Editor’s Notebook © by John Arkelian
The best of writing, photography, art, and argument – on everything from film to foreign policy.
“Ever dreamed of subscribing to a cultural magazine that doesn’t seem to be eating out of the hand of half a dozen media magnates? Something pluricultural and unassuming but nonetheless covering everything worth seeing, reading, doing or listening to for a season? Well, it exists, and in Canada to boot!”
“There is no on-line version or web site, which either makes John a dinosaur or a man of character. (I opt for the second, since the editorial team occasionally has a kind word for me.)”
John Howe — Canadian artist and co-conceptual designer on all three “The Lord of the Rings” motion pictures.
* Editor’s Note: The age of the dinosaurs has at last come to an end — with the arrival of this website!
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On February 23, 2016
© By John Arkelian
Vaclav Havel said, “Systems are there to serve people, not the other way around.” Well, the truth is that our political and economic systems no longer serve the interest of ‘the 99 percent.’ For years now, we’ve heard the mantra of the system’s new idols: Out-sourcing, down-sizing, industry rationalization, de-regulation, free trade, corporate concentration, mergers, wanton speculation by banks and stock markets, and globalization. Our political and economic leaders tell us that those things are inevitable. It’s progress, they say. And not just inevitable. We’re also soothed by assurances that such policies are good for us. Sure, we’re told, there may be painful transitions for some; but, in the end, we’ll all be better off for the changes. In fact, globalization and its ilk are neither inevitable nor beneficial to the majority. On the contrary, most of us are extremely ill-served by policies that enrich the few at the expense of the many. We reduce or drop protective tariffs to favor freer movement of goods across national borders. Doing so certainly favors corporations: It frees them to export jobs en masse to the Third World, where labor is cheap, and where environmental standards and worker health and safety safeguards are lax. Products from China are routinely adulterated by toxins; garment workers in Bangladesh are locked inside ramshackle sweatshops, where they burn to death when fires break out – for want of the most basic safety measures.
Corporations need to be ever larger, we’re told, in order to compete more effectively in the global marketplace: In the process, we get more and more corporate concentration in fewer and fewer hands. But true competition, which is the heart of capitalism and the market economy, requires many players, not fewer. Fewer options mean a captive consumer, at the mercy of near-monopolies or cartels: The piratical fees and usurious interest rates imposed by Canadian banks, cable companies, and wireless telephone firms spring to mind. North America can’t compete with cheaper labor costs in the Third World, we’re told. The de-industrialization of the United States and Canada is progress, we’re told. Factories, nay, whole industries, that long thrived here, suddenly collapse or move offshore. (Cities, like Detroit, and sometimes, entire regions, lay destitute and ruined in the process.) And why shouldn’t industries pick up stakes and move? There’s no honor, loyalty, or patriotism in the board room, among the ranks of those callously intent on stealing our jobs. Corporations serve the profit motive and nothing else. But, it wouldn’t profit them to desert North America if they hadn’t first induced our political and opinion leaders to adopt so-called “free-trade” agreements that let them take our jobs overseas and then sell their foreign goods here without hindrance or tariff. Wander any store selling clothing, appliances, or home décor: it seems that well-nigh every product we buy in the West is now made in China (and only in China – there are no ‘made in North America’ alternatives on offer). It’s nice for them: Years of massive economic growth, a rich harvest of jobs, prosperity for many, and, for some, great wealth. But those jobs and that wealth are jobs and wealth that were scooped up from North America and transferred there. Our own ‘one-percenters’ profit from this massive transfer of jobs and wealth; everyone else in the West is robbed of employment or real growth in income. We get cheap (and often shoddy or toxically tainted) goods; but we lose our future. Unemployment rises (to levels suspected to be much higher than those admitted by official counts), while those who do manage to cling to jobs are often obliged to accept a declining standard of living. Politicians make concerned sounds about encroachments on the middle class; but they ignore the looming elephant in the room – their own unforgivable complicity in undermining the industrial might of the First World.
