the past decade or so, Montréal has undergone a fundamental cultural shift, as new French-speaking communities arrive. The consequences for French Canadian nationalism and separatism should be obvious.
But this process of acculturation may be now speeding up. Our cities have become faster, life is lived at a frenetic pace in our cities on this continent. Last week, two bombs went off at the Boston Marathon, killing 3 people and injuring over 200 more, some very seriously. The bombs were planted by Tamerlan Tsarneav, 26, and his younger brother Dzhokhar, who is 19. The Tsarneav brothers are immigrants, they came to the United States from Dagestan just over a decade ago. Tamerlan was here on a green card, whilst Dzhokhar became a citizen last year. Their parents have both returned to Russia in recent years, leaving them here. But they’ve been here a long time, Tamerlan was 14 or 15 when he arrived here, Dzhokhar was 8 or 9. They were both Americanised, and their brand of terrorism, experts have concluded is of the ‘home-grown’ variety.
Yesterday in the Boston Globe, Farah Stockman commented on this growth in homegrown terrorism, citing forensic psychiatrist Marc Sageman, who in 2008 predicted that terrorism in the West would increasingly be of this variety. Of course, by 2008, we had already seen the writing on the walls. On 7 July 2005, four terrorists detonated bombs during the morning commute in London. All four were homegrown terrorists, two were the sons of immigrants, a third was an immigrant himself, but had grown up in England. The bombing of Madrid’s transportation system in March 2004 was also of the homegrown variety.
This new generation of terrorists, the so-called 3rd wave, are younger than the Al Qaeda terrorists of the previous decade. According to Stockman, the average Al Qaeda terrorist in the 90s and early 00s was in his 30s. Today, the average age of these 3rd wavers is in his early 20s. The 2nd wave were devoutly religious and had grown up in devoutly religious homes. The 3rd wave grew up secular, as the brothers Tsarneav had. So, why the turn to radicalism and terrorism, she asks:
For some, it was out of a warped romanticism for a homeland they barely knew; an act of rebellion against hardworking immigrant parents who brought them to the West for “a better life.” Others were US-born converts to Islam who found in terrorism a sense of camaraderie and purpose that had eluded them all their lives. A few became terrorists after years of gang-banging and drug dealing. It was an ideology that transformed their violent tendencies into something heroic. It made them feel they were on the side of the angels.
Sagemean concludes that for some of these young men, ‘terrorism is a fad.’ This is an interesting thought. But if these young men are attracted, in part, by this romantic attachment to their parents’ homeland, or the homeland of their families, or to the religion that sustained their family generations ago, I’m not so sure that this is a fad. Scholars looking at notions of diaspora note the attachment 3rd generation children and those beyond have to the mythical homeland. Looking at my own community and what I study (the Irish), I would note that men and women whose families emigrated to North America 160 years ago remain curious and interested in the mythical homeland of Ireland. Ireland draws them in, they’re curious about the history, the culture, and some even the language. This becomes a life-long interest.
Maybe Sagemen is correct in that the violence of radicalism and terrorism is a fad of youth and some of these young men will eventually mellow out and choose to focus on aspects of their culture that do not lead to violence. Certainly there are echoes of this in the Irish diaspora, where many young men (and some young women) have been attracted to the glory of the violence in the North. This was certainly true when I was younger, before the establishment of peace following the Good Friday Accords in 1998. Young Irish-American and Irish-Canadian men would hold romanticised images of the IRA and the resistance “back home”. Most have long since grown out of this fascination with the IRA, of course. (This did, however, inspire Bono to go on a legendary rant during a performance of “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” during the 1987 Joshua Tree tour, which was released on the DVD of Rattle & Hum).
The Strange Anglo Fascination with Québécois Anti-Semitism
December 13, 2012 § Leave a comment
I am a reader. I read pretty much anything, fiction and non-fiction. As I have argued for approximately forever, reading, and especially, literature, is what keeps me sane. So I read. It’s also the end of the semester, so what I read devolves in many ways from lofty literature to murder-mysteries. I would argue, though, that a good murder-mystery is full of the basic questions of humanity, right down to the endless push/pull of good v. evil. I came to this conclusion when someone once tried to convince me that Dostoyevsky’s Crime And Punishment was, at the core, a murder-mystery.
