Active History

From Salò to Cult: Sadism, Terror, and Fascism in Fiction

January 8, 2019 No Comments

The Four Libertines and their associates. basementrejects.com

Alban Bargain-Villéger

Salò.

It was this laconic, almost interjective title that first caught my eye. In the stifling Parisian heat of July 2002, somewhere in the Halles neighbourhood, the poster appeared in a surreal haze. A bridal party of dejected youths, the bride and groom dressed for the occasion, the rest stark-naked, advanced, seemingly resigned to their doom. Then the subtitle appeared: “or the 120 Days of Sodom.” While Salò obviously referred to the resort town where Benito Mussolini had established the capital of his short-lived Italian Social Republic, the rest of the title did not ring a bell. I had not yet become acquainted with Sade’s masterpiece, nor was I familiar with the director, Pier Paolo Pasolini. The cost of entry was cheap, as the showing was part of a Pasolini festival, on the occasion of the eightieth anniversary of his birth. Clearly, I had no clue what I had gotten myself into, as Salò proved to be an aesthetically unpleasant experience featuring stomach-turning torture scenes and ritualistic rape. To cut a long story short, I almost threw up in the movie theatre. But I am the stubborn type, so I decided to stay until the end.

What prompted this post was not a sudden, random flashback to my first encounter with Pasolini. Rather, it sprang from a slow-evolving reflection on the seventh season of American Horror Story, entitled Cult, which aired in late 2017. Evidently, the two works differ in several ways. Conceptually speaking, one is a full-length film, and the other an 11-episode series; while Salò is a 1975 Italian production, Cult is part of an ongoing American – self-explanatorily US-centric – show. However, these works address the theme of fascism in comparable ways. First of all, both emerged in climates of political violence and instability, the Anni di piombo (Years of Lead) in Salò’s case, and of the Trump presidency in that of Cult. While one cannot easily compare the two contexts, the similar questions that they sparked in 1970s Italy and 2010s America deserve more attention on the part of historians. Secondly, the frequent, and often inappropriate bandying about of the word “fascism” in the media, popular culture, and politics, should not deter academics from studying such approximations. Just because Salò and Cult provide partial, mostly aesthetic takes on fascism, it does not mean scholars should throw the baby out with the bathwater and dismiss these works as flawed and not worthy of attention.

***

In other posts, I have criticized the hackneyed argument that the “1930s” were back. Continue reading →

A Canadian Immigration Syllabus

January 7, 2019 2 Comments

Examining new arrivals in Immigration Examination Hall, Pier 21. Chris Lund/National Film Board of Canada. Photothèque collection/Library and Archives Canada/PA-111579

Two years ago, following the election of Donald Trump to office, historians specializing in the history of migration and ethnicity in the United States compiled the #ImmigrationSyllabus to serve as a resource and teaching tool for instructors, students and the general public. It was an inspired collaboration, one that showcased how historians can play an important role in disseminating knowledge about the very genealogy of particular public policy debates and information that can shed light on lies, falsehoods and mythologies that animate many of these contemporary discussions.

Inspired by these efforts, and cognizant of the important work that has taken place on these topics in Canada, we set out to compile an immigration history syllabus (Canadian-style) with input from scholars across the country whose own work and professional service has shaped our commitment to collaborative research, resource-sharing and knowledge dissemination. This syllabus brings together key themes, readings, sources, and questions about the history of migration to and from Canada, offering a resource to educators and students, and valuable historical context for contemporary debates.

The immigration syllabus (Canadian-style) saw many incarnations over the past few months. The result is a blend of loosely chronological subjects that can be used in the classroom, beginning with some key readings on what constitutes migration history and why it might be an important topic to study. To lend some flexibility, there are a series of thematic units that can be exchanged if instructors would like to focus on a particular aspect of this field such as gender, religion, settler colonialism or Indigenous mobilities. The idea was to have foundations as well as flexibility, and we hope that the syllabus does just that. Continue reading →

Activehistory.ca Repost – Cold Cases: Hypothermia before, and after, Stonechild

January 3, 2019 No Comments

ActiveHistory.ca is on a hiatus for the winter break, and will return to daily posts in early January. During the hiatus, we’re featuring some of our favourite holiday and winter themed posts. Thank you to all our contributors, guest editors, and readers for making 2018 a very successful year. Happy holidays to all and we look forward to continuing our work in 2019!

