Alex Caine is a Canadian veteran of the Vietnam War who lived his life as a martial arts instructor and more importantly, as a confidential informant who infiltrated criminal subcultures for the benefit of police. Caine grew up in Canada’s national capital region on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River, also known as Hull (now called Gatineau). By Caine’s own account, he grew up around, and participated in, street crime in his youth, which made him a convincing informant later in life.
Befriend and Betray is Caine’s memoirs of his experiences as a police informant. He has worked as a contract informant for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the FBI in the US, and other law enforcement organizations, infiltrating organized crime syndicates but also the Ku Klux Klan, and most importantly, outlaw motorcycle clubs. Befriend and Betray includes stories of infiltrating the Hells Angels, and the book includes a photo of the author standing with Sonny Barger, however the most important part of the book are the stories of the author riding with the Bandidos Motorcycle Club. At one point in the book, Caine recalls telling a law enforcement officer that pretending to be an outlaw biker was his specialty. The Bandidos are a Texas born club that has grown into one of the big-four outlaw motorcycle organizations. Caine appears to have spent much of his time working with them, and finding acceptance among them (attaining a full patch) and ultimately providing evidence at trial against the club. Caine’s expertise in the Bandidos is, apparently, such that he wrote another book titled The Fat Mexican about the 2004 Bandidos Massacre that occurred in southern Ontario where seven Toronto Bandidos were murdered on the farm of biker Wayne Kellestein. In Befriend and Betray, Caine discusses his own life with the club, riding with them on runs and visiting a street in a Texas town that was virtually owned by the Bandidos.
The most interesting aspect of Caine’s book are the points where it is revealed how many of the Bandidos appeared to actually believe in the brotherhood aspect of their club. He discusses how the vice president of the Bandidos chapter he infiltrated, a karate expert known as Karate Bob, wouldn’t enter into a martial arts business with Caine because he felt that that would corrupt the sanctity of karate. Caine then compared to this same biker’s unwillingness to allow the club to engage in group-wide criminal activity because that would corrupt the club’s sense of camaraderie. This frustrated Caine’s ability to collect evidence against his friends, and demonstrates that there are bikers, in leadership positions, who genuinely believe in the general ideals of their subculture. Of course, when it was apparent that Caine was not a true Bandido, there was not much hesitation in sending club members to his apartment to snuff him out.
Caine’s book is unique because it comes from someone positioned between the worlds of law enforcement and the underground. Caine has the experiences of a street criminal to make him appear authentic to the groups he approaches, but he’s opposed to crime, and he’s not police either, and he often voices his frustration with the actions of his law enforcement handlers. Among the kinds of subcultures where its members are routinely sent to prison, the rat is the lowest form of life. Caine appears, in his own writing (the truthfulness of which has been questioned by others), excited to be a part of these subcultures and to take down their criminal members at the same time, and while everyone might harbor some sense of admiration for the freedom exercised by bikers, who is out there who admires those among them who commit violent crimes?
The Lost Revolution is a book that covers a largely neglected aspect of the Republican politics during the period of recent Irish history referred to as ‘the troubles’. That aspect being the activities of the Official IRA, the ideological opponents of the British Crown, the Irish-Protestant paramilitary groups and also the Provisional IRA. The Officials emerged as the IRA split in 1969 at the beginning of the troubles, and occasionally shed the blood of their Provo rivals into that recent period of Northern Irish conflict.
This book serves as a history of a lesser component of the IRA history. The Official IRA was less intensely invested in violence than the Provos were, although they did engage in gun battles when necessary, and fund their movement through violent crime. Also their Marxist analysis of the situation in Ulster held less appeal than the more moderate socialist views of the Provos and their Sinn Fein political associates. Much of this long book is about the maneuverings of the Officials against their Provo rivals to gain an edge in the greater republican movement, and also about the emergence from the Official IRA (who gave up armed struggle long before the Provos had) of the Workers’ Party of Ireland, a political party with strong Marxist leanings and also strong opposition to sectarian violence .
