The best book I’ve read in about a year is The Suicide Museum (2023) by Ariel Dorfman. At first I borrowed it from the library, but a 700+ page paperback is too heavy to carry around, so I bought it to read on my e-reader. It’s brilliant. At first I thought it was a novel, but now I see much of it must be based on real events and real people. Dorfman is a well-published, left-wing writer of nonfiction, novels and drama who is Chilean. Now he lives in the US.
In The Suicide Museum, he weaves a fascinating tale. In 1990, in the age before the internet, before Twitter (X) and other social media, Dorfman is living with his family, teaching in a university town in North Carolina. The fascist dictator Pinochet has just been hustled out of office—after 17 bloody years in which more than 40,000 people were disappeared or killed. Dorfman and his wife, Angélica, are toying with the idea of going home to Santiago. One day out of the blue, Dorfman is contacted by a very wealthy Dutch industrialist, Joseph Hortha, who is visiting New York City. He invites Dorfman to NYC to meet. Dorfman doesn’t know the man and is disinclined, but Angélica —who is more adventurous — urges Dorfman to go. Hortha, who is Jewish like Dorfman, was born just before WWII. Hidden as a child in the Netherlands, he suffered terrible losses, and yet incredible triumphs.
Hortha offers Dorfman $100,000 (more than $200,000 in today’s money) to find out how the rich man’s hero, Chile’s once-elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, met his death. Hortha asks Dorfman to research and write a report about whether Allende was killed by Pinochet’s military when they stormed La Moneda Palace (the seat of government) or did Allende commit suicide in the last minutes, as the troops ransacked La Moneda?
Dorfman’s writing drew me in immediately. At first, he is reluctant. Hortha is a mystery: is he with the secret police, with the remnants of the Chilean death squads, is he for real? No matter, as an adjunct professor Dorfman could use the money and it was a way for him and his family to return to Chile– at least for a visit– if not permanently.
Though the task seems simple, what Dorfman writes about are all the close comrades of Allende who were (and weren’t) with him that ignominious day in September, 1973. Dorfman tracks down people he himself knew on the left during the heady times of Allende’s presidency. Every name listed in the book checks out – in that they were members of the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, MIR, or in the media, Allende’s physicians – are real people and know what really happened to Allende the day he died. The one figure who doesn’t check out is, of course, Joseph Hortha.
This book you will not put down. The writing’s great, the mystery of what did happen is shocking, and Dorfman manages to connect the events to his own books. For example, his best-known and award-winning 1994 play Death and the Maiden was mounted as a
“read through” in London. It afforded him the chance to go to London, in part to interview some Chilean comrades from the 1970s who had escaped Pinochet’s death squads to the UK nearly 20 years earlier.
The cover of the paperback features a drawing of a great spotted woodpecker. What the bird drilling away on cedar shanks has to do with the book’s plot, you will discover near the end of the book. This is an amazing and brilliant book. A must read.
To read the autobiography and eyewitness account of a 35-year-old English woman medical doctor living in Chile who was arrested and tortured by the Pinochet regime in the 70s, see my review of the very readable book, The Audacity to Believe by Dr Sheila Cassidy. It is an incredibly valuable contribution to understanding fascism – here.
Canadian Labour…
Adam King has written an excellent and informative article about anti-scab legislation coming to some provinces near you. In 17 April’s The Maple, King shows how a truly pernicious article by a Fraser Institute hanger-on in the National Post who opposes anti-scab laws is a lot of hot air. King notes “while it’s no shock to find anti-unionism in the National Post, this article is bad even by genre standards.” Read King’s article here.
And while we are on the subject of labour in Canada, it turns out that Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver hired Lions Gate Risk Management Group – a nasty security. firm. As a former worker noted on Glassdoor, “Autocratic leadership. Workers are treated like dogs.” Lions Gate Risk Management was hired to keep tabs, take videos and photos and generally harass striking members of the TSSU (Teaching Support Staff Union) who were on legal strike last fall. There’s a good exposé about these anti-worker spies in The Tyee, here. As Derek Sahota, a TSSU representative noted, “I believe they [SFU] were looking for any way to break the union. This was just one of the tools in their tool kits they felt they could use.”
