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吸血鬼ハンターD ブラッドラスト // VAMPIRE HUNTER D: BLOODLUST (2000) dir. YOSHIAKI KAWAJIRI

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Gilbert et al. (2025)

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STEPHEN: (he taps his brow) But in here it is I must kill the priest and the king.

James Joyce, Ulysses

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enemy feminisms: terfs, policewomen + girlbosses against liberation - sophie lewis

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The lush coastal landscape of the Bay of Bengal had for millennia sustained a forest of extraordinary biodiversity, including the bacterium Vibrio cholerae, which preyed on crustaceans. In the decades that followed the East India Company’s conquest of Bengal in the 1760s, 90 per cent of the region’s mangroves were cut down and replaced with embankments and rice plantations. To survive this ecological disturbance, the Vibrio cholerae evolved ‘a long, hairlike filament at its tail that improved its ability to bond to other vibrio cells … form[ing] tough microcolonies that could stick to the lining of the human gut’. In 1817, heavy rainfall flooded the town of Jessore with cholera-infested waters from the forest, sparking the first cholera epidemic. 

Troy Vettese, Drew Pendergrass, Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics

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Seconds, 1966, dir. John Frankenheimer

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Expanding Solidarity and Securing Spiritual Rights  "Over the course of the 1970s, Indigenous and non-Indigenous women played crucial roles in furthering the struggle for Indigenous spiritual rights. That work was inseparable from a range of connected experiences and struggles, including Indigenous and non-Indigenous women’s experiences in prison, Indigenous women’s organizations’ support for community members both inside and outside prison walls, and feminist and anarchist women’s support for prison activism of all kinds. When the Butlers were arrested in 1981, those past patterns of women’s activism were leveraged and expanded upon to serve a broad campaign that tied together support for their trial to a more expansive campaign for spiritual rights in prison which had secured a range of victories by the mid-1970s. 

Anarchists in Vancouver again played a role in expanding community solidarity for the case of the Butlers and the broader struggle for Indigenous spiritual rights in prison in ways that mobilized both local and international support. As noted earlier, anarchist women were an important part of this process since they had been deeply involved in prison activism beginning in the previous decade. The radical community, however, was also deeply supportive of AIM [American Indian Movement] in general, and the Butlers case in particular. After Basford’s refusal to allow Peltier to stay in Canada, Vancouver-based anarchist Brent Taylor hit the Minister with a banana cream pie during his speech at a Liberal Party function in Vancouver. Three years later, when the Butlers were arrested, anarchist journals both in Vancouver and Toronto mobilized their networks in a range of ways to support the struggle for Indigenous spiritual rights in prison. 

Like the BCIHA [British Columbia Indian Homemakers’ Association], the anarchist community in Vancouver used the power of the  press to draw attention to the Butlers’ case and the affiliated issues of colonialism, racism in prisons, and spiritual rights. Blackout, a paper that circulated primarily in Vancouver, covered core details of the case as it evolved over time, including the  1981 initial confrontation between the Butlers and the police. Blackout followed  that saga over the next two years, as the struggles over spiritual rights escalated in the context of the Butlers’ incarceration. In doing so, the anarchist paper suggested  that assessments of Indigenous spirituality needed to be decoupled from those of “western religion.” Seeing the latter as “overwhelmingly (if not totally) a tool for confusing and pacifying people,” Blackout argued that the former, “has served as  a weapon of resistance—a rallying point and unifying force—against a 400-year campaign of extermination and genocide.” 

Blackout also used its pages to connect would-be supporters with those organizing on the Butlers’ behalf. Readers were thus invited to attend a benefit dance for the Butlers’ trial that consisted of reggae musicians and Indigenous poets at Vancouver’s Carnegie Centre. For those interested in travelling further afield, information workshops on the Butlers’ struggles could also be attended as part of an AIM survival gathering at Pinehouse Lake in northern Saskatchewan. That gathering  was primarily organized to explore different forms of resistance to uranium mining  in the prairie province, but the inclusion of other topics was no surprise to Blackout since, as they reminded their readers, “lots of people have started to connect the eco, anti-nuke, anti-imperialist, and native sovereignty movements.” In 1983, when Indigenous activists initiated a cross-country trek to raise awareness around the importance of Indigenous spiritual rights, Blackout called on readers to lend their support to keep the “Long Walk” on the road. Often, the contact points that Blackout published to facilitate these forms of support were AIM activists or family members that had travelled to Vancouver for the Butlers’ initial trial, including Nilak Butler. Another common contact that appeared in the pages of Blackout was the People Struggling to be Free, an Indigenous community group that supported the Butlers and promoted the wider issues of spiritual rights in prison.