Much of the writing by and for hackers has, since the beginning, been primarily electronic text distributed via networks and BBS systems. Relatively recently, as has been discussed elsewhere on this blog, hack/phreak e-zines such as Cult of the Dead Cow and Phone Losers of America are finding print publication via various self publishing platforms. 2600 Magazine (a name taken from the ‘blue-box’phreaker technology that played a 2600hz tone into a trunk line to seize telephone operator status for the caller) has, since 1984, been the one consistent print publication for the computer underground.The magazine has always focused on the analysis of telecommunications and computer systems, although it has also always taken a libertarian-tinged leftist political slant as well. In 2009 2600 published an almost 900-page ‘best-of’ anthology of the magazines articles. The single largest component of each issue, however, is the letters section, and this volume anthologized close to 30 years of correspondence with the publication.
Dear Hacker is an enormous collection of the letters that appear in 2600 magazine, introduced by Emmanuel Goldstein, the magazine’s founder and editor-for-life, who notes his own history of writing letters to magazines. Goldstein noted the importance of a reader responding to something they read in print, demonstrating their engagement with the media and participating in the social life brought into being by writing and publishing. Dear Hacker includes the unedited letters of hackers writing about every aspect of hacker culture, with the original editorial responses. Each chapter focuses on a different component of the full range of hacker concerns, such as dealing with law enforcement, hackers in prison, questions about technology, and questions about the magazine itself. These chapters are subdivided according to years, showing similar concerns revolving around changing technologies and environments as time proceeds. The book is not simply a collection of correspondence, it is also a history of a print magazine operating as a medium of active information exchange to a subculture that is based on the use of computers. Maybe next 2600 will edit a book of Goldstein's editorials that begin each issue.
Discordia is a documentary produced by the National Film Board of Canada that records the strife at Concordia University over the issue of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. The events depicted in the film begin with a 2002 visit to the campus by (then) former and also future Israeli Prime Minister Bejnamin Netanyahu at which protests gave way to rioting. This event was followed by an attenuated struggle for student space between members of the progressive Student Union and members of the Concordia chapter of Hillel (an international organization for Jewish university students). Directed by Ben Addleman and Samir Mallal, Discordia captures the events of this struggle as they unfold. At the centre of the struggle was a challenge to the right for Hillel to use campus as recruiting grounds for the Israeli Defense Force. The students of Hillel saw their recruitment efforts necessary to protect Israel, a Jewish island in an ocean of Arab hostility, while Arab students took the actions of Hillel as a provocation against them, and as a means of evoking the actual violence suffered by Palestinians at the hands of the people who actually do the fighting for that organization. The film thus captures numerous interviews with the students involved as well as moments of direct conflict between the groups, as well as moments of friendship and solidarity among the members of either side. Finally, the documentary also captures reactions by a number of students who are not interested in the strife these issues have caused and are simply frustrated by it having temporarily taken over campus life. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of this kind of subject matter is the question of where bigotry and politically conscious activism overlap. Consistently, the argument is made against pro-Palestinian activists that their work is basically anti-semitic. There’s no question that in the broader spectrum of pro-Palestinian expressions a strong anti-semitism can be found that pushes the immediate socio-political realities of the central issues to the side (often to indulge in age-old conspiracy theories of Jewish manipulations). In this particular documentary, the weight of dealing with the present issues as bigotry falls mostly upon the shoulders of Hillel members, both in accusations they make of their adversaries, and in their attitude towards the other. The pro-Palestine Concordia Student Union is headed by Aaron Mate, a young Jewish activist who currently works as a producer for Democracy Now!, a daily social justice radio program carried by the Pacifica Radio network, and Samir Elatrash, a Canadian-Palestinian student with family in the occupied territories. Hillel is primarily represented by Noah Sarna, a leader of the Concordia chapter and a sincere and passionate fighter for Israel. There are some instances of unadulterated Anti-Semitism expressed, but more common are the Islamophobic statements of the Hillel students. Furthermore, Aaron Mate is characterized as a self-hating Jew during the documentary and also off screen by his opponents. This charge against Mate suggests that in some circles Jewishness demands unlimited support for Israel and all of its policies.
