Life on Queen Street

Canada to Ernst Zundel - Fuck you, Charlie.

As I've been recuperating from my latest round of surgery, I've been watching copious amounts of *achem*'d TV. To whit:

The Good - You Could Do Worse Than Watching These

Torchwood Series One - wonderfully good Brit sf with a dash of Queer As Folk mixed in. It's nice to see Russell T. Davies, the man behind QaF and Bob and Rose, let loose on the 'after the watershed' crowd after two seasons of doing Doctor Who for the strictly PG crowd. I've always loved Captain Jack Harkness and John Barrowman's take on the character and Gwen Cooper is a fast favourite.

Doctor Who, "The Runaway Bride" and Series Three, "Smith and Jones" and "The Shakespeare Code" - all brilliant but I still miss Rose. Nicely, though, so does the Doctor.

ITV's Mansfield Park - a bit spotty in places but a generally lovely adaptation that understands that the genuine goodness at the core of Fanny Price is the hub around which the story turns. It also answers the question of what Rose's been up to lately: Billie Piper's quite winning in the role. The potential for Doctor Who/Jane Austen crossover fic is a charming bonus.

The Bad - What I Meant By Worse

Blood Ties, episodes five and six - I want to like this series because I adored the series of Vicky Nelson novels by Tanya Huff. Alas, the writing on each successive episode seems to get just that little bit worse. The actors are fine enough in their roles and, after a while, I got past the weird of seeing Vancouver stand in for Toronto but the "straights and supernatural" story has been done and done before and far better. Blood Ties suffers in comparison not only to Buffy and Angel but Torchwood, every companion's first look inside the Tardis, Veronica Mars and just about every police procedural on the tube. It has a prefab, Harlequine Romance Presents: The Supernatural Romance of the Month Club feel to it that I'm having a hard time getting past and the 'every week Vicky gets a new supernatural case' plots feel hackneyed - something the novels never did. Not recommended.

The Sopranos, whatever the latest episode was called - Tony gets arrested, Tony doesn't get along with his sister, Tony broods, yadda, yadda, yadda. To be honest, I've never warmed up to The Sopranos - some episodes were very, very good but I've often felt that the hype exceeded what was actually shown onscreen and this was one of those episodes. It's been more than a year since the last new episode of The Sopranos and was anyone waiting breathlessly for the show to return with an episode that centers around Tony and his sister spending a tense, passive-agressive weekend together at a lake somewhere in Vermont? Fuggedaboudit.

The Ugly - Just Say No

The Tudors, episode one - Dummer. Than. Dirt. Excellent performances and generous views of Henry Cavill's naked ass do not make up for the fact that The Tudors is stupid even by the standards of those old Big Three Network American miniseries us kids of the 70s remember from Sundays nights throughout childhood. The writing is sloppy, anachronistic and inaccurate to the extent that The Tudors doesn't merely take dramatic liberty with the historical record but instead makes up details wholesale because apparently the life of Henry VIII was insufficiently dramatic already. Showcase desperately wants The Tudors to be their Rome and the latter's influence is clearly seen the in the liberal amount of raunch splashed throughout the first hour. But where Rome fiddled and reinterpreted the historical events leading to the rise of Augustus Ceasar, the action of the series was nevertheless based on solid historical research and painstaking attention to detail. In comparison, The Tudors settles for stock locations and costumes that belong more to the Elizabethan Renaissance than Henry's reign. I was particularly distracted by the tournament scenes which featured the actors jousting with throats and legs left bare, chests and shoulders virtually unarmoured while riding thoroughbreds - not, generally speaking the way a Renaissance Prince like Henry would dress for a joust. More attention to such details would have made it easier to overlook the clunky writing. Instead The Tudors, for all its pomp and velvet doublets has the look, feel and sound of a bog-standard 'historical' soaper. Recommended only for fans of Henry Cavill's naked ass.