The following post by Josh MacFadyen was originally featured on October 30, 2014.

The 2013 ice storm left hundreds of thousands of Canadians out in the cold and made some people pause to consider the fragility of urban energy systems in a changing climate. The idea of so many people spending Christmas in the cold made me reflect on some of the better-known cases of Canadians freezing to death in the past. Frankly – and aside from Sir Franklin – most of us likely couldn’t name a single person who died in this way. But one name we should all know is Neil Stonechild. His story, and the stories of other victims of hypothermia, should shape how we think about systemic racism and other social injustice.

Neil Stonechild (1973-1990), Saskatoon, SK undated photo

This month marked the 10th anniversary of the inquiry that brought a police force, an entire city, and many parts of Canada to consider some of these problems. The body of 17-year-old Neil Stonechild was found in an industrial area at the northern edge of Saskatoon in November 1990. He had frozen to death in that position five days earlier, wearing light clothing and only one shoe. His face was bruised his blood alcohol content had been high, and some of his friends and family suspected foul play. They were told that a full investigation had been conducted and that the teen had wandered to this remote location under his own volition. A cold case if ever there was one.

Still, some wondered if Neil had been the victim of a “starlight tour,” or the un-authorized police practice of leaving drunk or rowdy people on the outskirts of the city to dry out. Some could survive the walk, but in the case of Stonechild and several other Cree men, drying out in a Saskatchewan winter meant freezing to death. Prairie winters are unforgiving, to put it mildly. Saskatoon’s average January temperature (from 1977 to 2012) consists of daily lows “around -20°C, falling below -33°C or exceeding -8°C only one day in ten.” On the night Stonechild went missing, the temperature fell to -28°C.

Ten years later Darryl Night told a police officer that he had been left in a field one January evening, and he only survived the -20°C temperatures because he found his way to a power station and called a taxi. Night did not expect anyone to believe him. But days later the frozen bodies of two other Aboriginal men were found in a similar location and the police officer consulted Night and asked him for a full report. This began a long process of investigation and reconciliation that reopened the Stonechild case and culminated in a Commission of Inquiry and a report revealing what really happened to Neil Stonechild. The police officers were charged with a minor offence and relieved from their duties. The police chief was replaced, and a series of recommendations were advanced to build better accountability and begin repairing the trust between First Nations communities and the police.

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Activehistory.ca Repost – Cold Comfort: Firewood, Ice Storms, and Hypothermia in Canada

January 2, 2019 No Comments

The following post by Josh MacFadyen was originally featured on January 9, 2014.

Many Canadians had a brush with homelessness, or at least heat-lessness, over the holidays. Over half a million customers across Ontario, Quebec, and New Brunswick spent Christmas in the cold and dark, and ten days after the 2013 ice storm homes were still coming online. With the region currently experiencing snow storms and extreme cold temperature warnings, Canadians may be thinking about the fragility of urban energy systems and our level of preparedness for extreme weather events. (At least we seem to be intrigued by travel delays, frost quakes, ice mayors, historic frozen negatives, boiling squirt gun experiments, and of course Frozen, as well as more serious local relief efforts such as Coldest night of the year and “In from the Cold” campaigns.)

The ice storm was deemed the largest in Toronto history, but since it follows only fifteen years after a similar ice storm in Quebec and Eastern Ontario these may not be isolated 100-year events. Extreme weather events appear to be on the increase, and 2013 was a banner year. Debates over the Toronto’s preparedness and resilience are ongoing. Anthony Haines, CEO of Toronto Hydro, promised there will be discussions regarding future improvements and “there is no doubt, learning is to be had.” Winter storms can be especially risky when cold weather and power outages overlap, and historically, extreme cold has been far more lethal than floods and heat waves.

