![]() The Soviet Union, for example, had something that it called “elections,” usually referred to, as though more descriptively, as the “free expression of citizen will.” The process, which was mandatory, involved showing up at the so-called polling place, receiving a pre-filled ballot-each office had one name matched to it-and depositing it in the ballot box, out in the open. Ignorance is strength.” Real-life totalitarian regimes do not grant their subjects the clarity of juxtaposing a word with its antonym-they enforce order by applying words in ways that invert meaning. In 1984, George Orwell imagined the Party dictating its slogans: “War is peace. ![]() And it meant that there’d be always something to eat, even in the leanest days, before spring planting. You’d walk down the alleyways in places like Two Hills and marvel at what these Ukrainian Canadian gardens could produce. And it was always enormous, of course, and well into the second and third generation in Ukrainian Canadian towns, the garden was a thing of wonder. The colonialist enterprise of breaking sod was here reproduced at a feminine scale in the kitchen garden. The enduring story was that they were busily constructing their future in western Canada, and they carried with it these tropes of thankfulness to the government or even the queen for these free lands on which they were busting the virgin soil and building western Canada. Therefore, we were somehow entitled to ownership.īut that of course was not the enduring story that was passed down to us. The ceding of territory through treaty with Cree chiefs was never mentioned. And it was when I put those two dates together, standing there in front of that gravestone, 18, the mass hanging, the sod-busting, I realized that our settler mythologies had never acknowledged that there was a history prior to our arrival on the land. ![]() ![]() There were all these names to read, but what struck me forcibly was that these men had been hanged a mere fifteen years before my paternal grandparents arrived to homestead near Vegreville in 1900, not so far from Frog Lake. The tipi poles were sticking up above the bush, you could see them as you walked in a diagonal line down the bank toward the Battle River, just west of the historic site. I stumbled upon this gravesite while visiting the Battlefords in 2008. Putin nodded to one of his bodyguards, who took the glass Kalashnikov and carried it out of the room, leaving the hosts speechless.…The correct term is probably not the popularly known kleptomania, which refers to a pathological desire to possess things for which one has little use, but the more exotic pleonexia, the insatiable desire to have what rightfully belongs to others. This gaudy souvenir costs about $300 in Moscow. At one point his hosts brought out a conversation piece that another Russian guest must have given the museum: a glass replica of a Kalashnikov automatic weapon filled with vodka. In September 2005, Putin was a special guest at New York’s Solomon R. press, Kraft announced a few days later that the ring had been a gift-preventing an uncomfortable situation from spiraling out of control. He had asked to see it, tried it on, allegedly said, “I could kill someone with this,” then stuck it in his pocket and left the room abruptly. Petersburg, Putin pocketed the 124-diamond Super Bowl ring of New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft. In June 2005, while hosting a group of American businessmen in St. And I stumbled upon another encounter with the concept of pleonexia :
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