New Media

T-shirt logos inspired by the Third Reich don’t look too good at Christmas parties.

Swastika-emblazoned leather jackets haven’t been in style for about six decades, and even then it was mostly a European fashion. Some close-cropped, jackboot marching types still like the retro look, but they’re fortunately in the minority.

So, why are stores in Vancouver, Canada, selling “trademark T-shirts… inspired by Soviet propaganda”? More to the point, why are people buying them?

The Soviets weren’t Nazis, but for those who went through Stalin’s gulags, there wasn’t a big difference. The Soviet Union was directly responsible for 60 million dead (mostly of its own citizens), the virtual enslavement of half of the continent of Europe for the duration of the Cold War, and the propagation of kleptocratic regimes and foreign wars across the globe. It’s sole redeeming feature is that it isn’t around any more.

If the people buying the shirts are doing so out of an ironic sense of humor (capitalist consumers buying socialist-inspired fashions), all well and good. But Vancouver’s socialist vanguard aren’t known for their wisecracking ways.

Tags: Soviet T-shirt, Che Guevara shirt, communist fashion, Motherland Clothing Company

Canadians are known for their ability to endure inhospitable weather, but Vancouverites are definitely the exception to the rule.

Just a few weeks of snow and hail, unseasonably low temperatures and hurricane-force winds have left the citizenry jittery and a lot more reliant on candles and bottled water than we’d like to be.

At least the boil-water advisory isn’t back (yet), but the windstorm last night that woke half the city around 3:30 am caused so much damage that we can’t even walk on our streets without fear of getting knocked cold by a falling branch. The jewel of the city, Stanley Park has become a no-go zone. In the bigger picture, a million BC residents are without power tonight as the temperature nears freezing; this, after multiple power outages already from our freak weather.

Weeks of unending rain and overcast skies are one thing. We can take that. No Internet? No television? No heat? This is not good.

Happy holidays, everyone.

Tags: bad weather, climate change, Pacific Northwest, power outage

The poll results are in and surprise, surprise – Vancouverites are more concerned about deterring thugs from our streets than making sure nobody catches them picking their nose while hailing a cab.

Almost 80 per cent of respondents to a Strategic Communications poll say that they would support video surveillance in public places. Was anyone really that surprised?

Goons on Granville are picking fights with innocent bystanders, people are getting stabbed near the Skytrain stations and idiots with more ammunition than brains are turning our entertainment districts into shooting galleries. Cameras won’t prevent crimes in progress, but they might just help the cops get a closer, freeze-frame look at the bad guys, leading to an arrest. If the city isn’t willing to pay for extra cops on the street, the least it can do is give the cops more tools to do their jobs.

Of course, there are some locals with some very strong opposing opinions about this, trotting out the usual arguments about police overreach and the erosion of our civil rights. I just happen to think they’re wrong. Looks like most locals are on my side, though – at least according to the latest poll.

Check in again next month.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s asinine conference on Holocaust denial (which oddly featured a number of white supremacists hanging out ammicably with their gracious Persian hosts) is just the latest in a string of stunts confirming Iran as the greatest contender for the 2007 civilized-country look-alike-contest (Russia is said to be a strong runner-up).

He pulled out all the stops, ensuring that Ultra-Orthodox Jews in their black hats and long curly locks got plenty of face time in front of the camera.

Still, no one could say they were really surprised by it – not least since Ahmadinejad has been plugging the event for months, interspersed with announcements that the UN member state of Israel will be destroyed at some point in the near future.

What else should people expect from a country where people are fed news straight up that the Walt Disney corporation is just another Zionist-controlled entity in a global conspiracy for world domination?

I’d like to think that people in this part of the world would have enough distance and perspective to see that Ahmadinejad’s agenda isn’t on the side of good. Sadly, one Canadian university professor from the east coast and a horde of anti-establishment stooges here on the west coast refute that optimistic view.

“We don’t like so much the Europeans who came to this place and killed all the people,” an Italian visitor to Vancouver recently remarked to me. He said it while looking at representations of native artwork at the Vancouver Art Gallery with a sincere kind of wonder mixed with a frustrated incomprehension.

According to my acquaintance, Europeans have the idea that their ancestors essentially came over to this part of the world and wiped out the native populations in a terrible explosion of genocidal bloodlust. He actually assumed that the First Nations were extinct in Canada.

I tried my best to explain to the new arrival that while Europeans did indeed commit terrible atrocities against the indigenous population, diseases brought over from Europe had contributed far more to their decline and their current state as a disempowered minority in their own ancestral lands.

Duplicitous diplomats and cheating traders didn’t bring these cultures to their knees. Typhoid, Tuberculosis and smallpox ensured that the European colonial experience in the Americas would meet little resistance.

Most people living on BC’s west coast are at least somewhat familiar with the history of the Pacific Northwest natives. On the coast, in the midst of plentiful resources and a mild climate all year round, the natives were able to sustain relatively stable societies over more permanent swathes of territory than was possible elsewhere – before contact with Europeans brought its familiar apocalypse.

Unlike their distant cousins to the south who had access to advanced metalworking and stone-hewing technologies, the Pacific Northwest tribes used wood for everything. Hence, no pyramids. No lost cities, like Machu Piccu. Not even a single house remains of their ancient civilization. It has all quite literally rotted away.

Only painstaking work by archeologists, anthropologists and our own First Nations descendants have given us some idea of what went on here long ago.

Mel Gibson’s new film, Apocalypto, will attempt to bridge that gap in our vision a little for the ancient culture of the Mayas, pre-contact. The film must surely suffer from inevitable innacuracies of the worst kind – the ones where there is no living expert who can point out the mistakes. But it at least attempt to show us what this part of the world was like before the coming of the others. I look forward to seeing it – as the first effort of a new genre.