I suggest that the kind of learning “to be had” includes a broad understanding of our historical relationships with extreme weather and urban energy supplies, including food and heat. Climatologists will be working to identify the frequency of these weather events, but historical climate data also allow historians to create detailed risk-maps of extreme cold weather events in Canada over time. Historical research in energy, transportation, and urban planning may then show us how Canadians adapted to these challenges over time.

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Holiday Repost – Gin and Tonic: A Short History of a Stiff Drink

December 31, 2018 No Comments

Planning on enjoying a drink as part of your New Year’s Eve celebrations? Grab a glass and settle in to read this post by Jay Young was originally featured on August 14, 2012.

The Gin and Tonic – what better a drink during the dog days of summer? Put some ice in a glass, pour one part gin, add another part tonic water, finish with a slice of lime, and you have a refreshing drink to counter the heat. But it is also steeped in the history of medicine, global commodity frontiers, and the expansion of the British Empire.

Let’s start with the gin. Although it is commonly known as the quintessential English spirit, the history of gin underlines the island’s connections to the outside world. The origin of gin – unlike the drink itself – is quite murky. Sylvius de Bouve, a sixteenth-century Dutch physician, is the individual associated with the development of gin. He created a highly-alcoholic medicinal concoction called Jenever. It featured the essential oils of juniper berries, which the physician believed could improve circulation and cure other ailments. The berry, deriving from a small coniferous plant, had long been treasured for its medicinal properties, including its use during the plague.

Some students of the spirit argue that English soldiers discovered it while fighting in Holland in the 1580s during the Dutch War of Independence, whereas others trace England’s gin tradition to the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). The English nicknamed the drink “Dutch courage,” but what stuck was gin, a derivation of the Flemish word genever.

Gin’s popularity grew in England after William of Orange had become King of England following the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Parliament exerted its superior authority by ousting from the throne the Catholic King James II. With William’s reign came high import duties on French brandy – the dominant hard liquor in England at the time. The English began to produce a gin at a low cost. As John Watney notes in Mother’s Ruin: A History of Gin, “[a] revolution in drinking habits, equal to or perhaps surpassing in importance the Glorious Revolution in politics, was about to occur.” Parliament ended the royal monopoly on spirit distilling within London and its surrounding area, and statutes promoted distillation from grain grown by English farmers.

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Activehistory.ca Repost – Lace Up: A History of Skates in Canada

December 29, 2018 No Comments

The following History Slam episode was originally featured on November 29, 2017.

For the past three-and-a-half years I have had the pleasure of working with Jean-Marie Leduc and Julie Léger on a book looking at the history of skates. Mr. Leduc is a renowned expert on skates with one of the biggest private collections in the world that has been displayed at museums and exhibitions across the country, including during the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver. When the opportunity came up a few years ago to work on a book, it seemed to me an interesting idea that would make for a good read. On November 10, Lace Up: A History of Skates in Canada was released. The book traces the development of skates from bone skates used by Indigenous peoples for thousands of years to the skates used by today’s world champions. Through Mr. Leduc’s collection, the book explores how skates and their technological innovations shaped how people got around on ice. At the same time, as skates continued to evolve, new winter sports were invented based on the improved technology. For instance, the development of stop picks on figure skates allowed for the speed, agility, and aerial components required in today’s competitions.

In this episode of the History Slam, I talk with Jean-Marie Leduc about Lace Up. We talk about the origins of his extensive skate collection, how he built the collection, and some of his favourite pairs. We also talk about the book, how we put it together, and what readers can expect.

Sean Graham is an editor with Activehistory.ca and host/producer of the History Slam Podcast

Activehistory.ca Repost – An (Ice) Bridge to the Past: Niagara Falls has Frozen

December 27, 2018 No Comments

The following post by Daniel Macfarlane was originally featured on March 5, 2015.

