Caithness Armed Forces Day

This week’s Caithness Courier reported on local events in advance of the countrywide Armed Forces Day on 27 June.

A joint-parade by the Pipes and Drums of the Highlanders, 4th Battalion the Royal Regiment of Scotland (4 SCOTS) and Highland Youth Pipe Band included Pipe Major Martin Macdonald from Thurso. Although I am aware of both full-time and TA personnel from Caithness who have been stationed to Iraq and Afghanistan, I am not aware of any who have been killed or injured. Thankfully.

AFD is aimed at redressing some of the balance over recent years which has seen members of the armed forces portrayed as passive victims and not individuals who made conscious decisions to join an organization which was known to be involved in armed action, and in which injury or worst was always a possibility.

I am also thinking of the likes of those who describe the “Iraqi resistence” which was then targetting British soldiers (as well as Iraqi civilians) as “writing their names in the stars” and then ingratiate themselves with grieving family members of certain dead soldiers. Or who, in their books, describe foreign contractors and non-journalists in Iraq as “legitimate targets for acts of resistance” (presumably, this would not include have included Margaret Hassan, but maybe did include Ken Bigley).

But, I digress. The most recent funeral I have seen of a British soldier was of Sapper Jordan Rossi, killed whilst clearing ordnance near Sangin, Helmand Province on 23 May 2009.

Shame on The Times

Jean Seaton who, with her colleagues on the board of the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, was unequivocal in her praise for blogger Night Jack, who was awarded the 2009 prize.

In today’s Guardian she responds to the schoolboy glee of Times Media Correspondent, Patrick Foster and colleagues in unmasking him – as Dc Richard Horton of Lancashire Constabulary – and precipitating an immediate written reprimand pending a full disciplinary investigation.

In addition to the apposite observation that, in an Orwellian twist, the deletion of his blog has erased it from the pages of history (forgetting Google Cache, for the moment) she allays concerns that he was identifying and potentially prejudicing ongoing investigations:

Even odder is their main accusation against him: that the blog revealed material about identifiable court cases. The blog did not do this – cases were disguised. However, once the Times had published Horton’s name then, of course, it is easy to find the cases he was involved with.

Yeah, good one, Times. I have been through today’s edition, but cannot find anything fresh on Horton. Keeping a low profile? You are an absolute disgrace. Same goes for that be-ermine’d twat, Mr. Justice Eady.

 

UPDATE – Next Left has linked to this missive, so I will reciprocate and link to its comprehensive round-up of the blogosphere’s – left and right, up and down, here and there – being united in one thing: disgust at The Times.

Aberdeenshire Council Brought into Disrepute

… but we do not know why. Another LibDem… oh, that sounds strange to say… Cllr. Paul Johnson blogged in April about the suspension of former-SNP, now-independent Fraserburgh councillor Ian Tait.

Following a complaint from an unnamed individual that he had made inappropriate remarks to her/him at a community development meeting, a Conduct Comittee barred him from most council functions until December 2009. A reader’s letter to the Fraserburgh News suggests this complaint was made seven months after the fact.

Even if, like I assume does Johnson, I knew why, I would not be able to reveal it. For Aberdeenshire Council has declined to release minutes of the Conduct Committee on the grounds it was not in the public interest. The Aberdeen Press and Journal is reporting that its appeal, with the acquiescence of Tait, to force their release has failed.

Maybe Tait should appeal to Mr. Justice Eady whose latest perverse ruling on defamation and privacy law drove me, initially at least, to spluttering, incohate dismay.

Recently a rather excellent blog called Night Jack – An English Detective (still available in Google Cache if one wishes to look) had been up there by an anonymous CID officer in an anonymous English town expressing his views on local policy initiatives and national political figures. It even won the 2009 Orwell Prize for Political Writing. With half a million hits in one week, it would clearly have been causing consternation for regional Police forces which suspected it was one of their officers and for the Home Office.