The New York Times has a rather shocking article A Marketplace of Girl Influencers Managed by Moms and Stalked by Men about making money through little girls. Experts say it is dangerous — because of the stalkers and because of the commodification of girls and women. The NYT investigated 5,000 “mum-run” Instagram accounts that feature their little girls. Tons of people pay $10 a month to tune in to clothing, shoes, makeup, poses and more sported by these mainly preteen girls.
“Elissa has been running her daughter’s Instagram account since 2020, when the girl was 11 and too young to have her own. Photos show a bright, bubbly girl modeling evening dresses, high-end workout gear and dance leotards. She has more than 100,000 followers, some so enthusiastic about her posts that they pay $9.99 a month for more photos.”
It’s worth reading the article. Of course one factor is the grinding down of the middle class and “the wolf at the door” sort of poverty. Clearly some of these mothers have little money and being able to make money off their daughter is an attractive option. Here it is.
What to Watch…
Sick of Myself is a 2023 film from Norway you can watch on Kanopy. It’s very good. A young woman barista sees her boyfriend getting lots of media attention for his “art form” (basically stealing furniture and making art out of it) and decides to do something to garner some notoriety. In this black comedy, the young woman makes herself sick, and gets hospitalized due to a terrible skin rash. What happens afterward is both funny and pathetic—it’s a truly human movie and one told with wit and sarcasm. You’ll like it here is the trailer.
Tantura (2022) is now available to watch on Kanopy. The documentary film examines what happened to hundreds of residents of the Palestinian village of Tantura in the summer of 1948.
Israeli soldiers attacked, beat, raped and killed 40-200 Palestinians. But the most important part of the story is this: Teddy Katz was the graduate student who wrote his Master’s thesis in 1998 about what happened at Tantura and several other Palestinian villages. His thesis was awarded the highest grade possible and he graduated with honours. However the Times of Israel picked up the story and suddenly some of his informants (subjects) with whom he had done interviews sued him for libel. To spare the university and a huge court battle, Katz was forced to sign a retraction which said the massacre never took place. Just after the judge closed the case, Katz tried to withdraw his retraction, saying that he had signed it “in a moment of weakness and that he already deeply regretted it,” but the judge refused to listen. The university revoked his degree. This film is very important because it shows how Israel has been able to rewrite history to its own advantage – and cover up its disgusting, racist reality. Israel’s current war on Gaza is no exception. Here is the trailer.
Deutschland 1983
Deutschland 1983. This series is on CRAVE and is worth even subscribing briefly and dropping your sub after you see Deutschland 1983, Deutschland 1986, and Deutschland 1989. A young man, Martin, born in East Berlin in the 1960s gets involved in the HVA spy network. He conducts international operations as the Cold War is on its last leg. The six parts in Deutschland 1983 series is well worth watching – the family relationships, Martin’s desire to do something good for his country and the international rage against the US is palpable and well done.
After those six episodes you can watch Deutschland 1986, and Deutschland 1989 – when the Cold War has given way to the US and Reagan’s wars and histrionics. Martin is caught as are the other characters including a doctor who must do unethical drug trials to maintain her family, and Martin’s ex-wife who becomes a senior bureaucrat in the East German government. Martin’s malevolent aunt who is a top spy for East Germany also needs to supply arms to the ANC in South African. All the characters are believable; you don’t know who the spies are, yet you get to understand the politics of the times that push both “home” and “international” Communist causes.
The series is fascinating, six episodes for each of three years – the best is the first series, Deutschland 1983. The trailer is here
Catch Me a Killer is an 11-part series on Netflix which is based on a true story and a novel. It is about South Africa in the ‘90s. Micki Pistorius is a journalist turned psychologist who finds serial killers in her country. Micki is a credible and driven profiler, the first of the kind in South Africa. Here is the trailer
I would recommend watching Layla M on Netflix. Layla, born and raised in Amsterdam is in her last year of high school. Layla has witnessed many racist incidents, and refuses to “turn the other cheek.” Her parents, originally from Morocco, live mostly non-religious lives; her dad runs an antiques shop; her brother likes to play soccer—her Muslim family seems modern and tries to fit into Dutch life. Layla decides to don the veil and then wear the niqab as a sign of her faith and to distinguish herself from her peers who want to be Europeans. There are some excellent moments when her dad challenges her, and her mother begs her to be “pleasant” as there are only a few months left before Layla will enter university and then medical school.