Niagara Falls has frozen. Well, not really. The entire water flow of the famous Horseshoe Falls doesn’t actually freeze, despite ‘polar vortexes’ (more commonly known to most Canadians as ‘winter’). Water keeps flowing underneath the ice. The American Falls does occasionally dry up due to ice jams upstream (and this has happened once in recorded history to the Horseshoe Falls: see note [1]). Tourists are nonetheless flocking to see the gelid cataract – and some people are even climbing it!

Wind can send large chunks of ice from Lake Erie down the Niagara River. Ice jams at the base of the waterfalls form what are known as “ice bridges.” In the 19th century these congealed water spans became an occasion for festivities, as the two Niagara Falls communities on either side of the international border would use them for transnational ice parties. Talk about having a drink on the rocks!

LAC MIKAN no 3318088 — Niagara Falls Ice Bridge around the turn of the century. Wikimedia Commons

Great_Ice_Bridge,_and_American_Falls,_Niagara_Falls,_U._S._A.,_by_Barker,_George,_1844-1894 — People congregating on the Niagara Ice Bridge. Wikimedia Commons

That is, they had ice parties until one fateful day. On February 4, 1912, the ice bridge broke away and raced downstream. 3 people perished. From that point on, such festivities on the ice were prohibited.

But that wasn’t the end of disasters related to ice build up. In 1938, another ice bridge broke free and took out the famed Honeymoon Bridge (see a video of the collapse here).

Obviously there was an ice problem, at least from an anthropocentric perspective.

But ice wasn’t the only aspect of the Niagara system that Canadian and American officials wanted to change. Bilateral efforts had already led to the diversion of massive volumes of water around the falls for hydro and industrial production. These efforts reached their apogee with the 1950 Niagara Treaty. This accord authorized the remaking of the actual waterfalls themselves, with up to ¾ of the water diverted around the waterfall to power stations downstream. I won’t get into all that, however, since I’ve previously done so on the NiCHE website and other places. [2]

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Holiday Repost – Here We Come A-Picketing! Christmas Carols, Class Conflict, and the Eaton’s Strike, 1984-85

December 26, 2018 No Comments

ActiveHistory.ca is on a hiatus for the winter break, and will return to daily posts in early January. During the hiatus, we’re featuring some of our favourite seasonal posts. Thank you to all our contributors, guest editors, and readers for making 2018 a very successful year. Happy holidays to all and we look forward to continuing our work in 2019!

The following post by Sean Carleton and Julia Smith was originally featured on December 18, 2014.

By mid-December, the holiday shopping season is usually in full swing for Canadian retailers. Thirty years ago, however, several Eaton’s department stores in southern Ontario were experiencing a different type of holiday hustle and bustle: Eaton’s workers were on strike.

Hoping that unionization would improve their wages and working conditions, many of the department stores’ mostly female workers had joined the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU); but management’s refusal to negotiate left them with few options but to withdraw their labour power. On 30 November 1984 RWDSU members at six Eaton’s locations went on strike. In doing so, they embarked on a significant struggle to win a collective agreement in a sector known for poor pay and precarity, all while enduring one of the coldest winters in Canadian history.

Eaton’s workers picketed for almost six months. During that time, they used a variety of tactics to maintain morale and hold the line. With help from the Canadian Labour Congress, they organized a national boycott of Eaton’s, a particularly effective technique during the holiday shopping season. Strikers also used performance and humour to win public support. In the lead-up to Christmas, they worked with the Red Berets, a feminist musical group in Toronto, to adapt Christmas carols to incorporate issues related to the strike. These types of creative tactics attracted considerable media attention and thereby increased public awareness of and support for the strike.

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Holiday Repost – ‘Tis the Season (for Social and Economic Change): Depression-Era Christian Socialism and an Alternative Meaning for Christmas

December 24, 2018 No Comments

The following post by Christo Aivalis was originally featured on December 17, 2015.

If one peruses their televisions, computers, and streetscapes, they can’t help but forget that we have been in the throes of the Christmas season since November. But this form of Christmas celebration, tied so deeply with capitalism, belies the transformative optimism Christmas provided working-class socialists in the Depression, and still today. Much as Pope Francis’ criticisms of capitalism and consumerist Christmas celebrations amidst war offer a call to change, so did the Christian Left seek a new social order in the Great Depression via the message of Christ and Christmas. For them, the egalitarian and socialist ideals of a 2000 year old Humble Nararane Carpenter spoke the society they wished to build.