Then Times Media Correspondent, Patrick Foster gradually deduced Night Jack’s location and then identity as Dc Richard Horton from the Lancashire Constabulary. On being doorstep’d, Horton took out a temporary injunction to prevent his name being revealed.

The Times appealed, citing public issue grounds, and Eady – who had previously ruled that an overpriviledged boy-racer, whose fascist parents were permitted to resume a life of landed-comfort after their heroes were defeated, had the right to continue wearing a public mask of respectability whilst spanking the cheeky girls in private; or that as long as one believes one is peddling a valid treatment, it is defamatory to call it “bogus” even if all the evidence says it is – ruled that, as blogging was “essentially a public act”, so Horton had no right to expect anonymity.

So, he lost it, has been formally repremanded by Lancashire Constabulary, and deleted his blog.

I can quite believe that Foster followed biscuit crumbs to identify Horton, and will assume that the subsequent decision to reveal his name was part of a gleeful exercise in power rather than pin-striped goons at the Thunderer doing a favour for their mate, the Chief Constable.

I see blogging as modern-day pamphleteering, which *was* present in the time which Eady belongs to; so wonder if he would have served Chartists on a platter to the great and merely powerful. I rather suspect he would have. Nowadays, I do appreciate that bloggers should not expect a cast-iron right to privacy especially where they are discussing public affairs, but am at a complete loss to see what the public interest was here in identifying Horton balanced against the public interest in his blog remaining active. For a profession, i.e. journalism, which prides itself on protecting the anonmyity of confidants/sources/snouts to then reveal Horton’s identity stikes, at the very least, not cricket.

And The Times is in damage-limitation mode. One article suggests that Horton was “using information about cases, some involving sex offences against children, that could be traced back to genuine prosecutions” to construct his anecdotal missives. I most certainly can see the concerns in potentially prejudicing active investigations and court cases. Had this been a concern, however, I strongly suspect we would have heard much more than… well… anecdotal opining.

Elsewhere, Times Crime and Security Correspondent, Sean O’Neill, admits to “mixed feelings” about revealing Horton’s identity. As the uniformly disgusted commentariat states, they should have thought about that at the time. It is one thing to be a great person to have after a disaster; quite another to wallow in self-pity after a fuck-up of one’s own making.

I hope Foster and O’Neill and their Editor, James Harding, and their Potus, Rupert Murdoch will now reveal the identities of any of those “sources close to government” when asked and never, ever, ever appeal to some code of journalistic ethics.

Compare and contrast: Dc Richard Horton who did not wish his identity to be linked to documents in connexion with public service, fails; Cllr. Ian Tait who does wish his identity to be linked to documents in connexion with public service (which are now preventing his engaging in public service), fails. Just how different is Scots and English law in this respect?

Oh, at least Eady will not have to worry about his learned profession’s embarassing little secrets being made public. Now, in light of his ruling the Simon Singh was libellous when he called chiropractic “bogus”, I am off to market a treatment for woodworm which will involve my dousing cats in kerosine and playing fire-frisbee.

I think it works, so there ain’t no way no-one can call me a raving nutter.

UPDATE – On reflection, I suspect I was unfair on O’Neill. Re-reading his piece I note how careful he is to place responsibility firmly with Foster. So, it appears that, unlike Foster (and Harding) he is appalled as everyone else at two supposed journalists deliberately exposing as witty and insightful amateur reporter (i.e. blogger) who would not feed them exclusives.

Anti-Catholicism in Caithness

Dr. Eric Kaufmann, a reader in politics and sociology at Birkbeck, UCL mentions Caithness in his recent publication, Rethinking Ethnicity: Majority Groups and Dominant Minorities. This relates to the 1918 Munro (Education) Act which had aimed to appease/mollify objections to privately run Roman Catholic (and Episcopal) schools at the imposition of state control by permitting the respective church structures to retain full influence over staffing and curricular issues whilst the local authorities provided the finance.

