Another lesson in the national character?

This is a story that jogged my memory back to when I spent a semester in my senior high school years studying Canadian and German aviation history in the First World War.  That would have been back in late 1999, and I remember then lamenting how Captain Roy Brown had been largely forgotten in official memory, despite his very prominent place in aviation history. 



Above is probably one of the most memorable photographs of the man.  Brown, who was born in Carleton Place, Ontario, in December 1893, but wound up living just outside of Stouffville up to his death, was long credited with being the fighter pilot who, in his Sopwith Camel, shot down and killed Manfred von Richthofen – otherwise known as the Red Baron.  Brown was an ace in his own right (13 official victories), and had the noble record of not losing a single pilot under his command because of his strict training requirements.  His career in the First World War was often interrupted by injury and illness – at one point, because of peptic ulcers, he lived on a diet of milk and brandy, which likely was also used to cope with the frayed nerves that came with being a fighter pilot.  Sopwiths killed more airmen on the ground than they ever did while in the air, and he had a fair share of run-ins with the unruly planes. 

In the fall of 1917, he won the prestigious Distinguished Service Cross for his courage in battle.  With a jammed gun, he flew to rescue a lone British fighter who was being circled by four German Albatrosses.  In the confusion that ensued, both Brown and the serviceman managed to escape and survive. 

Brown was not one to brag about his accomplishments, and after 1918, he did not do the celebrity circus of public speaking and sabre-rattling, maintaining instead a quiet modesty over the feat with which he had been controversially credited (two Australian ground-gunners had also been credited with killing Richthofen).  After the First World War, Brown bought a farmhouse outside of Stouffville, and ran as a Liberal candidate in the 1943 Ontario election, though lost to the Progressive Conservative contender.  His day job was as an accountant, and he did that up to his death in March 1944 of a heart attack.  He was buried in Aurora Cemetery; some time in the 1960s – or so say Internet records and searches – his remains were transferred to a location somewhere in Toronto, but specific details are not known.  One writer, Dan McCaffery, who also happens to be the author of a definitive study of Billy Bishop, reports that Brown sometimes received death threats from some who remained enraged that he had killed the Red Baron.    

All of this is known about Brown, but official recognition and homage has not been accorded to him until now.  Then again, perhaps with the notable exception of Billy Bishop, much the same can be said of Canada’s other airmen.  Carleton Place, his hometown, will soon unveil a mural of Brown where recognition might at last begin, fully ninety-four years after the end of the First World War, and sixty-eight after Brown’s death.  A museum devoted to Brown is also slated to open soon.  Visitors to the Bishop museum in Owen Sound sometimes mistakenly think that Bishop is the one that downed Richthofen.  They did indeed encounter each other in the skies over the Western Front, sometime in 1916, but that was all. 

So says a Carleton Place Town Councillor: “The Canadian focus has always been on Billy Bishop and he was a fantastic pilot, no doubt, but he couldn’t be all places at all times.  Brown’s story itself is very interesting.  He never lost a pilot under his command and he was always very modest…He didn’t want to talk about the Baron.  There has been controversy over what happened ever since.” 

Brown and other aces like him form not only an important and essential aspect of Canada’s military and historic heritage.  Canadian airmen dominated the RFC and later RAF, even though it sometimes happened that these men were listed as “British” in order to circumvent the gap between the records of Canadian and British fighters.  They are also hallmarks of Canadian identity and something of a national narrative; a continuity through history that present and future Canadians should learn from and grasp the human story behind war. 

 

After all, one need only look at British efforts in raising awareness of such human connections, such as the life, times and exploits of SOE operatives, or the role of the Home Guard during World War II.  Brown’s life is a microcosm of life, death, victory and defeat during and after one of the most horrific human catastrophes in history, and it has that uniquely Canadian slant to it.  It helps that Brown is part of the ongoing mystery of how Richthofen died.  The controversy is far from over, and at this point will probably never be solved.    