So, it is that I came to find myself reading the third in John Farrow’s so-far excellent series of murder mysteries set in my home town, Montréal, and featuring the crusty old detective, Émile Cinq-Mars. The third novel, however, centres around Cinq-Mars’ early career in the late 60s/early 70s. And Farrow, who is really the esteemed Canadian novelist, Trevor Ferguson, took the opportunity to write an epic, historical novel. It’s also massively overambitious and falls under its own weight oftentimes in the first half of the book. The novel opens on the night of the Richard Riot in Montréal, 17 March 1955, with the theft of the Cartier Dagger, a relic of Jacques Cartier’s arrival at Hochelaga in the 16th century. The dagger, made of stone and gifted to Cartier by Donnacona, the chief of Stadacona, which is today’s Québec City, has been central to the development of Canada. It has ended up in the hands of Samuel de Champlain, Étienne Brulé, Paul de Chomedy, sieur de Maisonneuve, Dollard des Ormeux, Médard Chouart des Groselliers, Pierre Esprit Radisson, and so on. But it has ended up in the hands of the Sun Life Assurance Company, the very simple of les maudits Anglais in mid-20th century Montréal. Worse for the québécois, Sun Life has lent it to that mandarin of ‘les maudits anglais,” Clarence Campbell, president of the National Hockey League, and the man responsible for the lengthy suspension to Maurice “The Rocket” Richard. Clearly, Farrow subscribes to the theory that the Quiet Revolution really began in March 1955 (I do not agree with this one bit, thank you very much).
Farrow then takes us through the history of the dagger, from Cartier until it ends up in the hands of Campbell, to its theft on St. Patrick’s Day 1955. And from there, we move through the next sixteen years, through the Quiet Revolution, Trudeaumania, and the FLQ, as Cinq-Mars finally solves the mystery of the theft of the Cartier Dagger in 1971 (which was also the year that an unknown goalie came out of nowhere to backstop the Habs to the Stanley Cup).
All throughout the story, Farrow, in true Anglo-Montréal style, is obsessed with franco-québécois anti-semitism. This is especially the case from the late 19th century onwards. We are brought into the shadowy underworld of the Order of Jacques Cartier, a secret society hell-bent on defending French, Catholic Québec against les Anglais and the Jews. Characters real and fictive are in the Order, including legendary Montréal Mayor Camillien Houde, and Camille Laurin, the father of Bill 101, and others. And then there’s the Nazi on the run after the Second World War, Jacques Dugé de Bernonville. We also meet Pierre Elliott Trudeau and his nemesis, René Levésque.
Outed as anti-semites are the usual characters: Maurice Duplessis, Abbé Lionel Groulx, Houde, Laurin, and, obviously, de Bernonville. Also, Henri Bourassa and Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine. And so on and so forth. And, ok, fair enough, they WERE anti-semites (though I’m not sure you can call Bourassa and Lafontaine that). Québec, and Montréal in particular, was the home of Adrien Arcand, the self-proclaimed fuhrer of Canada. These are disgusting, dirty men.
But all throughout the novel, only French Canadian anti-semitism matters. This reminds me of a listserv of policy wonks, academics, and journalists I’ve been a member of for a decade-and-a-half. Years ago, we had one member who liked to rail against the sovereigntists in Québec, accusing them of being vile anti-semites (sometimes he was right). But, whenever evidence of wider Canadian anti-semitism was pointed out, he dismissed it out of hand. In his mind, only the French are anti-semites (to the point where he often pointed to the Affair Dreyfus in late 19th century France as proof the québécois are anti-semites to the core).
I am not suggesting that anti-semitism should not be called out for what it is: racism. It must and should be. But whenever we get this reactionary Anglophone obsession with Franco-québécois anti-semitism, I get uncomfortable. This is a bad case of the pot calling the kettle black. Anti-semitism has been prevalent in Canada since the get go, in both official languages. The first Jew to be elected to public office in the entire British Empire was Ezekiel Hart, elected to the Lower Canadian legislature in 1807. But he was ejected from the House almost immediately upon taking his seat because he was Jewish. The objections to Hart taking his oath of office on the Jewish Bible (which was standard practice in the court system for Jews) were led the Attorney-General, Jonathan Sewell. But the people of Trois-Rivières returned him to office nonetheless. He was again refused his seat. Opposition came from both sides of the linguistic divide in Lower Canada, and you will surely note Sewell is not a French name. Lower Canada, however, was the first jurisdiction in the British Empire to emancipate Jews, in 1833. The leader of the House, and the Parti patriote? Louis-Joseph Papineau.
