bob tarantino

"a very happy result"

Okay, I'll ask.  Andrew Potter posits that "most of the important theoretical developments that gave rise to what we call “the sixties” actually happened a decade or two earlier".  David Frum argues, in his How We Got Here - The 70s: The Decade that Brought You Modern Life - For Better or Worse (which is really an underappreciated book, IMHO), that the "1960s have a reputation as America's turning-point decade, but ... that the 10 years following mattered more" (those aren't Frum's words, but Amazon's, but they capture his argument).  Both Frum and Potter are smarter than me by a few orders of magnitude, but the question is begged - did anything of consequence actually happen in the 1960s?  Aside from, say, "Stray Cat Blues"?

"charged, convicted and sentenced"

The months since July 2007 have been among the busiest of my career, so I've been unfortunately unable to devote the kind of time I'd like to addressing various matters (legal, political and otherwise) on this blog.  In particular, the recent brouhahas over human rights commission complaints being filed against Maclean's and against Ezra Levant and the Western Standard engage free expression issues in which I have a particular interest, so it's been frustrating for me to be silent on the matters, but others have been doing a much better job of covering them then I'd be able to.  I have been, let us say, derelict in my duties as a member of the vast rightwing conspiracy.  Happily, others have been addressing the issues with much more eloquence and attention than I'd have been able to muster, so my voice has hardly been missed.  A couple of weeks ago I did find the time to pen an op-ed piece which the good folks at the National Post were generous enough to publish today.  It can be found online here, and on page A16 of the print edition.

The piece doesn't begin to contain much of what I'd like to say about the matters, but I thought it might provide some useful context for at least part of the discussion.  I don't love the title ("The Free-Speech Myth") which was appended to the op-ed, but I wasn't really able to offer any better suggestions.  Of more concern, there was one paragraph which lost a sentence in the editing process, which I'd like to add back in because the nuance is important - the underlined portion was in the original but missing from the final version:

Canadians have long sought to define the proper limits of speech and expression: The government once banned the tracts of Jehovah's Witnesses, and pulled Witness children who refused to salute the flag not just out of school, but out of the home of their parents. When the Doukhobor religious sect staged events of public nudity to give expression to their rejection of secular authority, the government responded by amending the Criminal Code to add a specific crime carrying an increased jail term.  These days, and for many years now, various mayors of Toronto have happily participated in Pride parades which feature enthusiastic displays of public nudity.

I was trying to highlight the juxtaposition in how we respond to public nudity: it was once considered a threat dire enough to warrant parliamentary attention, but our concerns have sufficiently morphed over the years that leading public figures will happily associate themselves with it.  The point, and hopefully the theme which came through in the column, isn't the normative aspect of the behaviour, but that our responses to the behaviour are in a constant state of reassessment and revision.  Much the same with free expression: what is considered acceptable expression has rather radically changed over the decades, and will likely continue to do so.  This is all a political project, and should be treated as such.  As I wrote, "In short, the objects of our piety may have changed, but the inclination to government oversight of speech and expression isn't terribly different".

"a very strange, wild appearance"

To speak in a perhaps too-reductionist manner, the urban environment is best seen as the site of a struggle against an ever-encroaching natural environment - a city is ultimately an effort to carve out a space for commerce and leisure.  We expect a certain amount of permanence from urban environments, and tend to view any unmoderated yielding of it with a sense of discomfort (this is distinct from mediated attempts at combining urban and natural environments or maintaing natural environments in the midst of encroaching urban sprawl, like, say, High Park, Central Park or Rouge Park).  I was always a bit taken aback by the notion, for example, that the Roman Forum, heart of the ancient capital, was for centuries little more than a debris field which require excavation. 

Understanding how nature gives way to a city isn't terribly difficult to understand; but how, precisely, does a city give way to nature?  It's apparently happening in Detroit.  Check out the photos at detroitblog, which show entire neighbourhoods being overtaken by plants and wildlife - even, bizarre as it seems, abandoned downtown skyscrapers being reclaimed.

"in the past, the disparities"

Need some help here.  Mark Steyn has been on a bit of a demography and immigration kick lately in case you hadn't noticed, and in making his "demography is destiny" argument, he's had to confront a bit of a conundrum: as high as immigration rates are currently, they have been as high or higher at certain times in the past.  (I write this post without delving too deeply into the slightly disturbing strains of hysteria which seemed to grip some parts of the Canadian blogosphere within the past couple of months after the most recent Canadian 2006 Census report came out about immigration and urbanization trends - one day I'd like to take some time and examine some of the more disturbing anti-immigration rhetoric which came out of that, but I didn't have time then and don't really have time now... so it'll have to wait.)  I don't mean to simplify Steyn's argument, because I don't think it is one which is easily dismissed out of hand, nor is it the same argument which it is caricatured as by some of those who consider themselves on the other side of the political divide from Steyn.  But this post isn't about Steyn's broader argument - rather, it is about a particular passage from one of his most recent columns in The Western Standard.