 
Unfortunately, for too long, the Canadian slant has also meant a certain forgetting after the war, which is only now beginning to be reclaimed thanks to the work of a small, faithful few aviation historians and historically-minded decision-makers.  For many years, this neglect was blamed on the narrative of Canadian identity that was being willfully fostered; that Canadians were – and always will remain – a nation of peacekeepers.  Now, in the wake of Canada’s efforts at stabilizing post-Taliban Afghanistan and in coming to grips with a post-9/11 landscape of national security and stability, in which peacekeeping has sadly often become synonymous with appeasement and indecision, perhaps that paradigm is beginning to shift. 

Who will mourn the Celts?

The journalist and historian Marcus Tanner has, since 1988, written books about borderlands and countries that have imploded because of ethnic, religious and cultural differences. His first noteworthy book was a history of Croatia, now into its third edition (2010), and his most recent is about the Hungarian king, Matthias Corvinus, whose kingdom encompassed much of modern-day Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and the Balkans. That said kingdom eclipsed following his death, and the extensive library that Corvinus once owned became scattered, with Hungarian nationalists later claiming that the day his library was restored, the old, greater Hungary would rise again.

Not too long ago, I picked up a copy of one of Tanner’s books that had been sitting on my shelf, waiting to be read. The subject matter, I confess, was somewhat alien to me. All the same, I came away from the experience with a greater appreciation for something that I had previously known little about. The Celtic experience has had lasting influences throughout continental Europe and North America (to say nothing about Australasia, for that matter). I remember, one summer, visiting a site of Celtic ruins just outside Bratislava, Slovakia – the Celts made it farther eastward than that, I later learned.

The Last of the Celts, first published in 2004 (Yale University Press), is a gentle interlude in his literary repertoire that, while not dealing directly with geo-political disintegration, encompasses culture, religion, identity and – most crucially – language, particularly as it concerns the Celtic peoples of the British Isles, Ireland, France, Nova Scotia and Argentina.

Taking the contemporary “Celtic revival” as a backdrop, Tanner argues that this popularity in such a revival is superficial and only skin-deep. One may think of St. Patrick's Day revellers drinking "green beer" to prove their Irish-savvy qualities. True Celtic culture, which has pretty much extensively involved language usage, is steadily declining, even in a fortified place like Wales and its Welsh speakers, and may not last into the next generation.

His book is a combination of historical and cultural analysis, combined with his personal travels and (extremely keen) journalistic observations of these Celtic hinterlands and their people. The result is a fascinating, in-depth, but ultimately melancholy book that chronicles the swan song of the Celtic peoples. It is tragic, not in the least given the Celtic influences to be found in our own cultures worldwide – and this goes beyond Halloween, jack-o-lanterns, bagpipes and fiddlers.

Tanner sets out the two linguistic branches of Celtic languages, Goidelic (Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx) and Brythonic (Welsh, Cornish, and Breton), and visits the Scottish Highlands, the Irish Republic, Northern Ireland, and the Isle of Man before proceeding to both North and South Wales, Cornwall and Brittany. He leaves Europe for Nova Scotia, Canada, where a Scottish settlement once thrived until the turn of the last century, before finishing off in Patagonia (Argentina), of all places, where a number of Welsh colonies were established beginning in the 1860s. These, too, were eventually crushed by linguistic and cultural assimilation, as well as the unfriendly vibes from Argentina’s later authoritarian rulers.

A short review cannot do Tanner’s work proper justice, but it appears that in all ten chapters the experiences have a number of commonalities. Tanner emphasizes that religion once guaranteed a certain preservation of language, but with the spread of Protestantism and Non-Conformism throughout the British Isles, the attacks on the Scottish Gaels, for example, were unrelenting. The eventual decline in religious observance was one factor that consigned the use of these languages to older folks. Along with bagpipes and fiddles, which were slated for bonfires for their apparent decadence-spewing qualities, was also Gaelic.

It survived, as did fiddle- and pipe-playing, in Nova Scotia long after it had eclipsed in Scotland, but Nova Scotia’s modernization and end of isolation, notably after the First World War, unleashed a torrent of Anglicization. Celtic music survives in Nova Scotia, and this is the only remnant of a much larger Celtic identity; Gaelic is pretty much never spoken outside of a few specialists and linguists. In Brittany, the unrelenting presence of French, as well as an official state ideology that permits only French usage and is unfriendly to minority languages, has done similar damage to the Bretons. Most Bretons, it seems, worry more about the economy than the revival of their identity.