At any rate, this isn’t a defence of the franco-québécois record on anti-semitism. It’s not good. But it is to point out that Anglo Canada isn’t exactly pristine. Irving Abella and and Harold Troper’s book, None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933-1948 makes that point clear. Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King’s immigration chief, Frederick Blair, made sure that Jews fleeing Nazi Germany weren’t allowed into Canada. Jews had been coming to Canada since the late 19th century, and there, they met an anti-semitic response, whether it was Montréal, Toronto, or Winnipeg. Even one of our great Canadian heroes, Lester Bowles Pearson, Nobel Prize-winner for inventing UN Peacekeepers and Prime Minister from 1965-7, was an anti-semite, at least as a young man before the Second World War.
And anti-semitism has remained a problem in Canada ever since. While anti-semitism is relatively rare in Canada, B’Nai Brith estimates that, in 2010, upwards of 475 incidents of anti-semitism happened in Toronto alone.
So clearly Canadian anti-semitism isn’t a uniquely franco-québécois matter. Indeed, one of the few Anglos to feature in Farrow’s book, Sir Herbert Holt, was himself somewhat of an anti-semite himself. And I am left feeling rather uncomfortable with this strange Anglo Québec fascination with the anti-semitism of francophone québécois, especially when it’s presented out of the context of the late 19th/early 20th centuries. This was a period of pretty much worldwide anti-semitism. It was “in fashion,” so to speak, in the Euro-North American world, from actual pogroms in Russia to the Affaire Dreyfus, to the US and Canada refusing to accept refugees from Nazi Germany thirty years later.
On Irish Historiography, Revisionism, and the Troubles
August 22, 2011 § 3 Comments
Last month, at the Annual Conference of the Canadian Association of Irish Studies at my alma-mater, Concordia University, I was witness to an interesting discussion about revisionism in Irish historiography. The discussion centred around issues of identity in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. In particular, the issue of binaries, in that one was either Protestant or Catholic and the twain never met.
I have long had problems with revisionist history (in the historiographical sense, let me be clear), in that it seeks to normalise, which means it plays down the unusual, the anachronisms, and so on. In some ways, this is a good thing. In the case of Ireland, there is some good which has come out of revisionism, most notably, we are free to focus less on the stereotypical tragic history of a “famished land, who fortune could not save” (to quote the Pogues). In short, Ireland is free to become (to borrow from revisionism in Québec historiography) “une nation comme les autres.” Revisionism also leads us to post-structuralism and allows us to get past the binaries in many ways: Catholic v. Protestant, man v. woman, city v. rural, North v. South, Ireland v. England, etc. We can see the greys now, a process begun with the muddying of the playing field by the great revisionists of the 20th century: T.W. Moody and Robert Dudley Edwards, as well as the great troubadour of revisionism of our era: Roy Foster.
But, this becomes problematic when taken too far. When we become too focussed on seeing past the binaries, to see all the ways Catholics and Protestants got along in Belfast, in Derry, and across the North, we run a new risk. And that is to trivialise the Troubles. The Troubles was, ultimately, a civil war between nationalists and unionists in Northern Ireland. For the most part, we have long used “nationalist” and “Catholic” and “Protestant” and “unionist” as synonyms. And it is good to see across the lines, to see the attempts at peace-building and community-making in the midst of the terror and devastation of the Troubles. But if we push this impulse too far, then we are blind to the Troubles (or any other conflict that relies on binaries). There is a reason that those two sets of words were/are seen synonymously. It remains that over 3,500 people are dead, countless lives were torn asunder, and the two cities of Northern Ireland, Belfast and Derry, still bear the scars of the Troubles on their landscapes.
We, as historians can try all we like to see past the binaries here, but the simple fact remains that this binary was a pretty fundamental one, it resonated with people, it caused them to fight, sometimes to the death, for what they believed in. It caused them to engage in terrorism. It tore families and communities apart. We cannot lose sight of that.