This film was released after the release of another documentary about the Netanyahu riots called Confrontation at Concordia, directed by Martin Himel. I haven’t seen Himel’s film (I’ve now added it to my watchlist) but according to wikipedia it heavily emphasizes the anti-Israel sentiments expressed and the anti-free speech dimension of the riots which ultimately succeeded in preventing Netanyahu from speaking. In interviews, Himel also was someone who regarded Discordia as flawed for its heavy presence of Aaron Mate, the “self-hating jew” who sided with Palestinians. During a talk given by Himel about the two documentaries, he said, “In my Concordia, we did interview the Arab student leader Samir Elatrash, as well as the Jewish student leader Patrick Amar. But Discordia, besides interviewing Elatrash, interviewed a self-hating Jew who agreed with the Arabs. There was no interview with Amar or any other self-respecting Jewish spokesperson.” This kind of statement indicates a point of view where race and ethnicity determines political disposition. Discordia challenges that notion however, showing that Anti-Israel doesn’t have to mean Anti-Semetic, and in fact, opposition to oppression of Palestinians doesn’t have to mean death-to-Israel. The struggle over this issue is far more nuanced in its actual manifestations than a simple clash of ethnic hatreds.
Discordia is essentially a film about the subaltern struggle for Palestinian sovereignty from Israel, and an example of how this conflict carried out by diasporic communities far from the centre of the fight. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has its epicentre in Jerusalem’s West bank and the Gaza Strip - the ‘Occupied Territories’ - but it has its peripheral battlegrounds on university campuses and public spaces and events such as, for example, the Toronto Pride Parade, where the presence of the group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid is an annual source of controversy. At these peripheral sites of conflict, ideologies, flows of influence, rhetorics, symbols, and attitudes are the means of attack and the ground upon which the battle is waged, and they are relevant to the overall conflict.
Since the late 19th century, via the Theosophists and later through some of the novels of Herman Hesse, India has been conceived by much of the west as a land that is more humanely spiritual than virtually anywhere else on planet Earth. The Hippies and their New Age descendants intensified these sentiments to the extent that, to this day, India is basically a theme park for a New Age colonialism of religious seekers. Richard Attenborough's biographic drama Gandhi, about the great leader of Indian Nationalism, shows a nation deeply fractured under the weight of a cruel British colonial rule, a mean caste system, and entrenched ethnic hostilities.
Attenborough's film is important because Gandhi too has been idealized as a quiet, monkish figure, often remembered through photographs where he is shown naked and sitting cross legged. He's the guy who said "you have to be the change you want to see in the world" and other feel-good aphorisms. Gandhi shows him for what he was, a lawyer and a revolutionary theorist who would go take a beating from British officers, go to prison, and refuse food, to advance the cause of sovereignty for India and all of its citizens. Gandhi is depicted as intense and uncompromising in his leadership of the cause of Indian independence. He is also depicted as failing in some respects, to create an India united under its own independence, as he never sided with the cause of Hindu supremacism and was ultimately assassinated by an adherent to that cause, which comprises the final shot of the film.
One interesting aspect is that Gandhi rejected the caste system, insisting that, when his followers were building communal buildings (referred to as an 'asram') that all must share in all duties. So that some individuals of higher caste take part in the work traditionally reserved for the lower castes in order to break down this system and the consciousness it engenders. This aspect of Gandhi’s work is featured primarily in the beginning of the film however, much of the latter half of this long movie represents the leader as either an interview subject or as a hunger striker.