Similar is the thorough non-existence of Manx and authentic Cornish, two extinct languages that died out long ago. In Cornwall, the last celebrated Cornish speaker is an unlikely hero, in the form of Dolly Pentreath. Her usage of the language apparently manifested the most when would-be patrons that refused to buy her fish became the objects of Cornish cusses. She died in December 1777. While Cornish experienced a revival in the last century, it is just that: a revival, which likely does not do the original language justice in pronunciation and intonation. To make matters worse, there is a schism among Cornish speakers over authenticity and accuracy, which only serves to fudge any attempts at a real revival.

Welsh and Irish are different, Tanner points out. Northern Ireland, he finds, has bastions of Irish speakers that are greater than in the Irish Republic, particularly in Belfast, though they are no doubt responses to the ugly sectarian violence of the so-called “Troubles.” In the Irish Republic, the usage of Irish is permitted and even encouraged – the Irish government finances Irish-language media, for example – but the unwitting effect is that most Irish prefer English, given it has been so entrenched anyway. “Economically, culturally, gastronomically, sexually, and in terms of fashion, Dublin, London and New York have practically converged. A great levelling of former distinctions has taken place. Sentimental patriotism and a disappearing accent are virtually all that now divide this homogenised society” (p. 347).

There is, however, less of a sense of looming extinction in the Irish cases; less so in Wales, where Tanner finds that Welsh has a banal quality that actually ensures the survival of a language. Tanner recounts an experience at a supermarket in Caernarfon, observing teenagers buying beer, and speaking amongst themselves and the cashier entirely in Welsh. “It surprised me,” he writes, “because in Scotland, Ireland and the Isle of Man I had never seen such mundane activities carried out in anything but English. I had seen or heard Gaelic used in churches, in music and in seminars and on signposts and in beautiful books, but I had never seen it used by what might be described as ‘yobs.’”

He continues: “A language and culture can only stay alive when they are worn casually and unselfconsciously. Welsh has that quality.” Listening to Welsh spoken in a north Pembrokeshire village, Tanner reports being in an “earthly, ordinary place with a jukebox in the corner churning out 1950s American hits,” where “the crowd of men and women shouting at each other above the din spiced their Welsh almost constantly with English swear words. It all seemed alive – a natural affair, rather than some kind of cultural project” (p. 214).

While Welsh may be the high point of The Last of the Celts, not much else by way of Celtic identity and survival has this quality in Tanner’s book. When languages disappear, he points out in his Conclusion, so too do adages, stories, traditions and other bastions of an identity that can never be truly replaced by the best-intentioned revivalists. We are witnessing the end of the Celts, though readers like me may wonder if anyone is even watching.

The end of a hiatus

Not since the fall of 2009 have I posted on this blog, and this is something that I have sought to change for quite some time. I was starkly reminded of this when, a few weeks ago, I helped someone put together their new blog so as to promote their business -- it felt like I was re-learning that which I had already known, and had been doing for many years!

There has certainly not been a shortage of news-worthy subjects on which to write. It is just that 2010-2011 was the year of disappointments for me, and also a rejigging of priorities and professional trajectories. Some intellectual heroes of mine lost their lives. Still others went through personal life changes and tragedies. Christopher Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer, and he continues to receive treatment for it.

On the political front, some crazy things have happened. While everyone continued to lament the state of the economy, even though we are now technically in recovery mode, the Balkans remained much as they have, with Croatia, somewhat grudgingly, moving ahead with their EU-minded reforms.

Montenegro, on which I have written often, has officially become an EU candidate country, and its veteran leader, Milo Djukanovic, stepped down for the second time, to be replaced by Igor Luksic, whom I have met personally on a number of occasions. Kosovo's third anniversary was overshadowed by its continuing problems of governance and corruption (just like its second), as well as lurid allegations that its leaders were involved in some kind of organ harvesting mafia. Serbia, meanwhile, kept teeter-tottering on whether it would speak to Prishtina and launch overdue status talks about minorities, trade, links, and so on.