At dawn on Easter Monday, 9 April, 1917, 27,000 soldiers of the Canadian Expeditionary Force attacked the entrenched German position on Vimy Ridge, just north of the town of Arras in the Pas de Calais.

Fighting together as a corps for the first time, at 5:30 in the morning, 15,000 Canadians begin their advance toward the German lines under a creeping barrage of artillery. The Germans took Vimy Ridge in their initial sweep into France in 1914 and spent the next three years fortifying the ridge with networks of trenches, tunnels and concrete machine gun posts, strung together with tens of thousands of metres of barbed wire. An attempt to take the ridge in 1915 ended in failure, costing French forces more than 150,000 casualties. A year later, the British were similarly repulsed. There is a sense that the British High Command believes the Canadian Expeditionary Force will fair no better. But General Arthur Currie, first Canadian to be promoted General in the course of the war, is determined not to repeat the mistakes of previous battles.

Currie is Chief of Staff to General Byng, the British commander of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, and planning the attack on Vimy falls to him. Foremost in Currie's mind is the bloodbath of the Somme. The battle, which raged throughout the summer and fall of the previous year, cost the Allies more than 600,000 men before ending in stalemate. The four Canadian divisions alone lost 25,000 men killed and wounded. But many units suffered even greater losses. On the first day of the Somme, 1 July, 1916, the Royal Newfoundland Regiment lost 710 of 800 men and all their officers killed. Currie is determined to do better for Canada at Vimy.

General Currie prepares tirelessly for the battle. The early months of the 1917 are spent planning the assault and preparing and training the men. Then, on 2 April, 1917, the Canadian and British artillery unleash the largest artillery barrage in history to date, shelling the German positions on the ridge for a week. The Allies fire more than a million shells and the noise from the shelling in loud enough to be heard in Southern England, 100 miles away. The Germans troops entrenched on the ridge refer to this bombardment as "The Week of Suffering."

Then, at 5:30 a.m. on 9 April, 1917, the Canadian attack begins. The first wave of 15,000 men goes over the top, advancing along a six kilometre front under the cover of a "creeping barrage" of artillery fire - a moving bombardment targeted just ahead of the Canadians, covering their advance across No Man's Land. The Germans respond with withering machine gun fire but Currie's men are prepared with countering fire that pins the Germans down in their trenches. Three of the four Canadian divisions achieve their objectives in two hours. The fourth division takes the highest point of the ridge, Hill 145, by the end of the day.

Over the next five days, the Canadians, reinforced by a second wave of 12,000 men, sweep the Germans from the ridge. By the time the battle is over, 14 April, 1917, the Canadians will have taken "more ground, more guns and more prisoners than any previous British offensive." Canadian casualties at Vimy Ridge total 10,602 with 3,598 killed.

Hearing of the victory, a French soldier declared that it was impossible. When he was told that it was the Canadians who took the hill, it is said he cried "ah, les Canadiens, c'est possible!" At Ypres and the Somme, fighting with British units under British commanders, the Canadians had gained a reputation as tough fighters. Fighting together as a corps for the first time at Vimy Ridge, the Canadians proved themselves the finest troops on the western front. During the final 100 days of the war, the four divisions of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, eventually numbering 100,000 men, would go on to defeat or force into retreat 47 German divisions.

From a country of eight million souls, eventually 500,000 Canadians would serve overseas during World War I. As a British Dominion, Canada automatically was at war when Great Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August, 1914. But it was a nation to which her veterans returned in 1918, a nation forged in the crucible of battle on Flanders Felds and in French trenches where Canadian men fought and died together as a Canadian army for Canadian officers for the first time in our history. From their sacrifice was born the spirit of our sovereign Canada.

90 years later, we remember. Then, those who fought it called World War I "the war to end all wars." 21 years late, the nations of Europe were again at war and Canadians crossed the oceans to fight the blind ideologies of hatred and intolerance, to fight those that would victimize the innocent and persecute the helpless. And today, 62 years after the last World War, Canadian soldiers are fighting and dying in a foreign land once again.