(A state of affairs I strongly suspect the one-eyed trouser snake and jacobite jihadi, Osama Saeed, is attempting to re-create with generous funding from the SNP-controlled minority administration at the Scottish Executive. Is sectarianism not wonderful?)

Kauffman reports that the only local education authority in Scotland which petitioned against the Act was Caithness, which had no Roman Catholic schools to be transferred. This was described as “a theological dislike for Romanism was not tempered by any significant social contact with catholics or with any public policy need to accommodate”. I can see his point, as I believe this was a scant two decades after an active Roman Catholic church on Shore Street, Wick had been demolished ostensibly on planning grounds, and another 42 years were to pass before a second permanent church was consecrated in Caithness.

Roman Catholicism had been successfully expunged from Caithness as well as the Northern Isles over two hundred years previously, and remained this way until the turn of 19th Century. The print edition of this week’s John o’Groat Journal includes a brief aside by Noel Donaldson, author of the Wicker’s World column on the re-establishment in post-Reformation Caithness. With the herring boon and other itinerent work, the population of Wick and Pulteneytown by the 1830s was estimated at 10,000. This would inevitably have included Roman Catholics from elsewhere in Scotland and Ireland.

One of the first priests to be dispatched was Father Walter Lovi, whose role in managing the cholera epidemic of 1832 is discussed by Donaldson. 

 

Punch cartoon of Court of King Cholera.

Being thought to have been introduced to the British Isles from ports such as Wick, with their regular contact with Scandinavian and North American sources, as many as 32,000 people died that year. That year, what have been termed the Cholera Riots took place in Merseyside; although judging by the attacks on surgeons and anatomy schools, I suspect a large cause was due to the fear of Burking (i.e. grave-robbery to provide cadavers for dissection) and the 1832 Anatomy Act which legislated for the seizure of the corpse of anyone dying in a poor-house for use in anatomy schools.   This monstrous act of state-endorsed terrorism against the underclass is detailed in Dr. Ruth Richardson’s masterful Death, Dissection and the Destitute.

The Silver Darlings by Neil Gunn, about the herring industry, featured an outbreak of a disease which is assumed to be cholera in his fictionalized Dunbeath.

Having checked at the local libraries, I have found very little on the epidemic of 1832 on Caithness.  One firebrand preacher, Reverend Alexander Ewing, who flitted between Thurso and Wick published a pamphlet entitled “The perculiar obligations to devotedness to God arising from the preservation of life in the midst of His terrible judements: a discourse in reference to the recent visitation of cholera”.  Peter Reid, who went on to found the John o’Groat Journal, also printed a daily bulletin which aimed to inform the fearful populous, and itinerent workforce considering relocating to Peterhead, of the daily change to case number and deaths or recoveries.  My source of that information was Frank Foden’s Wick of the North, which makes no reference to Lovi.

I am sorely missing an Athens log-in or access to well-stocked university libraries, so have to make do with the often poorly referenced local history books or tantilizing glimpses on Google.

At this point, Wick was the administrative centre for the Vicariate to the North Pole (which appears to have been superceded by the Catholic Mission to Inuit). One Father Walter Lovi is mentioned by the Scanlan Trail as being originally from Edinburgh, and in 1832 recently having established St. Thomas’ Roman Catholic Church in Keith. It seems safe to assume this was the same man.

A cleric of this name is also mentioned on the history section for St. Joseph’s at Darlaston in the West Midlands, although he was the Rector at St Mary’s The Mount Walsall (presumably based around the contemporary Roman Catholic primary school of the same name). This Lovi was reported as having retired in 1868, which would be about right for a young priest in 1832.