On Hatred and Continuums: DeSean Jackson and GK Chesterton
July 11, 2011 § Leave a comment
Apparently Philadelphia Eagles’ wide receiver, DeSean Jackson, said something stupid on satellite radio last week, using homophobic slurs to shut down a caller. He later apologised on Twitter, but followed that up with a stupid comment about himself being the victim of people trying to take him down, though he has since deleted that tweet and replaced it with more apologies. Big deal, right? Well, sort of. See, Jackson has done a lot of good work in the world on behalf of bullied children, and bullying a belligerent caller makes him, well, a bully and therefore a hypocrite.
But the larger issue is the gay slur. Dan Graziano of ESPN comments that this hardly makes Jackson a homophobe, it just makes him stupid. “Gay” is a multi-faceted term, and is often used as a putdown or a dismissal in much the same way “sucks” is. That doesn’t make it right, however. In fact, it makes it offensive. For sure, Jackson wasn’t thinking of the deeper significance of the slur when he used it, but the very fact that “gay” is used in a negative connotation to note something sucks is problematic. “Gay” is a negative term in this sense, and that, I would argue, connects it to homophobia, even though it might not actually be homophobic. Either way, there is a continuum here.
I read all of this this morning after having read the most recent issue of the Times Literary Supplement I have received, due to the Canada Post strike. It’s dated 10 June. Anyway, the feature review is a discussion of two recent works on G.K. Chesterton (it’s behind the Times’ paywall, so I haven’t linked it here). I am no expert on Chesterton, in fact, I have never read him, nor am I all that likely to do so in the future, so take this for what it’s worth.
In discussing Ian Ker’s new biography of Chesterton, G.K. Chesterton: A Biography, reviewer Bernard Manzo discusses the charges of anti-Semitism against Chesterton. First, let it be clear that Chesterton lived during a time when anti-Semitism was fashionable in the European and North American world. Second, anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism. Both Ker and Manzo attempt to downplay Chesterton’s anti-Semitism, to qualify it. I’m not so sure.
Both Manzo and Ker point out that Chesterton did not believe Jews to be capable of being Italian, English, French, etc., due to the simple fact that they were Jews, and that “Jews should be represented by Jews and ruled by Jews” and that they should have their own homeland. Indeed, Chesterton argued that all Christians should be Zionist, though, ironically, he also argued that no Christian should be an anti-Semite. Ironic because he was one.
Chesterton also argued that those Jews who lived in other countries should be sent to homelands, not unlike that imagined by Michael Chabon in his novel, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. Or perhaps, more to the point, not unlike the “homelands” for black South Africans during the Apartheid era, or reserves for aboriginals in Canada, or, ghettos for Jews in Nazi Europe. But Ker (and Manzo) think that this could not have been the logical outcome for Chesterton, who was “perfectly sincere” in his suggestion that Jews be excluded from mainstream society.
Both Ker and Manzo play down this anti-Semitism, arguing that it needs to be cast in light of Chesterton’s deep abhorrence of Nazism and its vicious anti-Semitism in the years before his death in 1936. I remain unconvinced. Certainly, Chesterton’s anti-Semitism did not advocate the extreme ends of Hitler and the Nazis. But that doesn’t make it ok. It doesn’t mean that Chesterton was not an anti-Semite. Qualifications such as that made by Ker and Manzo are problematic, in that they simply point to complications of character.
Certainly, we are complicated creatures, we have internal contradictions and ambiguities, that’s what makes us human. But it should not let Chesterton off the hook anymore than noting that he lived in an era when anti-Semitism was fashionable. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has argued that Nazism was the logical outcome of this pan-Atlantic world anti-Semitism (he is less successful in arguing Germans were complicit in the Holocaust). If this is indeed the case, then Chesterton belongs on the continuum of Atlantic world anti-Semitism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And attempts to discount it like those of Ker and Manzo are simply intellectual gymnastics and reek of intellectual dishonesty.
The Real and True Story of the Birth of Rap Music
April 2, 2011 § Leave a comment
First, I have been MIA for a bit from here @ Spatialities and from my duties over @ Current Intelligence. I have been off on medical leave from work since February. Regular programming here and @ CI will resume shortly. In the meantime, I am spending a lot of my time recovering reading. I have been ploughing through books, taking advantage of all of this free time to read. I’ve been reading all kinds of things, both fiction and non-fiction, everything from paperback novels to philosophical ones, from philosophy to history and current affairs. The fruits of my labours will soon be appearing on my CI blog, “Advance Copy.”
Anyway.