The West, the Western World, is the home (and guardian) of democracy, equality, inalienable human rights, the rule of law, and, something even bigger. Shall we call it civilization? In science, technology, philosophy, law, literature, music, cinema, and art, the West has no peers, not even close. For all its vaunted long-vintage as a ‘civilization’ of sorts, China has never managed to organize itself as a free and democratic society. How civilized is that? The values of its oppressive regime are antithetical to ours, yet our leaders collude in state-controlled Chinese companies buying up sections of our resource and telecommunications sectors. We transferred our wealth to them; now they are buying us out. Don’t be too proud of Western civilization, say some. There are other ways, they say. There may be other ways – ways, which in some Muslim countries, for example, legitimize misogyny and the moral effrontery known as ‘honor killing.’ Not all societies, not all so-called civilizations, are created equal. People are, yes, but not the systems that they live under. The West’s hard-earned position as the home of enlightenment and liberty is to be preferred (and, yes, trumpeted) over all the alternatives. The West is humanity’s apex. Alas, however, it is under siege – a siege from within that threatens to undermine or social cohesion, our security, and ultimately our moral compass.
Is globalization good for us? No, it is not – not unless you happen to be a member of the one-percent. Is globalization inevitable? Not, it is not. On the contrary, it is directly attributable to conscious choices made by the few and foisted on the rest of us. The fact is that the combination of the United States and Canada, even if they stood alone, constitutes a market of such vast size and (still) wealth, that it could (and should) manufacture its own goods for its own population. North America is an indispensable market. What we insist upon matters, if we will but demand what is just – not for the small wealthy minority, but for the overwhelming majority of our populace. People in North America are well-educated, hard-working, inimitably resourceful, and, most important of all, blessed with freedom. We do not shuffle and bow before potentates or tyrants. We are not cowed by the powerful. We speak our minds. We practice tolerance. We celebrate diversity. We welcome newcomers. We hold ‘the powers that be’ accountable. We hew to government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
How should we respond to globalization? By calling a halt to it. If needs be, we can build Fortress North America. ‘Autarky’ (or complete self-sufficiency) is an option for North America: With our resources, wealth, large (and highly educated) population, and endless resourcefulness, we can stand alone – and thrive, doing so – if we have to. But, we don’t stand alone: The West also comprises Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and close allies like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. What do we do? We exit the ill-advised free trade pacts that throw open our doors to foreign goods and services. In their place, we pursue ‘fair trade.’ There’s ample precedent in the near-past. The Auto Pact between the United States and Canada stipulated that American automobile manufacturers could sell cars in Canada without tariff obstacles, provided that they made a certain number of those cars in Canada. North America has the great size and strength as a market to impose such conditions upon Third World trading partners. We can also require that, as a condition precedent for reduced tariffs for goods coming into North America, Third World countries like China, India, and Bangladesh must enact and strictly enforce environmental protection laws, child labor laws, and worker health and safety laws that are as least as stringent as those that exist in North America. (There is no reasonable rationale for tolerating differential standards in such basic public interest safeguards.) We should also insist that goods being imported here originate in places where workers are paid a “fair living wage.” What constitutes a fair living wage may not be the same amount here as it is somewhere else; but it lies within our power to eliminate sweat-shop wages and to thereby partially ameliorate the labor cost differential between the developed and developing world – not by reducing wages here, but by mandating their rise elsewhere as the price for free access to our market. And, for its part, Canada should belatedly act on what has been glaringly obvious for decades: that it should make things with its resources and not just sell raw materials to others, for them to transform into finished goods and resell back to the resource producers at a higher price.
“The market economy is as natural and matter-of-fact to me as the air. After all, it is a system of human economic activity that has been tried and found to work over centuries (centuries? millennia!). It is the system that best corresponds to human nature. But precisely because it is so down-to-earth, it is not, and cannot constitute, a world view, a philosophy, or an ideology. Even less does it contain the meaning of life. It seems both ridiculous and dangerous when, for so many people… the market economy suddenly becomes a cult, a collection of dogmas, uncompromisingly defended and more important, even, than what that economic system is intended to serve – that is, life itself.”*
*Vaclav Havel, Summer Meditations (translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson), Knopf Canada, 1992
John Arkelian is an award-winning author and journalist with a background in international and constitutional law, criminal prosecutions, and diplomacy.
Copyright © 2016 by John Arkelian
On November 9, 2015
© By John Arkelian
Sometimes a few words, or a single photograph, can create a visceral
 Photograph © 2015 by Belinda Martschinke. sense of a place we’ve never been – and bestir a powerful desire to take flight and wing our way to the very place that has conjured such yearning in our mind’s eye. The longing thus awakened may be wrenching or it may be soft as down, but it persists, like a compass pointing to the heart’s True North. These few words about Greenland, from Artsforum’s German correspondent Belinda Martschinke, awoke such a desire in us – the intimation of a place as yet unvisited but somehow lodged in our very marrow and in the soft whispering of the soul:
“Never before had I such an intense feeling that nothing else mattered than the single moment, nothing past, nothing in the future, nothing at any other place than where I was at the time. This gave me an incredible peace with myself.”