Below: Deutschland 1983, Layla M, Tantura, Two Worlds Colliding: Darren Night, Sick of Myself
More and more frantic with her family ignoring her as a Muslim, she decides to marry a young Muslim man, Abdullah, also from Amsterdam, whom she confides in over Skype night after night. She runs away from home early one morning, and the two marry in secret. They take off for a training camp, then to Belgium and finally to an unnamed country to try to join the Islamic state (ISIS). We see a very human and well-informed film in which the young people are not treated like monsters, or terrorists. In the end, we see the long arm of the state trying to track the couple and eventually deal with Layla. This film was released in 2016, at the height of young people, especially young women in western Europe, secretly going to Syria to join ISIS fighters. The film is a tragic reminder of what the western authorities do to the ones who want to return to the UK, or indeed to Canada. I urge you to tune into a podcast I reviewed The Shamima Begum Story, here. It is the true story of a 15-year-old school girl who leaves the east end of London for Syria to live in the “Caliphate”. When her four children plus her husband died, and she tried to return home, the UK punished her by revoking her citizenship. She now lives alone in a refugee camp in Syria– with no country and no status. The trailer is here.
Clearcut is a 1991 feature film shot in Thunder Bay, Ont and environs. More than 30 years after Clearcut was made, Thunder Bay is in the news once again. Its ex-police chief and the lawyer for the police department were arrested and charged with obstruction of justice and breach of trust for making false statements about the investigations into the seven murders of Indigenous teens found in the waterways in the city. For more on that, I recommend reading, Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City, a 2017 award-winning book by Anishinaabe journalist Tanya Talaga .
“Canadian Heritage defines racism hotspots as the regions with the highest number of police-reported hate crimes in Canada”
Of course Thunder Bay is known for its racism, and sometimes TB is called the most racist city in Canada. Indeed it is one of the racism hotspots: “Canadian Heritage defines racism hotspots as the regions with the highest number of police-reported hate crimes in Canada.” But the current events are taking place decades after the plot in the fictional Clearcut. The film will leave you shaking, not just because of the overt racism, and the all-male macho cast of characters. Nothing mitigates the violence in the film. Don’t rush to see it. While it starts off well enough — with Indigenous people trying to block clear-cutting of their land and mount pressure to close the local sawmill, about a third of the way through, the film turns into a horror film reminiscent of the 1972 film Deliverance crossed with Friday the 13th . Clearcut is pretty horrible. The evil, bloodthirsty guys are Indigenous men. It’s on Kanopy.
Master Gardener on Kanopy is a stagnant, white-saviour kind of film. I wasn’t impressed. A gardener for a rich woman who owns an estate is confronted by a personal challenge to his authority. When the woman’s wayward niece comes to live and work for her board under the gardener’s watchful eye, the gardener shows his vulnerability . Though the film is nicely shot, it is slow until it ramps up into incredible violence and revenge – in the gardener’s efforts to “save” the young woman from the drug lord with whom she used to live.
On the NFB site is a good 50 minute documentary by Indigenous filmmaker Tasha Hubbard called Two Worlds Colliding (2004). The film examines the “freezing deaths” of at least Indigenous people in Saskatoon who were picked up by the police, driven to the edge of town and told to walk home sometimes without warm coats or shoes in mid-winter. All but one, Darrell Night, froze to death. What happened to the cops responsible for this? You have to watch to see.
The Guardian newspaper in the UK ran this article a year ago – when Night mysteriously died after being the whistle blower nearly twenty years ago.
Podcasts to listen to…
The Take on Al Jazeera is one of my favourite podcasts. In only 20 – seven days a week — the podcast explores a wide range of topics, international events and politics. In this episode, Dr. Munther Isaac (@MuntherIsaac), an Evangelical Lutheran Pastor living in Bethlehem explains what it was like to celebrate Easter – in his West Bank city. He said, “Our Good Friday has lasted much too long” against a backdrop of the horrendous slaughter of more than 30,000 Palestinian in Gaza by Israel. The distance from Bethlehem to Gaza is only 100 km, but of course it is impossible and off limits to make the trip – as serious journalists know only too well.