I teach Western Civ every semester. Teaching the same course over and over again, well, I need to find ways to make it interesting. And for the students, too, they are forced to take the course, it’s a requirement in the Social Sciences programme at John Abbott College. So, we all need coping mechanisms. One is obviously humour. When we get to the Reformation, we get to that great anti-Semite, Martin Luther (who my students inevitably confuse with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King). And whilst explaining how the Lutheran Reformation came to be, I discuss the protection Luther received from Frederick of Saxony, who gave Luther shelter against the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. As an aside, Frederick was actually the pope’s choice to become the next Holy Roman Emperor in 1519. Turns out it was a good thing he didn’t become Holy Roman Emperor, since Frederick was instrumental in the Lutheran Reformation.
Back to the main point: there is this great picture of Luther and a bunch of other men standing behind Frederick, a rather large, portly man, who is standing in what can only be described as his b-boy stance, wearing some heavy gold jewellery around his neck (see picture below), with his posse (Luther is the sour-faced dude at Frederick’s right shoulder). I explain to my students that Frederick was actually the first gangsta rapper in history.
It turns out, however, I was wrong. Frederick was not the first gangsta rapper in history. Moreover, rap was not, as has long been thought, invented in the Boogie Down Bronx in the 1970s. Nope, rather, rap was invented in the early 7th century Before Common Era by the Assyrian emperor, Sennacherib, following his defeat of the Elamites in 691 BCE.
Sennacherib had his court historian record the events of the war, from the emperor’s point of view. The account of the war is pure braggadocio, hype, and chest-thumping, not unlike early hip hop. See, for example, KRS-One’s video for “Outta Here” from 1993.
Compare KRS-One’s lyrics with Sennacherib’s account, taken from a quote in John Keegan’s A History of Warfare, the quote itself taken from H. Saggs’ The Might That Was Assyria:
I cut their throats like sheep…My prancing steeds, trained to harness, plunged into their welling blood as into a river; the wheels of my battle chariots were bespattered with blood and filth. I filled the plain with the corpses of their warriors like herbage…[There were] chariots with their horses, whose riders had been slain as they came into the fierce battle, so that they were loose by themselves, those horses kept going back and forth all over [the battlefield]…As to the sheikhs of the Chaldaceans [Elamite allies], panic from my onslaught overwhelmed them like a demon. They abandoned their tents and fled for their lives, crushing the corpses of their troops as they went…[In their terror] they passed scalding urine and voided their excrement in their chariots.
Seriously, just throw a beat under that, and you’ve got a dope track. So, hip hop, it turns out, is approximately 2800 years older than we thought it was.
The Redemptorists
January 10, 2011 § 2 Comments
I went to mass on Christmas Day, I’m not Catholic, but I kind of like the tradition. This year we were in Keene, NH, where my sister-in-law lives. The priest had as the theme of his Christmas morning sermon “redemption,” noting that that was the true meaning of the season. I like to think that is one of the good points of Catholicism, that redemption is granted through the fallibility of humanity, God’s forgiveness for our sins, in part through the sacrifice of Jesus, in part through confession. I presume that this is where the Redemptorist Brothers got their name, their job being to redeem the souls of both their parishioners, as well as their converts (they are a missionary brotherhood).
Anyway, all of this is by way of introduction of my destination tomorrow in Toronto: the archives of the Redemptorists. The Redemptorists were the parish priests in Griffintown from 1885 until the destruction of St. Ann’s Church in 1970, and the ultimate closing of the parish a dozen or so years later. So far as I know, no one has actually gone in and looked at the brothers’ records from Griffintown. I was told about them years ago by Rosalyn Trigger, who was at the time doing her PhD at McGill, but I never found the time to get to Toronto to look at them when I was researching my PhD. Funny: last time I saw my supervisor, Ron Rudin, a few months ago, I was telling him about my plans to go take a look as I finished off the research for the book. He wondered if he could take back my PhD for keeping knowledge of this archive from him. ‘Fraid not, Ron.
Anyway, I’m rather excited to be heading to the archive tomorrow morning to see what I can find, to deepen our general knowledge of Irish-Catholic Griffintown, it will also add something to my book that is not in other histories of the neighbourhood, including my own dissertation.