On August 12, 2015
© By John Arkelian
The dysfunction that permeates Canada’s Senate is far more pervasive than the revelations of unethical expense claims of recent months and the pernicious attempt by the Prime Minister’s Office to cover them up – however squalid those events are. Mike Duffy had no business claiming housing or living expenses in Ottawa (which was clearly his principal residence) on the flimsy fiction that his primary residence was in Prince Edward Island. Even if the Senate rules were so abjectly inadequate as to technically ‘permit’ such a claim, making such a claim had everything to do with cynical self interest and nothing to do with honorable stewardship of the public interest (and the public purse). Selfish greed and personal integrity are mutually incompatible. We now know that Duffy was far from alone in taking undue advantage of flimsy Senate rules: Other Senators, too, have chosen to put personal profit over personal integrity – by cynically using weak expense claim rules and weak oversight to their own advantage. Such behavior is insupportable – and it should result in permanent expulsion from the Senate, with a termination of the malfeasors’ Senate salaries and pensions. Equally outrageous is the fact the Senate has operated for countless years without adequate rules governing expense claims – without adequate rules, adequate oversight, or public transparency. There is no mystery as to how to establish such rules, oversight, enforcement, and public transparency. That they have been lacking all these many years suggests that the people we entrust with the levers of government prefer flimsy regulatory systems that they can twist and turn to their own selfish advantage.
Furthermore, it is long overdue that clear, sensible, transparent, and enforceable rules be established to govern precisely what constitutes “residency” in a particular province or region sufficient to qualify a person to represent that province or region in the Senate. Up till now, the government has clearly preferred lax, vague, and flimsy rules – to enable them to appoint a political crony who may have only a tenuous connection (like Duffy’s summer cottage) to the province they are purporting to represent. Lax, flimsy, and vague rules are all the better for manipulating things to the partisan advantage of whichever party happens to be in power. That’s no way to run a modern democratic country.
Then there is the involvement of the PMO. As the tab for Duffy’s dubious claims grew, the hitherto indulgent Prime Minister finally decreed that Duffy must repay the money, lest the growing political scandal damage Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party brand. Duffy refused. But a solution materialized. Nigel Wright, who was Harper’s chief of staff, paid the $90,000 bill himself, while the taxpayers were actively deceived into believing that Duffy had relented and was repaying his own contentious expenses. Before that happened, however, Wright told Duffy that he needed to run the plan by his boss. “Good to go from the PM” was the message Wright subsequently sent Duffy. Does anyone, can anyone, reasonably believe, in light of those words, that Stephen Harper himself was aware of, and approved of, the indirect repayment of Duffy’s tab? The payment in question is being characterized as bribery by the RCMP: It’s part of the 31 criminal charges against Duffy for fraud, breach of trust, and bribery. But, here’s a glaring puzzle: How can the recipient of the bribe (Duffy) be charged with a criminal offense while the man giving the bribe (Wright) is not? It makes no sense – legally or ethically. And the optics are rotten: It smacks of selective prosecution. And, is there anyone who believes that Nigel Wright was truly making a gift of $90,000 of his own money to Duffy? We’ve heard that there are “discretionary funds” within the PMO and perhaps also within the Conservative Party. Basic common sense (and human nature) suggests that Wright would be quietly reimbursed from one of those sources (away from public scrutiny) for his grandly benevolent out-of-pocket “gift” to Duffy. True, there has been nothing in the news to suggest such reimbursement was in the wings; nor have we seen media speculation on the point. But what reasonable man can believe that some such scheme was not quietly in the minds of those involved?
Those are the some of the recent indictments in the court of public opinion against Duffy, the Senate, and the PMO. But there is an even deeper malaise – one that goes back to the very founding of the country. It’s the ill-considered manner in which the “Fathers of Confederation” established the upper house of the Canadian Parliament in the first place. Why are Senators appointed (rather than elected)? Why are they appointed by one man (the Prime Minister)? Why were they appointed for life for most of the Senate’s history (with a retirement age, of 75, only being added later)? Remember the mantra of the old Reform Party, that the Senate should be refashioned to become “Equal, Elected, and Effective?” That model is the only acceptable one. Senators should be directly elected by the citizens of Canada – for fixed terms, and with term limits. There should be an equal number of Senators from every province (to balance the representation according to population model that applies, more or less, in the House of Commons). Or, if Canadians prefer, we could have an equal number of Senators from each region of the country (rather than each province). And, the constitution should be amended to provide a meaningful, effective role for the Senate vis-à-vis the House of Commons: If it doesn’t have real, meaningful powers, then there is no reason for it to exist.