On Easter Sunday, six Canadian soldiers were killed in Afghanistan. Tens of thousands of men who fell in the fields of France and Belgium never came home again and the bodies of thousands more were never found, sucked down into mud like tidal pools. And for some, found but laid to rest without a name to mark their passing. Today, we can count our losses in the dozens and each man and woman is brought home again, with an efficiency that grows more cruelly routine with each repetition. But the sacrifice and the loss remains the same, for one fallen soldier as for one thousand:

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.

While I'm on the subject of how US conservatives misunderstand the history of WW II to piss me off, there is this gem from "Right Wing News" (motto: "Bashing the French Before Bashing the French Was Cool" among others) about the vandalism of a Jewish school in the Charlottenburg area of Berlin:

I'm a little amazed that there are still Jews living in Germany because the Germans can talk about how much they've reformed, but you know there will always be a current of deep, virulent anti-Semitism in that country. Just imagine being a Jew in Germany and knowing that most of the 80 or 90 year olds you see on the street supported gassing people like you and now, those people are sitting their great-grand children on their knees and telling them about the world.

I love how the writer manages to patronize German Jews while simultaneously bashing their compatriots. Because you're only a bigot if you attack the minority, eh?

Since this is the Internet, and therefore the obvious must be stated, I find vandalism of any kind heinous and vandalizing schools and places of worship doubly so. It's the act of someone too cowardly to stand up and speak to his or her beliefs in the public and anti-Semitism is the hateful refuge of sad, loathsome people. But they do not, thankfully, represent the whole of the German nation. Nor did they ever.

( It takes less than five minutes to find more than a dozen similar incidents that occurred in the US in 2006 )

The idea that the German people were enthusiastic participants the machinery of the Holocaust and the Final Solution - Hitler's plan for the systematic extermination of Europe's Jews - has a certain appeal these days, particularly among conservatives (see Slate.com, "Goldhagen's Willing Executioners" for the controversy around the book Hitler's Willing Executioners and its critics). It provides a nice simple answer to the question "who is responsible for the worst crime in human history" that neatly leaves everyone not German off the hook - and by "everyone else" I mean Canada, the United States, England; "enlightened" and democratic countries, who nevertheless closed the door on German Jews seeking to emigrate (in fact, encouraged to emigrate) following the Nazi rise to power and the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws. The Nazis were responsible for the Holocaust but the fault can be shared among all nations who chose not to act so long as the persecution of the Jews (as well as Communists, gays, Jehovah's Witnesses, Gypsies and dissidents of all sects and creeds) remained an internal matter.

Casting Nazism, the Holocaust and the Final Solution as a specifically "German" problem allows people to write the Holocaust off as a freak of History, Nazism as merely the ugliest expression of Prussian triumphalism. By doing so, we are spared having to answer the hard questions (how do you get ordinary people to commit monstrous acts) and the harder answers (easily) that this time in history has left in its wake. And any scary parallels you might draw between then and now can be dismissed as hyperbolic rhetoric because, after all, the Holocaust is a German problem.

The fact is that Germany was no more and, in many cases, somewhat less anti-Semitic than its European neighbours and North American contemporaries in the early 20th century. German Jews experienced growth in their civil liberties and, for want of a better term, social acceptance throughout the 19th century. There was nothing about the dawn of the 20th century that suggested this would change. That thugs and hate mongers like the Nazis could come to power in a democratic nation that had all the benefits that education, affluence and urbanity could provide should be a reminder that liberty rests on a fragile compact between people and power; that when people stop thinking and stop questioning and allow themselves to be swept along with the crowd without regard to their consciences, terrible abuses can and will occur.

But what we should never allow ourselves is the comfort and the easy, smug superiority of saying that "it could never happen here."

Everyone should see this movie.

I am not loving Rome this time about.

Is it me?

( No, baby, I'll change... )