Photojournalism Work

LTCOL Andy Maclean, Age 88.

Liam O'Neill, drummer for the Montreal rock group Suuns.

Dawson College student Lucas Aivizidis in his illustration class.

Punk rockers Propagandhi perform in Montreal, 2007.

A puppet show at Café Esperanza, Montreal 2004

Westmount Library, Westmount, QC.

A puppet show at Café Esperanza, Montreal 2004

What if we committed to pursuing the responses that pacifism could provide to war?

"While the Allies were at war with Nazi Germany and engaged in a massive military campaign of unprecedented scale against it, they did little if anything to either stop the ongoing slaughter of millions of Jews and other minorities, or to save and absorb refugees." -Wikipedia "International Response to the Holocaust"

"The more I learn about the [2nd world] war, the more I understand that the pacifists were the only ones, during a time of catastrophic violence, who repeatedly put forward proposals that had any chance of saving a threatened people. They weren’t naïve, they weren’t unrealistic—they were psychologically acute realists." -Nicholson Baker, from "Why I’m a Pacifist: The Dangerous Myth of the Good War" in Harper's Magazine, May 2011.

(If you plan on not reading this essay through, then track down and read this article "Why Nicholson Baker is a Pacifist," which inspired it. Baker wrote in Harper's Magazine in May 2011 "Why I'm a Pacifist", and I found the article profoundly validating and reassuring as an emerging Pacifist, or a summary of Baker's key arguments.)

Just as, in our brains, the pathways we have forged are more likely to be used and re-used until another synapses and neural pathways are created, we are apt to choose the paths which are known to be safest-- and if not safest, at least most predictable. History only repeats itself because we weakly and lazily choose to repeat it.

What brought me to this thought?

A few sundays ago I listened to "Cross Country Checkup" while I was driving. The subject was: "Should Canada do something to help Syria?" Should we provide military support, either through sending Canadian troops or supporting the rebels with arms or otherwise? Should we be involved in this civil war somehow?

I can't pretend that I know more than most other Canadians about Syria, Bashar Al-Assad, or this conflict, and I'm not going to propose watertight, carefully thought-out solutions here, but I kept thinking while I was listening "what about Pacifism?" Where in this conversation--which tended often to be a dichotomous argument between war and indifference-- where is the talk of Pacifism?

We've got it in our heads that the only way to deal with tyrants is by meeting them with violence. Consider that pacifism cannot be fair-weather pacifism, opposed to all wars except just ones. When anti-war movements and protests gain traction, I think this usually has to more do with disdain for imperialism than advocacy of peace. We shouldn't confuse these sentiments-- we can end up believing imperialism is ok when war or physical violence isn't involved.

Nicholson Baker's makes some worthwhile points about pacifism-- that Hitler had already used Jews as hostages earlier in the war, and potentially used them as hostages to keep the U.S. from joining the war-- that there was communication which suggested the Nazis were ready to accelerate the Final Solution in response to the Americans getting involved in the war. Among other prominent Jews, American wartime pacifist Abraham Kaufman lobbied the U.S. to negotiate with Hitler in exchange for the lives of Jewish refugees-- that's assuming one of the less anti-semitic Allied countries would agree to receive them.

Separate from our military actions, our Government's policies towards immigration and refugees can do a lot to prevent slaughter, and to prevent tyrants being tyrannical. History only repeats itself because we weakly and lazily choose to repeat it. 

A basic premise of democracy is that solutions only become watertight as the thoughts and intentions of all citizens and experts are hashed out. This starts with intention: if we are going to battle, there are binders full of military strategists who'll sit down and discuss the details and challenge each other's viewpoints. The solutions we employ are products of these private conversations, and of the broader public conversation-- all the thought, debate, information which is shared through media and filters its way into individual conversations in coffeeshops, radio call-in shows, and in newspapers and ultimately the houses of parliament. Which one comes first is a chicken and egg discussion.

What if we committed the public conversation to pursuing the responses that pacifism could provide to war? Maybe the ideas would come into circulation, and maybe some good would come of it.

Semantics and sentipensante: "I feel like" vs. "I think that..."?

"Interviewer: Why did you call the movie "Stop Making Sense?"

David Byrne: "Because it's good advice."

"Facts are simple and facts are straight 

Facts are lazy and facts are late 

Facts all come with points of view 

Facts don't do what I want them to 

Facts just twist the truth around 

Facts are living turned inside out 

Facts are getting the best of them 

Facts are nothing on the face of things 

Facts don't stain the furniture 

Facts go out and slam the door 

Facts are written all over your face 

Facts continue to change their shape..." 

-Talking Heads, "Crosseyed and Painless"

I noticed a while ago that many like-minded people my age have casually replaced "I think that" with "I feel like."

For example: "I feel like we probably shouldn't invest all our money in hog futures." I'm not talking about: "I feel like pizza for dinner," which is legitimately felt. Here's some of what I associate with each word:

Feeling: experience, intuition, sea change, watchfulness, groundedness, passivity, hesitance, experience over interpretation, yielding instead of arguing, "subjectivity". Feeling is to be dominated.
Thinking: interpretation and meaning, facts, deduction, rational discourse, arbitrary/manic changes, airiness/non-grounded, outward public challenge, conversation, decision-making, power, politics, being in the game, being right, interpretation over experience, mischief, "objectivity". Thinking is consequential.