Donaldson recounts that, after starting in Thurso, the cholera soon reached the much more crowded Wick where it affected all religious confessionals with perfect equanimity.  With Jews being thin on the ground up here, Roman Catholics appear to have been blamed.  Lovi, however, presumably acting with Reid and others, braved the fear of infection and personally treated the sick or laid out the dead.  According to Donaldson, during three months, 300 fell ill but only 66 died.  I do not have breakdowns for elsewhere in the country, but this appears very favourable against the 32,000 dead across the country.

In Wick of the North, Foden also cites the 1848 epidemic, by which time Lovi had departed, in which only two residents of Wick died (two middle-aged women), whilst the survivors included a good few young children and very elderly residents. It should be remembered, though, that although Wick and Pulteneytown were quite densely populated, they were immediately adjacent to open countryside and exposed to the sea-breezes beloved of 19th Century physicians; unlike dank inner cities in the above Punch cartoon. Looking across the North Sea, however, one can see Bergen severly affected at the same time. In 1848, some one thousand infections occurred with over 60% mortality (contrasted to 20% at Wick in 1832) in a conurbation of comparable size and economic activity to the Wick area.

Donaldson paints a picture of Lovi being carried aloft by adoring crowds. Whilst this may well be guilding the lily, it is without doubt that, whereas previously his attempts to establish a church site had been frustrated by the municipal leaders, he was now rewarded with at Breadalbane Terrace where St Joaquim’s continues to be located today (if I have any local readers, I understand there is a booklet on Lovi in the lobby). 

(© Copyright Bill Henderson and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.)

Donaldson argues that if the upcoming Wick Harbour Fest celebrations intend to crown a Herring Queen, so should they remember Lovi’s work in maintaining confidence in Wick as a herring centre.

I agree.

Jeremiah Wight and John Wright

The Reverend Jeremiah Wright sees Jews behind his orange juice… no! Zionists! Whoopsie, Jews behind his *Zionists*.

John Wight, prominent figure in the Scottish Palestinian Solidarity Campaign and Edinburgh Stop the War – No! Not that One! – Coalition sees the threat to human progress from the “hydra-headed monster” of Israel and its influence on “International Jewry”.

A Cavalry Officer Fond of Polo

I was looking through the spiffing web log of Jonathan Calder – the secretary of Nutcase the Lord Bonkers – when I espied a familiar sight: Thurso Castle. I have previously discussed it on my other truly awful web log, including this photograph of mine.

I was there this morning, chatting to the occupant and my MP, John the Lord Thurso. What my photograph and that one provided by Calder should show is how misplaced an attempt from Labour PPC for the constituency, John Mackay, to portray Thurso as living in a country castle was.

In all the years I have lived in [the town of] Thurso, this was the first time I had ventured past the gate house on the main road, and down the glorious avenue of trees; maybe 1/3 mile. This buccolic remnant and the copse of trees (relatively unusual in wind-swept Caithness) is by far the most significant remainder of the pile built by Tollemache Sinclair, Thurso’s great-great-grandfather, in the 1870s. On the left of the photograph on Calder’s web log is a white-washed wall, which was formerly the servants’ quarters but now represents the lounge and a large part of the occupied area. In fact, seen from the front, the scene of entropy and genteel decay made me think of a J G Ballard short story.

Attempts to dismiss him as a serial absentee from 10 votes on Parliamentary expenses, I found, are equally misplaced. At least five of these took place ad hoc in one session in May 2009 when he had departed for a prior engagement with the full knowledge and permission of party whips.

I will stop there, as I wish to discuss an absolute gem which Calder links: namely the Google Book of Gerard J. De Groot’s Liberal Crusader: The Life of Sir Archibald Sinclair, biography Thurso’s grandfather and Tollemache Sinclair’s grandson. De Groot describes him as a “cavalry officer fond of polo”.

Born in 1890, like Winston Churchill, he had a speech impediment. Like Churchill, he later opposed Chaberlain’s Appeasement policies. Like Churchill, his mother was of blue-chip East Coast wealth from America sent to Britain to marry a titled Lord. Like Churchill’s Ma and Pa’s canoodling, this caused much scandal and consternation. Unlike Churchill, though, he did not arrive eight months after a hastily arranged marriage.