John Arkelian is an award-winning author and journalist with a background in international and constitutional law, criminal prosecutions, and diplomacy.
Copyright © 2015 by John Arkelian.
On January 19, 2015
© By John Arkelian
In the aftermath of recent murderous events in Paris, one can only feel profound revulsion. What can possibly be in a human being’s mind to prompt him to take other lives with such casual, cold-blooded brutality? And how can anyone professing to be religious, commit such horrors with (what they believe to be) the name of God on their lips? “Allahu Akbar!” (“God is Great!”) shout those in the act of bloody murder, grotesquely oblivious to the monumental blasphemy of their words and actions.
Wonderfully perceptive, literate, and erudite, the late Polish essayist and foreign correspondent Ryszard Kapuściński described the poisonous characteristics of extremism so adeptly back in 1993 that his words sound as though they were written to describe the brutal violence perpetrated in Paris in January 2015.
“Three plagues, three contagions, threaten the world. The first is the plague of nationalism. The second is the plague of racism. The third is the plague of religious fundamentalism. All three share one trait, a common denominator – an aggressive, all-powerful, total irrationality. Anyone stricken with one of these plagues is beyond reason. In his head burns a sacred pyre that awaits only its sacrificial victims. Every attempt at calm conversation will fail. He doesn’t want a conversation, but a declaration that you agree with him, admit that he is right, join the cause. Otherwise you have no significance in his eyes, you do not exist, for you count only if you are a tool, an instrument, a weapon. There are no people – there is only the cause. A mind touched by such a contagion is a closed mind, one-dimensional, monothematic, spinning round one subject only – its enemy.”**
Such is the foe of civilized man. How then does civilized man respond to violent extremists, to the monomaniacal savages who perversely purport to wield hatred, terror, and murder as though they were the instruments of justice and devoutness? Kapuściński’s next words should prompt us to caution:
“Thinking about our enemy sustains us, allows us to exist. That is why the enemy is always present, is always with us.” **
We need to take care that we do not succumb to a symbiotic relationship with those who want to harm us – each side needing the other as its implacable foe, a mortal enemy that must be crushed at all costs. If there is no reasoning with terror; there is the hope that better education and vigorous outreach can dampen its supply of new adherents. Maybe we need to consider limiting how many new immigrants we import from places whose history and culture are more likely to make some of their expatriates susceptible to the siren call of extremism. Maybe we should ensure that we do not import large numbers of immigrants from places with alien ideas or retrograde norms faster than our society can digest them. Maybe we just need to work harder at assimilating newcomers into Western culture and norms. Maybe we need to find better ways to counter the ideological indoctrination that finds a receptive audience among the dispossessed, the dysfunctional, and those otherwise neglected on society’s fringes. Those who feel included in society, surely, are less likely to strike out against it in violence.
Gradually, but relentlessly, putting in place the devices of a police state (surveillance, warrantless searches, imprisonment without trial, torture, assassination of real or perceived threats, and creeping infringements on free speech), as the West has been doing ever since 9/11, is to admit defeat – to subvert our own societies from within and destroy what’s most precious about them. That is the terrorist’s goal: We must not do his destructive work for him. There are tried and true criminal investigation and prosecution mechanisms in place to combat terrorism. Terrorists commit crimes – shocking crimes, yes, but crimes nonetheless. Let our criminal justice system and law enforcement agencies use the normal implements that have always been at their disposal to respond to this threat. The ordinary implements of our legal system are more than adequate to deal with the particular crime of terrorism.
Instead, there’s talk in Canada (and elsewhere) about further restricting core human rights – by lowering the evidentiary threshold required for criminal investigation or prosecution; by ever greater surveillance (which already unconstitutionally catches in its universal net every law-abiding man, woman, and child); by diluting the essential requirement that a search warrant be issued by a court before a person or premises be searched by the state; or, alarmingly, by employing some kind of “preventive detention,” locking-up potential threats before they can hurt us. Such measures are anathema to a free people. If those intent on violent crime merely conspire to commit it, they are subject to the reach of our criminal law: It is more than capable of dealing with them – without extraordinary police powers or unconstitutional deviations from our most fundamental human rights and freedoms.
