Rick Salutin

Wells: The party of hope often wins in Quebec. This year, that’s not the PQ

Rick Salutin is searching the world for the essence of democracy—see here, here and here for the first three instalments—and in Switzerland he considers referendums.

Janice MacKinnon, Rick Salutin, Jeffrey Simpson, Susan Delacourt and Ned Franks talk with Steve Paikin about the utility or futility of our current Parliament.

Chris Selley noticed this one, from Rick Salutin’s column today:
This week, too, our commanding general in Kandahar, Jonathan Vance, said we would “demand honesty, integrity and good performance from all levels of government or we won’t stay.” But that’s pretty much what the Taliban delivered and why Afghans grudgingly tolerated them before we went in.
Actually, I’m struck by how the rest of the paragraph doesn’t make Rick sound less like a profoundly addled fellow typing distractedly while he keeps one eye on the stove:
So what was the purpose, besides changing the image and role of our military? Perhaps these guys have spent too much time at Fort Hood and seen Patton once too often. Maybe they should just be issued copies of the hot new video game, Call of Duty , without needing to stand in line.
In other words, the part Selley quotes actually benefit from being taken out of context…

 

In the early 1960s Khrushchev mounted a campaign against economic crimes, possibly out of a desire to reduce the flagrant cheating that had begun under Stalin as a matter of self-preservation — if you couldn’t fulfill the plan, you had better fiddle with the figures — and had become at least partially routinized and institutionalized. “Antiparasite” laws were passed and the death penalty was attached to conviction for certain crimes. … Any Soviet reader would have been struck immediately by the extraordinary prominence of Jews in these cases. The Jewish character of their names was stressed — Ber Peisakhovich Frid, Leyb-Khayim Yudovich Dynov, Abram Moiseevich Kantor, etc. — so there would be no mistaking their nationality. The stereotype of the Jewish speculator was not unknown to Soviet peoples, and the message was quite clear: Jews are heavily involved in speculation and are thereby making economic gains at the expense of others and the state. Over 400 trials for economic crimes which involved Jews prominently were reported in the press of several republics. Bribery, embezzlement, falsifying records, and foreign-currency speculation were the most frequent charges. The familiar themes of links to foreigners, Israeli diplomats, and the synagogue were often raised, further highlighting the distinctively Jewish character of these odious, anti-Soviet practices. Of the 117 people sentenced to death in the 512 trials analyzed in the Pinkus study, ninety-one (78 percent) were Jews.

In 1990, following the opening of Soviet archives, the Oxford-educated historian Robert Conquest was asked by his publisher to suggest a new title for a revised version of his 1968 book The Great Terror. The book chronicles the oppression, internment, and murder of millions in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, and was denounced by scores of Western intellectuals as fascist propaganda.

Must-reads: Henry Aubin on the Order of Canada; Graham Thomson in Kandahar; Vaughn Palmer on BC’s emissions targets.