He also served as second-in-command to Churchill in the 6th Royal Scots Fusillers at Ploegsteert Wood during the Great War, where Churchill was making amends after Gallipoli. Afterwards, he accompanied Churchill, now Secretary of State for War, as his Personal Military Secretary; and then as Private Secretary at the Colonial Office.

In 1922, he was elected as Liberal MP for Caithness and Sutherland, defeating the incumbent Liberal MP. The then decline of the Liberal Party marked his rise through Parliament. He later sat in Ramsay MacDonald’s Cabinet, as Secretary of State for Scotland, and then alligned with Churchill once more when the latter was shunned by his party. During WWII, he had been the Secretary for Air, but lost his Parliamentarian seat to a Tory in 1945 whilst the rest of the country was voting in a Labour Government. After a second defeat in 1952, he was made the first Lord Thurso.

All in all, de Groot decides that he had helped make good again the name of this established and popular Caithness family slightly besmirched by his father, Clarence, who was:

A lieutenant in the Scots Guards, he dabbled in amateur theatricals, played polo, wrote very bad poetry and generally did what dashing young gentlemen were supposed to do – including getting up to considerable mischief on his Grand Tour. During his youthful adventures in Paris, he contracted syphilis.

Clarence was briefly a Liberal MP for Caithness-shire, but died in 1895, aged 37, leaving Sinclair to be raised by the absolutely dotty but locally popular Tollemache, Third Baronet of Ulbster and another onetime Liberal MP. These were not Dukes of Sutherland type people, with one report of a collapse in the summer crops being offset by his waiving the rent for that year (several of the families still farm locally). *His* grandfather, Sir John Sinclair and the first Baronet of Ulbster, had been the Jethro Tull of his day and class; coiner of the word “statistics”; founder of the Board of Agriculture, in 1793.

Tollemache, however, was the Ed Wood of landlordism. A genuinely nice person, but an abysmal planner. Harmlessly, he was fond of his orchestrion, such as this model which is still working on the Isle of Rum:

Idiotically, inspired by all the soppy romanticism of the 19th Century and tales of Ivanhoe, he converted the stable Thurso Castle, at great expense, into the following baronial fable:

The perfect allegory for the Romanticism of the 19th Century should have been seen in the fate of the Eglinton_Tournament of 1839, being rained out on the day and turned into some proto-Glastonbury Festival. But, Tollemache persisted and the Castle, it has to be said, lasted some 70 years until a sea-mine damaged it during WWII. Even with shrinking fortunes, the damage could have been repaired had a better job been done in the 1870s. Alas it was not to be, and in 1952 the Castle was stripped of its lead roof and left to slip, like the Charlotte Elizabeth on t’other side of Thurso Harbour, into a state of genteel decay.

Shite Protest

Three thousand pounds are, clearly, more signficant than £300 which the Scottish Palestinian Solidarity Campaign could not tholl the Edinburgh International Film Festival accepting from the Cultural Affair Department at the Israeli Embassy. And the SPSC, organized by men such as John Wight and Mick Napier who link to white supremacist and Islamist Holocaust Denial sites respectively, flush from the success of forcing the EIFF to return this filthy lucre are moving their attention to this year’s Leith Festival which receives £3000 in sponsorship from Veolia, which manages the Seafield sewage plant in Leith.

This Festival, which I have good memories, of has been sponsored for the past eight years by Veolia and attracts all and sundry from the cities of Leith and Edinburgh as well as beyond. Leith, in particular, has an ashram and gudwara and Bahai House and mosque and multiple churches, and associated community centres, within a short work (as well as two pubs which open at 6 am).