In the aftermath of the murders in Paris, it became popular to declare “Je suis Charlie” (“I am Charlie”), in reference to the cold-blooded slaughter of editorial cartoonists at the satirical magazine “Charlie Hebdo” and the murder of mere bystanders at a grocery store. But, ‘Qui est Charlie?’ (‘Who is Charlie?’), after all? We are right to defend freedom of speech – including the freedom to criticize and lampoon political and religious figures. Such speech (nowhere more so than in the fine art of political cartooning) can inform, console, or critique. Sometimes it can be scathing. Sometimes it can sting, sometimes deeply offend. But it is invaluable in a free society. And, if we are willing to sometimes offend the minority, we must likewise tolerate speech that offends the majority.
Arresting the controversial (and ostensibly obnoxious) French comic Dieudonné M’bala M’bala for utterances that apparently seemed to sympathize with the terrorists’ murder spree seems inconsistent with our impassioned rally to the cause of free speech. Committing violence, or simply advocating it, is a crime – not free speech. Likewise, shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater as a prank is not a protected form of free speech. One person’s freedom ends when it causes actual harm to another person. But that leaves us with much speech that is ignorant, deplorable, or prejudiced. Provided that such speech, as noxious (and possibly hateful) as it may be, stops short of advocating violence or other criminality, it is to be protected. Freedom for decent people means extending freedom (of thought and speech) to those who are indecent.
A free people cannot afford to sacrifice core freedoms in the spurious name of greater security. And spurious it is, too. No amount of arbitrary state power will completely protect us from the danger of an extremist cabal or a lone crazed gunman intent on violence. If we sacrifice freedom for security, we will end up with neither. Further, we have far more to fear from the incremental moves toward police power trumping civil rights than we do from the terrible (but ever so remote) possibility of being killed by a terrorist. Lest we forget, police in Toronto corralled (or “kettled”) and unlawfully detained scores of law-abiding citizens, among other egregious human rights abuses, during the G-20 conference held there in 2010. That happened despite our constitutional guarantees (in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms), despite a mature legal and law enforcement system, and despite supposed systems of oversight and accountability. (To date, Toronto’s chief of police, Bill Blair, has, shamefully, been excused from testifying about his role in authorizing such gross excesses.) If the safeguards failed us then, as they manifestly did, how much more probable is it that the feeblest safeguards extant in the realm of counter-terrorism and surveillance will signify for nothing at all? Meaningful oversight and public accountability are all but illusory in the murky world of state surveillance and counter-terrorism measures. That’s why Canada, of all seemingly benign places, was complicit in past unlawful U.S. “rendition” of prisoners to secret interrogation sites abroad. That’s why Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan were, for a time, handing over their prisoners to local authorities who were very likely to torture or kill them. If we honor the metaphor of “Charlie,” we must stand fast against the seductive temptation to give away our core values and our inalienable human rights.
John Arkelian is an award-winning author and journalist with a background in international and constitutional law, criminal prosecutions, and diplomacy.
Copyright © 2015 by John Arkelian.
**Quotations are from “Imperium” by Ryszard Kapuściński (page 248); translated from the Polish by Klara Glowczewska. (Vintage International, N.Y., 1995) Originally published in Polish in 1993.
On January 19, 2015
As they used to say in “The X Files,” fight the future, by signing this online petition to stop Canada Post’s addle-brained plan to end home mail delivery:
https://www.change.org/p/don-t-let-canada-post-end-door-to-door-delivery
The online petition was started by a concerned Canadian, Susan Dixon. To date, it has attracted over 210,000 signatures, to no apparent effect, as far as Canada Post and its government overlords are concerned. Not for the first time, the will (and best interests) of the people seem to count for nothing by those who purportedly represent us.
And see below for “Postal Follies,” our March 26, 2014 editorial decrying the insupportable move by Canada Post management to unilaterally abdicate their core responsibility.
We happened to come across this nice assessment of Artsforum in the online magazine Offscreen:
Offscreen Notes: Artsforum Magazine — July 6, 2014
“Recently discovered this Canadian wide-ranging cultural issues online journal [Artsforum Magazine] which reminds me in its scope and literary bent of the excellent print magazine, The Believer Magazine, perhaps with a more politically driven interest (and from a Canadian perspective). Still, it is an ‘old-fashioned’ (I mean this in a good sense) liberal arts style magazine with a critical interest in all the arts (film, poetry, painting, photography, music, television, theatre, fiction).”
Donato Totaro, Ph.D
Offscreen (an online magazine)
Visit Offscreen at: http://offscreen.com/notes/view/artsforum-magazine
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