The column can be found here (registration required) - the full text should be online in a few weeks (the Standard keeps opinion columns from its current print issue (or at least Steyn's columns) behind a registration wall until the next print issue is available).  Here is the passage:

Prior to the boom of the nineties and oughts, the all-time blockbuster immigration year was 1913, when 400,000 "new Canadians" arrived.  Whether they looked at it like that is another matter: most of them were British subjects moving from one part of His Majesty's realms to another.  In that sense, it was not "immigration" at all, or not as currently understood.  The 2006 census numbers take as a given that the Canada of the 21st century will be a project built almost exclusively by foreigners.

Here's the thing: I'm not quite convinced that the factual underpinning for Steyn's argument is correct.  Problem is, I'm having a bit of trouble coming to a conclusion one way or the other.  So here's the question: in 1913, did "most" immigrants to Canada consist of Britsh subjects?  That doesn't sound quite right, but I could be entirely wrong.  I'm trying to find authoritative sources on the matter, but am having a bit of trouble, so I'm wondering if someone reading this might be able to find something (Selley? You still out there?).

Here's what I've been able to find thus far.  This site contains some handy charts which set out the ethnic origin of immigrants to Canada from 1896 to 1915 (with the onset of the First World War, immigration plunged to negligible levels).  So far as I can tell, for the year in question (1913) British subjects comprised 39.5% of immigrants to Canada, a number which is roughly comparable for the five preceding years (some years it was slightly higher, some years lower).  The site lists "Statistics Section - Department of Citizenship and Immigration Canada" as its source, but doesn't provide any pertinent links.

The closest set of relevant data from StatsCan itself is in this issue of Canadian Social Trends, published by StatsCan.  The article "100 years of immigration in Canada" is a wealth of information, and anyone interested in the topic is strongly encouraged to spend some time reading it.  On page 4, we find this passage: "At the start of the century the majority of immigrants to Canada had originated in the United States or the United Kingdom.  However, during the 1910s and 1920s, the number born in other European countries began to grow, slowly at first, and then rising to its highest levels in 1961 and 1971."  On page 10, there is a graph which I find difficult to read with any precision, which purports to show the relative numbers of immigrants from different ethnic backgrounds.  But the numbers of immigrants from the UK as reflected in the graph seem significantly higher than the numbers shown at the Ships List site linked to above.

So, can anyone find an online Statscan source which provides, in numerical rather than graphical form, numbers for immigration by ethnic group for the opening years of the twentieth century?

"no better way of leaving this life"

History buffs should find this fascinating:

A British secret agent who offered to blow up Adolf Hitler at the height of the Second World War was dissuaded from carrying out the assassination by MI5, according to newly released wartime archives.

The offer to kill Hitler in a suicide mission was made by Eddie Chapman, a professional criminal and safe-breaker who was trained by the Nazis as a spy and went on to become one of Britain’s most successful double agents, codenamed Agent Zigzag.

The story just gets more interesting from there.

"madcap schemes and daring ruses"

This piece, by Anne Applebaum, offers some reflections on the recent beneficence that the former head of East Germany's foreign intelligence service had passed away.  It's a good reminder of a couple of principles worth bearing in mind - first, that evil always turns in on itself:

And yet, for all his preening, Wolf and his comrades did not win the Cold War. Nor, for all the CIA's ham-handedness, did the agents of communism even win the intelligence war. Invariably, Western agents received their best information not through psychological manipulation and complex schemes, but because Soviet and Eastern European defectors offered themselves up voluntarily. Col. Ryszard Kuklinski, the Polish Warsaw Pact liaison, passed 35,000 pages of mostly Russian documents to the West because he'd seen plans for a Russian invasion of the West, during which Poland would be completely destroyed. Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB officer who worked as a double agent for British intelligence, did so because the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia had gutted his faith in Soviet propaganda.

- second, that what will help win an ideological struggle is, er, well having a better ideology:

Even as he fought on behalf of the Soviet Union and its client states, Wolf—who had spent his boyhood in Stalinist Moscow—knew perfectly well that the West was more just, more affluent, and more humane than his own cramped, repressive society. Most ordinary people knew it, too. As we now debate torture, or domestic spying, or other dubious methods that will allegedly help us defeat radical Islam, it's worth remembering that the West won the Cold War not by matching the nastiness of Markus Wolf—though some certainly tried to do so—but by being, and remaining, a more open society.

Quite.  We have a culture and society of immense resiliency and attractiveness - not because if you packaged it up and presented it to someone they'd say "Hey, what a fantastic, learned culture y'all have - look, Paris Hilton's new album!", but because it's incapable of being compartmentalized like that.  People get itchy to learn more when they grow up in the exurbs of Toronto or Baltimore - imagine how ready to rock you'd be if you came of age in, say, one of the neglected quarters of Nairobi.  Our polyglot culture will out because it's stronger, more adaptable, more sympathetic, more enjoyable, more... well, given some of the theofascist available alternatives, its just better.