Amid all of this, the EU has been the watchdog, contending with bailing out irresponsible and volatile member-states like Greece and Ireland facing economic meltdowns. It is something that has brought into question the viability of the Eurozone and the EU project itself -- one, however, that I happily predict will survive the tumult better and bigger. Croatia and Iceland are the newbies to be in the wings, though they will likely be the last of the accession countries for quite some time.

My country, Canada, remains in thrall of a political question that becomes more boring with each passing day. It is one mired in questions of opinion polls, minorities versus majorities, opposition party politics, the viability of coalitions, the evils of separatism and opportunism, and the utter embarrassment of hoped-for leadership that, if the polls are correct, has done nothing to change the landscape on Parliament Hill.

Certainly, my family has gone through a number of transitions and challenges, culminating in illness and life changes that happened so quickly when looking back at them. Things are looking upwards now, and the unknown of the future is partly what makes it so exciting! At the time, though, it was quite dark, which is ultimately why The End of the Line has been put on the back burner.

Rest assured, however, ladies and gentlemen. All of that is now about to change. Over the next few weeks, some changes will be made to this site, but all for the better. The Line is back. 2011 beckons, as does an enhanced, refined and glimmering future. I beseech you to join me in the ride! Thank you, also, for your patience -- I trust that it will have been well worth the wait.

Why on Earth is Slovenia doing this?

Slovenia remains the smallest of the former Yugoslav republics that had the blessed fortune of being spared the devastation wrought on its former co-republics. There were small skirmishes, and a helicopter was shot down on its territory, but the Belgrade-controlled Yugoslav National Army withdrew from Slovenia after just ten days of fighting. Slobodan Milosevic had better things to do, so to speak, by moving on to Croatia, which had a sizable Serb minority, particularly around the Krajina region.

Slovenia (along with Croatia) was the richest of the former Yugoslav republics, and moved towards free market capitalism and democracy the quickest. Some tourist guide books -- and now officials from the Slovene government -- have gotten on the bandwagon, and are trying to get the rest of the world to forget that Slovenia was once part of that bygone entity called Yugoslavia. When academics and journalists talk about the Western Balkans, Slovenia is noticeably not included in this definition.

So, in short, this country of some 1.5 million people (or is it closer to 2 million now?) has fared remarkably well. It joined NATO and the EU in 2004, and was the first ex-communist country with mature-enough financial institutions to join the Eurozone.

With all of this remarkable and exemplary progress, one can only wonder why on Earth Slovenia's government has elected to do this? "Slovenia's ruling coalition parties have joined opposition parties in calling for a referendum on a border deal agreed with Croatia...The four ruling parties as well as Prime Minister Borut Pahor and President Danilo Turk have decided to support the opposition initiative and said on Tuesday they will only ratify the border agreement if it secures majority support in a referendum, expected in early 2010."

Not long ago, newspapers that pay attention to this region of Europe had hailed a victory between Pahor and his Croatian counterpart Jadranka Kosor, who had signed an agreement ostensibly resolving a long-running dispute over the Adriatic Bay of Piran and demarcations between the two countries that were fudged during the Yugoslav period.

The problem? "The move may again complicate Zagreb's bid to join the EU, since Slovenia has blocked Croatia's EU entry negotiations pending a solution to the 18-year-old dispute." One cannot help but be reminded of another referendum in Slovenia's recent past, which embarrassed its leadership and dismayed human rights observers. After independence in 1991, Slovenia removed other Yugoslav nationals living in the country from official registries, thereby stripping them of their residency rights.

The government moved to fix this sad state of affairs, only to be squashed by a referendum. As the BBC's country profile for Slovenia reports, "Parliament later passed a bill restoring their citizenship but a referendum held shortly before EU entry in 2004 overturned it by an overwhelming margin." This came just on the eve of entry into the EU: what irony!