That the Redemptorist priests were popular in their parish of St. Ann’s is not in doubt. In 1885, when the Sulpicians were stripped of their parish of St. Ann’s, the Irish-Catholics of Griffintown were furious, to the point where they remonstrated with the Bishop of Montréal. However, the Redemptorists, upon their arrival, were able to almost instantly win the hearts and minds of their parishioners, by investing money in the church and parish. By the time that Father Strubbe, the “Belgian Irishman,” was recalled to Belgium, the Irish-Catholics were loudly remonstrating with the powers-that-be over this decision. All the former Griffintowners that I have done oral histories with fondly recall the priests of St. Ann’s, in particular Fr. Kearney.
So I’m hoping here to find out how the priests saw their impoverished parishioners, what they felt they could do for them, whether they enjoyed being in Griffintown, their impressions of the neighbourhood. I’m also interested in the question of faith. All of the former Griffintowners I’ve talked to, as well as all other evidence I’ve seen, shows a very Catholic community, one where people took the ceremonies and rituals of their faith. But what has always interested me is whether this was just that: familiar ritual. One thing the Church is very good at is giving its faithful ritual and ceremony that are both familiar and reassuring. But I’ve always wondered how deep the idea of faith goes, not just with respect to Griffintown, but the Catholic Church in general.
Then there’s the question of Irishness. One of the reasons the Griffintowners protested the removal of the Sulpicians in 1885 was because the Sulpicians were very good about ensuring the parish priests at St. Ann’s were Irish. The Redemptorists who arrived in Griffintown that year were all Belgian. Of course, Fr. Strubbe was able to win over his parishioners and even gain status as an Irishman by the time of his recall. And by the mid-20th century, the priests, like Fr. Kearney, were Irish once more. Was this a conscious decision by the Redemptorists and the Bishop to represent the faithful? What did the priests make of the Irishness of their parishioners?
So here’s hoping I can begin to find some answers to these questions in the archive.
The Irish & Crime in 19th Century North America
May 4, 2010 § 7 Comments
WordPress lets me see what search terms lead people to this site. Usually, they’re predictable, people searching my name, or Griffintown, or things along those lines. But today, there is this term: “explain the strong association between the 19th century irish diaspora and crime?” So, explain I shall.
Yes, this is a stereotype. But behind this stereotype is some kind of truth. Yes, the Irish, especially Catholics in inner cities, tended to find themselves in trouble with the law in disproportionate fashion in the 19th century. This was particularly true in port cities: Montréal, Saint John (NB), Halifax, Boston, New York, Philly. 19th century sailors were hard-living men. And the consequence of that was an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of police stations in those cities. And, yes, a lot of those sailors were Irish Catholics.
There was also the matter of labour violence. The Irish tended to do the kinds of jobs that no one else would, but they also tended to guard their employment jealously, in that if someone else wanted to do their work (free blacks in the States, French Canadians in Québec), they would protect their right to work. Oftentimes with violence when others threatened to undercut their wages (and the Irish tended to do work on very thin margins to start with).
Connected to this was ethnic/racial violence. For example, the Bowery B’hoys Riot of 1857 in the Five Points of Manhattan, where the Irish Catholics who had recently settled there were attacked by the nativist gang, the Bowery B’hoys. Or in York Point, Saint John, in 1849, when the ultra-Protestant Orange Order insisted on marching through an Irish Catholic neighbourhood on the Glorious 12th. Or more internecine battles in places like Philadelphia between black and Irish workers.
As an aside, this has led to one of the most simplistic arguments I’ve ever come across. Noel Ignatiev, in his overly dramatic How the Irish Became White (in order to “become white,” you have to first be considered something other than “white,” and I’m not convinced that the Irish were ever seen this way), argues that slavery essentially lasted another generation in the United States because the Irish Catholic immigrants to New York and Philadelphia, poor working-class immigrants, I might add, refused to throw their lot in with the free black populations of those 2 cities prior to the US Civil War. Had they, he argues, slavery would’ve ended. So, in essence, Ignatiev argues that the Irish “became white” by siding with the Anglo-Protestant hegemons in the United Sates against the blacks. Of course, to have expected anything different is just, well, simple. Why would the Irish side with the blacks? The blacks were the only other group of people down near the bottom of the socio-econo-cultural totem pole with the Irish. So, obviously, they’re going to try to distance themselves.
Anyway, I digress. Political violence. Well, politics were corrupt in the 19th century, pure and simple, whether it was Tammany Hall in New York, or battles against Anglo-Protestant hegemony in Montréal, corruption was everywhere, and violence was a common tactic by all sides. The Irish got their shots in just like everyone else.
