From fish to Stalin and Hitler
Growing up in Toronto, there were a few things my childhood peers and I believed about Newfoundland: Joey Smallwood was premier for life; fishing was the only profession; people were poor and spoke with a strange accent, part New World, part Irish. It was with interest then that I read Greg Malone’s book, Don’t Tell the Newfoundlanders, The True Story of Newfoundland’s Confederation with Canada. It presents the politics of Newfoundland’s entry to Confederation in 1949 from a dyed-in-the-wool Newfoundlander. And a satirist, to boot. But there is no humour here. It was written by an angry Malone, a serious Malone who emphatically believes Newfoundland got a raw deal by agreeing to join Canada on the eve of April Fool’s seven decades ago. “I carry a Canadian passport because Newfoundland was occupied by Canada in 1949 by means of a constitutional coup arranged with Great Britain,” writes the man who helped found the comedy group, CODCO. “That said, it is also true that Newfoundland’s joining up with Canada made sense, not only geographically, but politically and socially too. It may well have happened later and under different circumstances if it had not been forced on Newfoundland in 1948.”
Newfoundlanders weren’t certain about “hooking up” with us. They considered becoming an independent country or remaining under the aegis of Britain or joining the United States. It was only the relentlessness of a proCanada Joey Smallwood, secret negotiations between Britain and Ottawa and the reluctance of our politicians to let this one get away like Alaska. Besides, Labrador had iron ore and forests to maintain a pulp and paper industry. Malone reprints too many government documents and political memos in his book. That comes, likely, from not being a professional historian, but it can sometimes make reading Don’t Tell the Newfoundlanders a slog. Still, it offers a valuable perspective on Canadian history. The premise of Anton Piatigorsky’s novel, The Iron Bridge, is fascinating. Each chapter focuses on a famous mass murderer/dictator of the 20th century as he might have been as an adolescent: Idi Amin of Uganda, Pol Pot of Cambodia, Mao Tsetung, Josef Stalin, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic and Adolf Hitler.
I expected Piatigorsky, an award winning playwright, would offer an imaginative perspective about what might have created such brutality and immorality in these men. I quickly became discouraged. There are not many hints about what might have led these teenage boys to become such cruel dictators. Piatigorsky took a risk by focusing on real life figures we know something about rather than the usual fictional ploy of placing fabricated characters into a real historical backdrop. Even Margaret Mitchell knew better when she wrote Gone with the Wind. jhunter@thestar.ca