Now, Slovenia will have another referendum, while Croatia's EU bid, which it needs quite badly, is again left dangling in the Adriatic wind. But the authorities say we should not fear anything, but fear itself: "Nevertheless, the ruling parties are confident they can win. According to Reuters, a recent opinion poll showed 48.5 per cent of citizens would support the agreement while 14.6 per cent were undecided." Let us hope so.

Atta boy, Klaus!

So ends the twilight zone of uncertainty surrounding the EU's Lisbon Treaty. The last vestige of resistance to a process that would streamline decision-making in the EU and make it into the global power it should be has vanished.

Czech President Vaclav Klaus, a free market economist par excellence, accepted the decision of a Czech constitutional court, which rejected a complaint against Lisbon, and subsequently ratified it just a short time ago.

As such, a new European Council president post is in the offing, as well as a common foreign minister that will trump the current arrangement of a foreign affairs representative and the external affairs commissioner. Time now, it seems, is of the essence -- bien sur, I say, given that this whole affair with the Lisbon Treaty has been in an uncertain pipeline since the early summer of 2008, when the Irish electorate voted, in a referendum, against it (they subsequently affirmed support through a second referendum held recently).

From the report: "The Eurosceptic Czech leader had recently said he would no longer attempt to block the treaty, after receiving the promise of an opt-out from the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights." It seems that this opt-out was driven, yet again, by the need to "avoid property claims from ethnic Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia after World War II."

A further step, then, which is cause for celebration. The bit about the Sudeten Germans, however, remains the sore spot it was post-1945, but that is another story.

Visas and diplomatic spats

There are moments when I really question decisions made by the Canadian government concerning aspects of how it conducts its foreign policy. This Ottawa Citizen story, headlined "EU warning: may impose visas on Canadian diplomats; Retaliatory step to push Canada to lift visas for Czechs," is just one of those times.

Back in July of this year, this country's Immigration Minister, Jason Kenney -- probably more well-known for his publicized spat with British MP George Galloway, whom Kenney banned from speaking in Canada -- imposed visa requirements on both Mexican and Czech citizens. It has, predictably, raised quite the storm, though the Czech case appears to be more threatening, just because of the far-reaching consequences that are involved in raising the ire of one of the most powerful political and economic blocs in the world.

From the paper, quoting EU justice minister Jacques Barrot: "This situation is not acceptable -- not just for the Czech Republic but for the European Union as a whole. The European Union is a whole and it is not right and proper for Canada to require visas from one member of this ensemble." Later, the paper points out that "Ottawa reintroduced the requirement for Czechs to obtain visitor visas in July after hundreds of minority Roma from the central European country sought asylum in Canada."

There are, in my view, several issues that emerge from this little charade. First, for quite some time now, Canadian authorities have been wriggling in their offices over protectionist sentiments in the United States, particularly the "Buy American" clause in recent stimulus packages. A wise remedy, that both Ottawa and Brussels had begun to toy with, was to create a Canada-EU free trade agreement, which would begin to offset the excessive reliance on exporting 80%-odd of our goods south of the border. It is hard to see how this chilling of relations could be conducive to such a vital long-term objective.

Second, there is the issue of resources, and the rather lackadaisical approach Canada has taken to its consular obligations and responsibilities in the recent past. "Barrot said as a first step, Canada should open an office in Prague where Czechs could obtain Canadian visas, instead of having to travel to Vienna as they do now." This report fails to point out that Canada already has an embassy in Prague. It also has an embassy in Bratislava (Slovakia). Yet the Prague embassy is also accredited to Slovakia, but visitors from both countries must go to Canada's embassy in Vienna for long-term visas, or for other consular affairs -- no mean feat for many people in both countries who don't exactly have a ton of disposable income.

Canada has been shutting down a number of its offices throughout Europe. I know, off-hand, that its consulate in Saint Petersburg has been closed, as has its embassy in Sarajevo (in this last case, Bosnian applicants will have to go to Budapest for their needs, even though Bosnians require visas to visit the EU too...). Still other countries do not have Canadian consular offices on their soil, like Montenegro. Why this sparse presence, in light of these new realities?