Is this a problem, referring to thinking as feeling? It's certainly unclear language, it's flaccid and passive, a bit pretentious, and it's not accurate (you're usually describing a thought). "Politics and the English Language" by George Orwell comes to mind. I wonder what he would think?

Replacing thinking with feeling reflects, I think, an obsession with getting out of our heads, clearing our intellectual chatter and getting in touch with our sensitive sides. As a generation, we're cynical about thinking, and suspicious of thought; it is devalued as something inhuman and cold, misleading and unpredictable, sometimes violent, manipulative and dominating.

I think that saying you "feel" something also shuts the door to conversation-- as if, if I choose to challenge your opinions, I could somehow hurt your feelings. Feelings are also rooted, grounded, sensed, and can't really be challenged in the same way that thought can. Sure, you can debate a "feeling" with someone, but something just won't sit well at the end of the conversation.

In journalism, there is the obsession with objectivity as an ideal. We are supposed to divine out truth by reading between the lines of two different opposing viewpoints, or thoughts. More often than not, though, I don't think this works. Serious conversations become dichotomous and manic-- see the quote above, from the Talking Heads-- and the discussion is effectively lost in the details.

I sometimes choose thoughts, opinions, facts that fit the stories I have about myself. It's a great feeling to share thoughts on facebook when it's something that really represents me well as an intelligent, thoughtful and sensitive person. What I share reinforces my identity and the associated values. I suspect there are endorphins/hormones involved, it feels so good!

Maybe we're just naming it well, since gut and personality have so much more to do with how we choose and compose our public thoughts than thinking does?

I'm reminded of a quote by Eduardo Galeano that I like:

"Why does one write, if not to put one’s pieces together? From the moment we enter school or church, education chops us into pieces: it teaches us to divorce soul from body and mind from heart. The fishermen of the Colombian Coast must be learned doctors of ethics and morality, for they invented the word sentipensante, feeling-thinking, to define language that speaks the truth." - from The Book of Embraces

A window into what it's like to be bombed, and on what we do about it over here.

"Seek peace, and pursue it" -Psalms 34:14


All I can think now is that it's important for us to watch this and suspend our making of meaning.  As soon as we experience and are present to the horror unfolding, before we choose to make our meanings and fit them into our biases and worldviews there is what happened: refugee families lethargic and hysterical, suddenly faced with gathering their belongings and moving their shattered lives somewhere else; a son, wandering from man to man and screaming, whose grandparents are buried in the rubble (at the 28 minute mark); young boys filming on their celphones; eyes scanning the sky with what the journalist describes as a "sixth sense" for spotting MIGs.

One man, around the 29 minute mark, shows the blood-stained, empty interior of a van which was used to transport the wounded and dead, then makes his meaning: swears that he'll avenge these deaths in other villages and against Bashar Al-Assad himself, and the cycle of violence continues.

PBS Frontline journalist Olly Lambert is "the first Western filmmaker to spend an extended period living on both sides of Syria's war - and to document, on camera, the realities of everyday life for rebels, government soldiers and the civilians who support them."

"Despite all the training I've had and the knowledge of being in conflict zones, what does one do when there is an airplane coming back to drop bombs of that size? Would it be more likely the plane would drop the bomb in the same place or would it drop it somewhere else? Perhaps this is the safest place? I had absolutely no idea. You're just as much risk a hundred metres away as in this spot," he said.

Take these images and leave them on the table. Do not sift-- all violence is violence. The growing heat of knowing violence and not dismissing it, staying with the pain-- the roar of jets reverberates even over here. How do we respond, we who aren't ensnared in the day-to-day business of war?

On what to do, and thoughts about Anarchism and the Gospels, and societal Psychosis:


I'm thinking after watching the video of how to align my feelings with my actions, how to appropriately respond. Maybe a 1930s version of Steve Day would fly overseas to join the action, as did the young men and women who joined the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War (including about 1600 Canadians, who were followed as communists during the hysteria of the Cold War).

Or should I turn all my savings over to buying ambulances, shovels? That second point is radical but I am drawn more and more to the truth of it-- when I keep asking myself, interrogatively: "why, and why, and why?", I eventually can't ignore the fact that my savings represents hundreds of lives saved. Frivolity equals deaths, in real numbers.

As someone who was raised Catholic, this is the non-negotiable message of the Gospels; if you have two coats, you give the second coat to someone who doesn't have one. Don't wring your hands about it.

One of my favourite quotes on Anarchism came from an interview in the Catholic Worker Newspaper a few years ago. Paraphrased, it says that anarchism is an acknowledgement that there is never an end point, no perfect decision, no final answers, no systems. We are constantly creating a new world-- it is evolving, evolving...

"I'm not going to play at this sandbox anymore," is what Anarchism says to me.

Politics as usual is part of the automatic business of humans making meaning and finding patterns. One medical test for psychosis that I saw described on The Nature of Things was that participants were played static white noise and asked whether they heard voices in the noise. Participants who heard the static forming itself into ghostly voices were found to be more predisposed to psychosis.

Maybe that's what we do when the static gets too loud, when the jets roar too loud? We dissociate from the present and begin to assemble meaning?