Another podcast on The Take is also worth listening to: Did Israel Intentionally Target a World Central Kitchen Convoy in Gaza? This is a must-hear and it’s only 18 minutes long. Here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1sC_NX6eNk
Over My Dead Body: Gone Hunting has six well-crafted and fascinating episodes. It is the true story of four young people, who had first become best friends at their private Christian high school in the 1980s. The four paired off, married and had uneventful and privileged lives in Tallahassee, Florida. They all remained good friends. In 2000, one of the men, Mike Williams, disappeared during a hunting trip. His body wasn’t found nor were there arrests made for 17 years. The series is tightly written and well done. Of particular interest to me were two interviews after the final episode. One was with an FBI profiler who just goes over the pat ground of why the murderer murdered — jealousy, a new love interest, and narcissism. But the other interviewee is Professor Jane Monckton Smith, a British criminologist at the University of Gloucestershire, whom I’ve written about here when I reviewed her excellent book. She maintains that the issue of coercive control was at the heart of this murder. She offers a penetrating look at this phenomenon which has come to the forefront of cases surrounding “domestic” murders and violence, and asks more questions than can be answered.
Wondery is a great American source for podcasts. The research is excellent, the scripts are good, there is no repetition, and no boiling down the essence of the podcast. I’ve listened to several of their series: Aaron Hernandez: a Football Tragedy, I’ve reviewed here. A recent podcast series is FBI Agent Turned Russian Spy/Caught in the Act which I listened to here.
Letter of the month:
Letter of the Month from author, book reviewer and anti-slavery academic, Aidan J McQuade
Letter to British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak
Posted on April 16, 2024
16 April 2024
Dear Prime Minister
In 2017 I was awarded an honorary OBE in recognition of my services to the eradication of slavery. I am now returning this as it is something which I can no longer, in good conscience, keep.
On 15 April 2024, your government refused to provide protections for the victims of modern slavery from your unconscionable “Rwanda scheme”. Over the past months you, as Prime Minister, have acquiesced in attacks on the European Convention on Human Rights by members of your parliamentary party. These, along with the UK’s bipartisan position on Gaza, have put into sharp focus how British policy now distinguishes between people whose lives it values, and those whose lives it disdains.
These represent a fundamental repudiation by the UK of the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They are a rejection also of an enduring British human rights tradition stretching back to Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce, and Mary Wollstonecraft, and a longer tradition of rule of law that stretches back to Magna Carta.
As such they send to the whole world a message that the UK rejects the core bases of human rights and rule of law upon which progress in human dignity, including anti-slavery action has been based for hundreds of years. This can only impede the anti-slavery struggle and embolden other governments who seek to systematically abuse the rights of their subjects and citizens, including by the facilitation of their enslavement.
I hope that you will yet find it in your heart to alter course and embrace and defend these British traditions of human rights and rule of law rather than sacrifice them to some ill-judged populist crusade.
Yours faithfully
Dr Aidan McQuade
Ars Gratia Artis – Art for Art’s sake
Dorothy Hale was an actress, a dancer and a socialite in New York in the 1930s. When her husband died in a car crash, her career faltered and she faced economic ruin. At the age of 33, she leaped from her window in an apartment building in New York City. Her friend Clare Boothe Luce, publisher of Vanity Fair magazine, commissioned Frida Kahlo to paint a portrait of Hale as a gift to Hale’s mother. Here is the painting:
Mexican artist Chavis Marmol sculpted this wonderful work:
“Sculptor Chavis Mármol has never owned a car, but that’s never inhibited his drive. Earlier this month, the 42-year-old Mexico City-based artist (who travels largely by bicycle) dropped a nine-ton replica of an Olmec head onto the roof of a blue Tesla Model 3 in a crushing display posted to Instagram on March 11.
Read more here from my favourite arts site: Hyperallergic
Image at the top: Tesla car smashed by stone Olmec head, by artist Chavis Mármol of Mexico. (2024) Credit: Hyperallergic
Another ruined dinner party... 