The SPSC are demanding, however, that the Festival to “repudiate” Veolia. I do not know if it were Napier or Wight who selected that word, but it is out-of-place both for what they wish to be seen as doing and what they are, in fact, doing. An association with Israel, has raised their ire.

Not that I care what the association is. This is truly dreadful. The Jewish Chronicle is reporting that the Leith Festival has not caved, but also quotes spokesmen by way of the SPSC site who indicate some wavering. In my experience, the SPSC has issued misleading and innaccurate information before. I hope sponsorship continues and everyone enjoys themselves on the closing weekend, but part of me does also wish to see a posee of SPSCniks turn up to picket a community festival so all can see them as a bunch of fucking nutters.

UPDATE – I telephone’d the switchboard of the Festival and, although the office staff cannot comment on this matter, it appears that all is chuntering along. Not expecting to receive an acknowledgement, I let slip the current investigations following the SPSC’s stunt over the Jerusalem Quartet last year as well as Napier and Wight’s tendencies to link to Holocaust Denial websites.

Whoopsie.

Also, it is pissing with rain in Leith. But all are having fun.

I Do Not Know What Came Over Me

In this missive I gave some politik words concerning something I had said about John Wight, an antisemite heavily involved in soi disant Palestinian solidarity campaigns. It related to allegations made on the Scottish Patient blog relating to Wight. My past experience with this affirmed believer in the threat to “human progress” by “the hydra-headed monster” represented by “comprising Zionist ethnic cleansers, US imperialists, and Arab collaborationist regimes” (that is, not the commonly accepted definition of a nation state bound by borders; but a quasi-cosmic entity which transcends geographic boundaries and includes a whole mindset), as well as an individual who issued not-so-covert threats of violence against my good self. As such, I would not have been *surprised* by the allegations.

Instead of Wight responding directly, an associate of his who, judging my the proffered e-mail address, is a named comrade of his at the oxymoronically-named Socialist Unity, started posting snarling threats and calling me pathetic. Remember, Wight is a man who calls a private citizen attempting to promote her film at the Edinburgh International Film Festival an “Israeli deligate” and attempts to prevent the normalization of any sort of Israeli cultural output in the United Kingdom. Yet, Wighty does not like it up him. Double yet, he does not say this himself, but sets his attack poodles onto me.

For some reason, I decided to back off. Sorry, folks, I apologize. Wighty, in my next missive you are going to get it right-up you.

Anne Frank at 80

Anne Frank, the Dutch teenage diarist who died at Belsen in early 1945, would have been 80 today. To commemorate this, an age progressed image of what she would have looked like has been released by the Anne Frank Trust UK.

As the Telegraph reports, however, a potential short coming is that it relies on the smiling image of a carefree girl and not the weight of years, even had she survived, of her experiences both in hiding at the Achterhuis, owned by Miep Gies who recently celebrated her 100th birthday) at then of deportation and watching friends and relations die. This reminds me of an excerpt from The Talmud and the Internet, a lovely book by Jonathan Rosen, in which he recounted one bubby who died after nine decades in New York; her last words before going to an operation from which she never regained consciousness was a request for a beef sandwich. Another bubby, who had escaped the Holocaust, died grieving for her parents and others who had not. The difference should never, ever be seen as a reproach on the bubby who lived her life in safety and whose dying wish was for more material comfort: Anne should have lived that way as well.

Elsewhere, reports continue to come in of the 89 year old American neo-Nazi, James von Brunn, who shot dead a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. The Washinton Times notes he was a supporter of the American Friends of the British National Party, who have raised considerable funds for this party. I am unsure of precise electoral law on foreign fundraising for British political parties, so maybe the BNP’s legal eagle, Lee John Barnes (LLB Hons, could help out.