While much has been written about Christianity socialism among ministers-turned-politicians like Tommy Douglas, J.S. Woodsworth, and Stanley Knowles, less has been said about Christian socialism among Canadian workers and trade unionists. Yet if we look back to Depression-era trade union newspapers, we see a movement utilizing Christian scripture and imagery in order to agitate for substantive political, economic, and social reforms. After all, numerous contributors argued that Christ was not only God reborn, but was God reborn as a humble Nazarene carpenter: a workingman sent to bring a gospel of justice and equality for the downtrodden. Christ came not as a king, but as a pauper, and in so doing showed his allegiances. This identification with Christ as a radical workingman led many to propose a Christian social order that struck at the core of social and economic inequality, private property:

A theology which teaches that God is Mammon’s silent partner would necessarily be suspect in an age of folk upheaval…. Property needs not God to protect it…Jesus announced “Good News”[:] namely, that Heaven is passionately on the side of the people against the despotic tendencies of property; and under that leadership a messianic passion for men is announcing itself. The trouble is the working people at large have not yet come to behold The Carpenter.[1]

Not all pieces were necessarily so strident, but in general, there was a pronouncement that Christianity was incompatible with capitalism, at least as largely practiced. The solution for many in this case was finding in Christian theology a refuge from the cruelty of capitalist motivations, chief among them profit and property: “For it is written, ‘thou shalt not steal.’ Unhappily, our modern idea is based more truly on the idea ‘thou shalt steal.’ The whole system of Profit is theft.”[2]

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Holiday Repost – The Great Christmas Bake-Off: Kitschy Americana vs. Canadian Victoriana

December 23, 2018 No Comments

The following post by Cayley Bower was originally featured on December 20, 2017

Butterhorns displayed on a section of log in Canadian Living. I don’t know about you, but I’m inspired.

During the holidays, the food we eat is often as loaded with meaning as it is butter and sugar, which is good news for those of us looking to eat as many cookies and candies as possible in the coming weeks: it’s not over consumption, you see. It’s research. Holiday cooking is part of a web of meaning, tradition, and history, both personal and, as it turns out, national. This year, while engaging in my long-standing family tradition of purchasing the Canadian Living Holiday Baking collector’s edition and planning my Christmas baking, I realized that Canada’s Christmas food culture is deeply rooted in our imperial past, with ingredients and processes that tend toward the classically British.[1] In fact, the desserts in Canadian Living would not be wholly unfamiliar to Sir John A Macdonald. The most recent issues of Canadian Living Holiday Baking (a fixture in my childhood home that I’ve maintained) demonstrate this clearly through the promotion of a particular vision of the holidays that is situated firmly in the Victorian era. The connection between Britishness, tradition, and the holidays is especially clear when recent recipe collections from Canada are compared to those from the United States.

The recipes in Canadian Living, one of the more popular Canadian holiday baking publications, are decidedly British in flavour and have a nineteenth-century feel in both the simplicity of the ingredients and the way they are presented in the photos; evidently, Canadian culture continues to look to Britain as the source of all things traditional. The recipes in Canadian Living are predominantly twists on classic British foods like shortbread, gingerbread, and trifle, many of which were associated with Christmas in the Victorian era after the holiday was revived after being passé for many years. According to a BBC article on the history of Christmas, “the transformation happened quickly, and came from all sectors of society” and introduced many of the traditions we now regard as integral to the holiday, including roast turkey, Christmas crackers, and the obligation to see family members that one spends the rest of the year actively avoiding. Scholars generally attribute the revival of Christmas to the cult of the Christian family that Queen Victoria perpetuated after her marriage to Prince Albert.

While many of the rituals surrounding Christmas are derived from the Victorian era, the Christmas treats seem to be some of the most enduring.

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