Third, there is the Roma question: the visa requirement was imposed after several asylum requests came disproportionately from Czech Roma, who most certainly face nasty discrimination, not solely from extremist gangs and such, but also from everyday people (I speak from seeing this so many times myself). While Ottawa certainly has the right and obligation to filter out bogus refugee and asylum claims from all countries, this approach is closer to throwing the baby out along with the bath water.

One can only hope that the situation will stabilize, and the Czech government has been gracious enough (well, also quite pragmatic, since tourist dollars account for a lot, especially in Prague) to not reciprocate on Canadian travellers. But problems, little as they may seem, always have the enduring potential to grow into something quite nasty. Alas, this is a case in point.

Microcosms of transition

Finding myself back in Canada following a seven-month stint in Montenegro, I am still sorting through my experiences. Being a subscriber to regular news items from the excellent Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN), I found that much of what I witnessed and experienced in Podgorica (and elsewhere) was complimented by the informed content I read from the folks at BIRN.

I frequently found myself pondering the issue of relationships and the lives of young people outside the academic/professional sphere. I was especially curious to see how people my age related to the transformations taking place in their society, as well as how these changes were affecting them.

Montenegro is a special case in point, since the country is so small; its population is somewhere in the vicinity of 650,000, so I was expecting some degree of modesty and conservative traditions to predominate everyday life. Everyone knows someone who, in turn, knows some other people; what goes around comes around. Networks are extremely wide and strong in the Balkans, a legacy of a decade of war and crippling sanctions, but also steeped in tradition.

This story, therefore, is slightly unrelated to what I have described, and it deals specifically with Serbia. Its conclusions and implications, however, apply and extend to Montenegro, and some of what I learned and observed while there. This piece reports: "Health officials report that between 150,000-200,000 abortions are carried out every year in Serbia, news-site Mondo reported Monday...Every twelfth woman between the ages of 15-49 years has had an abortion. Most had not used contraception."

Serbia's total population is a little higher than 7,300,000. In the early 1980s, Serbia already had the reputation for having one of the highest abortion rates in Europe, a fact that nationalists failed to point out when they identified the high Albanian-speaking population within Kosovo and the declining number of Serbs in the province.

I do not know the statistics for Montenegro, but they are something just as frighteningly high, in proportion to the country's small size. Statistics are hard to come by, since Montenegro keeps getting looped in with Serbia, despite three-plus years of independence (go figure). Someone told me that it was in the range of the thousands.

Returning to this story: "[Dr. Katarina] Sedlecki [of the Family Planning Centre of Serbia] considers the abortion situation in Serbia as severe as every fourth abortion was carried out on women who had already had four or more abortions...She added that there are few organised efforts to promote sex education, or to provide information on how to limit family size in Serbia's family planning programme...Sedlecki stressed that economic factors are not the main reason for the high number of abortion cases in Serbia."

The story points out that other researchers indicated that there remain low levels of knowledge concerning contraception, the nature of abortions, "a belief that modern contraceptive methods are harmful to health, and a number of psychological barriers, [including] those arising from relationships with partners." They should also have pointed out, as I witnessed first-hand repeatedly, the social stigmas that befall women in particular that choose to become sexually active (or are just perceived to be such).

Little else can be said from this report, only that so many of the social problems confronting these 'transition' countries, like Serbia and Montenegro, are as much structural and political as they are societal and habit-borne. Montenegro is the tougher fish to fry, just because these realities are shrouded in tradition, secrecy and patriarchy. I found myself frequently frustrated, unfairly perhaps, by such tradition-honed factors that have persisted, despite the obvious negative outcomes that result. This arena of abortion rates in the region is just one aspect of this, and persists not so much out of necessity as it does because of other factors that, evidently, trump economics and the tangibles.

Revolutions have this invisible, yet potent factor to take into account. Montenegro (and Serbia) has a long way to go -- a generation or two, I would reckon -- before anyone can talk about full-out success in conquering legacies and habits forged by past experiences. I say this with sadness, because Montenegro is a country I adore, and consider like my second home and nationality.