In response, the stupid and unpleasant Richard Silverstein, who commits onanism at his blog, Titties Groan penned a missive at Comment is Free. Even judged against his previous brain farts – ridiculing Holocaust Survivors, claiming the killing of Jews-as-Jews at Chabad House in Bombay 2008 was not “nescessarily antisemitic” – this was a corker:

We know how the usual suspects among the Jewish leadership will line up on this … they will seek to parlay this incident into a much wider antisemitic conspiracy. People like Abe Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, live for tragedies like this. You wait. Tomorrow or the next day he’ll be holding a press conference with the security guard’s wife telling the world that African-Americans and Jews must make common cause against the vast antisemitic conspiracy. If he’s really feeling his oats that day he might even work in a reference to an evil Iranian president who denies the Holocaust as well. Mark my words, it’s coming.”

He should have waited for Foxman’s actual response, which was:

The shooting at the United States Holocaust Museum, in which a security guard was critically wounded, is a very sad and tragic event which reminds us, as the Museum itself does every day, in the starkest way, where the spread of hatred can lead. […]Brunn’s evil attack, at the very place that was created to remember and teach about evil in the world, is an immediate reminder that words of hate matter, that we can never afford to ignore hate because words of hate can easily become acts of hate, no matter the place, no matter the age of the hatemonger. […]”

Silverstein continued:

Let’s not do that now. Let’s acknowledge the danger that white supremacists and all violent forms of racism pose for our society (not just Jews). Let’s join with groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which denounced the shooting, to make common cause to fight this hatred.”

Having read some of von Brunn’s writings (and then used eye-disinfectant) I saw not one mention of allegiances with Islamist groups such as CAIR, or plain Islamic groups. It was all about Jews for him. Jews or Jewish targets are attacked with the murderous rage of a man who wishes he had fought on the loosing side in WWII, and Silverstein has to pre-emptively accuse his opponents of not caring for non-Jews as much as they do for Jews.

What a nasty little man.

Eskimos in the IDF

A film I have fond memories of is Vincent Ward’s 1993 Map of the Human Heart, about the cosmically doomed love between an Eskimo… oh, okay… Inuit boy called Avik, and Canadian Indian… oh, okay… First Nations girl called Albertine.

Narrated in flashback by a cartographer played by John Cusuck, to whom Avik recounts his tale, it starts in as a polar explorer played by Patrick Bergen arrives at a settlement in the Canadian Arctic in the years before WWII, and is drawn to Avik who is found to be suffering from tuberculosis.  Whisked away to a sanitorium in Quebec, he befriends Albertine, a Metis confined to hospital with a heart ailment (hence the film title).

Young love blossoms, even when Avik discovers Albertine’s ethnicity.  Rushing, fists brandished, he cries “Eskimos hates Indians!”.  And, no, he did not say “Inuit hate First Nations!”.  His TB treated, he returns to his settlement.

Several years later, the explorer flies in once to the settlement and meets Avik once more.  I have shaky memories of how, but Avik now ends up in the Canadian Air Force stationed in southern England with the remark he may be the “first Eskimo to fly in the RAF”, and meets Albertine once more.  I recall their canoodling in a glass ceiling’d museum as a doodlebug glides by, in terrifying silence, before exploding and showering the attic area with glass.

Avik then flies as part of the firebombing of Dresden (in which the director’s father also flew), where he bales out.  I recall his attempting to rescue a young girl from being sucked into a vacuum caused by the intense fires, and deciding that armies are cannibals.  He leaves Albertine, returns to his settlement to meet a cold and desolate end.

What triggered my memory was reading this report (a few years old now) about twins, Eva and Jimmy Ben Shira.  Part-Cherokee, part-Eskimo (and they are not Inuit; the mother was Yap’ik) they were adopted by an American Jewish couple who then relocated to Israel. 

Naturally, they were conscripted into the IDF; and, by all accounts, were the first Eskimos to do so.  Eva is reported to have introduced herself to her induction class with the assurance “I am not Chinese” (as an adult, Avik was played by Jason Scott Lee).

Eskimos in the IDF.  There is a joke in this somewhere.