But the most common reason why the Irish found themselves in trouble with the law in North America wasn’t any of this. It was the drink. The Irish were a disproportionate number of public drunks in North American cities, at least in the northeast of the US and Eastern Canada, for much of the 19th century. But, before we get into stereotypes of the Irish and the drink, let us remind ourselves of something else: they were the working-classes, they lived hard lives of unsteady and dodgy employment in the factories, ports, and canals of these cities. Their lives were defined by insecurity, in terms of employment, finances, housing. Inner-cities of Boston, Montréal, New York, Baltimore, in the 19th century were, in many ways, worse than they are today. Housing was worse, social conditions were worse, welfare states were worse. And so, not surprisingly, people tended to distract themselves from their problems with alcohol. And not surprisingly, this means that they ran afoul of the law and ended up getting arrested. And the Irish, well, they were a significant chunk of the urban working-classes in these cities. So, no surprise that they appear so frequently in the crime statistics.
Years ago, I was reading a book by my MA supervisor, Jack Little, about state formation in the Eastern Townships of Québec in the mid-19th century. As the Grand Trunk Railway was being built between Montréal and Portland, ME, in the 1850s, Irish navvies flooded the Townships. A rash of crime broke out along the rail line, and Stipendiary Magistrate Ralph Johnston was dispatched out to Sherbrooke to investigate. The results of his investigation surprised him, and in his report to his bosses in Québec City, he stated that the crime was actually committed by non-Irish Catholic, non-navvies. In short, by locals. And the Irish-Catholics got the blame. “In the eyes of too many,” Johnston wrote, “their crimes are to be Irish and Catholic.”
Yup, racial profiling existed in the 19th century too.
New Project: Current Intelligence
March 11, 2010 § Leave a comment
The Complex Terrain Laboratory is being retired. Mike, Eric, et tout le gang from the Lab, have begun a new project, called Current Intelligence:
is a journal of opinion and analysis. Its editors and writers are preoccupied broadly with culture, politics and current affairs; narrowly with conflict,crisis, and the state of the world “out there”; and laterally with the intellectual concerns of those who research, teach, and write about the issues.
We went live on Monday, 8 March, and we will publish daily, Monday-Friday, with a quarterly print journal as well. Current Intelligence comes with its own set of sections:
- The Editor’s Desk: daily must-reads
- The Agenda: informed comment on headline issues
- The Big Smoke: reporting on London’s wealth of current affairs talk (starting in May, 2010)
- The Quiet American: analysis of foreign policy, military intervention, human rights & humanitarian affairs
- Letters From Abroad: dispatches from field researchers, expats and other travelers
We can even be found on Twitter.
So, come on over, grab a coffee and read what we’ve got to say. As for me, I’ll continue to offer my own particular position on issues that require a deeper, historical, long-view of understanding.
Mr. Islamophobe
March 6, 2010 § 2 Comments
I’m on this listserv, I’ve been on it for over a decade, and I’m really just too lazy to unsubscribe. Occasionally, my laziness is rewarded with insightful commentary on Canada and the world. More often than not, I’m exposed to anti-Semitism from one member and anti-Islamic propaganda from another. Most recently, Mr. Islamaphobe (who is also of the opinion that feminism has destroyed our culture, and if it wasn’t feminism or Islam, it was the left, and if not them, then it was the environmentalists) has declared that Islam is a religion bent on world domination, supporting Geert Weders’ idea that, although there are moderate Muslims, there is no moderate Islam. I find this kind of commentary not just offensive, but stupid.
Both Christianity and Judaism are evangelical religions, they both seek new adherents wherever they are taken. If Islam is, as Mr. Islamophobe argues, hell bent on world domination, Christianity is even more so. The various Christian churches have spent much of the past two millenia seeking new converts, first as it expanded out of the Holy Lands into the European portion of the Roman Empire, then throughout Europe and North Africa, into Asia, across the Atlantic to the Americas, into sub-Saharan Africa, and Oceania. Islam has also similarly expanded out of the Holy Lands to become a global force.
Of course, the difference for Mr. Islamophobe is that Christianity is his culture/religion. Thus, for him, Christianity and the culture it has created stand for all that is good and great and beautiful in the world, whereas Islam stands for all that is evil and rotten in the world.
Matthew Barlow 