Blackout assisted in supporting public education and community solidarity for the Butlers in the Lower Mainland, but it lacked the reach of papers with international distribution networks. Fortunately, anarchists had those at their disposal in the form of Vancouver’s Open Road and Toronto’s Bulldozer (later Prison News Service). Although they existed in two very different cities, both papers were connected through shared political and social networks. Jim Campbell, the main force behind Bulldozer/PNS, was a former member of Open Road and a staunch participant in Vancouver’s anarchist community before he returned to Toronto to focus on prison abolition organizing. Open Road and Bulldozer published much longer issues than Blackout’s efficient four-page format, and they reached well beyond BC to the rest of the country, into the US, and overseas. That meant a larger platform from which to amplify the struggle for Indigenous spiritual rights in prison, both at Kent and beyond.

Those conversations took place through editorial pieces, but perhaps most importantly through the publishing of prison letters. As Bulldozer put it, state repression was facilitated by its ability to control communication between communities. This was particularly so when it came to prisoners, who were separated from the public by “the fences and concrete walls and the cages,” of the penitentiary. To overcome these obstacles, the paper proffered the power of “solidarity and the written word” between prisoners and non-prisoners in order to develop the “networks, inside, outside and through the walls that can give us all the strength and determination to continue.” The anarchist press, much like the penal press, provided much of this network infrastructure through which those forms of solidarity and communication travelled.

Indigenous male prisoners published letters in both journals, and regularly used their epistolary activities to inform the public about the struggle for spiritual rights in prison. Standing Deer, an Oneida/Choctaw prisoner, and a close ally of Peltier with whom he had done time at Marion penitentiary in Illinois, was a particularly prolific writer. Publishing in both Bulldozer and Open Road, he spoke extensively about the importance of supporting spiritual rights and detailed his  own hunger strikes in American prisons to work towards this. One of those, which he described as a “death fast,” lasted 42 days, and was conducted in concert with Peltier and Albert Reshaza, a Sephardic Jewish activist. Together, all three men were working to secure religious rights in Marion Prison by connecting the spiritual  oppression and racist treatment of Jewish and Indigenous prisoners. While the Peltier, Standing Deer, and Reshaza hunger strike was a high-profile event in the  world of prison activism, so too was the case of the Butlers. Ches-Ne-O-Na-Eh,  an Indigenous prisoner serving time in Texas, wrote severla letters to Bulldozer that, taken together, connected his own struggle to secure spiritual rights in the Southwest with those taking place in both Illinois and BC.

Bulldozer was also a crucial conduit for the public to hear directly from both Gary and Dino Butler and the Kent Native Brotherhood Culture Club. By the spring of 1983, the struggle for spiritual rights was reaching its boiling point, as prisoners took a multi-pronged approach to their demand. They threatened legal and political action with the Brotherhood, first seeking advice on religious freedoms from Vancouver lawyer Stan Guenther, and liaising with the Canadian Human Rights Commission, and later retaining the services of Law Professor Michael Jackson, who was keen on a Constitutional and Charter of Rights and Freedoms challenge. Members of the legal community were well aware of the potential ramifications of prisons denying freedom of religion to inmates, though the Butlers were ultimately unwilling to wait for cumbersome legal processes and began their strike. The news media and politicians like Burnaby NDP Member of Parliament Svend Robinson quickly took notice of the strike and outside supporters began raising money for legal fees and public relations, forming a community-based “Indigenous People’s Defence Committee.” This internal and external pressure was significant. After 34 days, the strike ended, with Kent officials promising freedom of religion.

The struggle continued, however, with changes to policy slow to come, and prison administrators transferring many of the participants to other institutions to undermine solidarity. As with other movements, like the Native Brotherhoods, this, in fact, only served to spread unity and fortify the movement. That December, the Native Brotherhood Culture Club held a benefit concert at the Oddfellow’s Club in Vancouver to encourage continued support for the Kent strikers, as well as to protect Indigenous spiritual freedoms. The concert which highlighted appearances by local bands including Vancouver’s punk band DOA, insisted: “the struggle for religious freedom may one day be yours, help support the Native struggle to retain their traditional religion inside prison walls.” What this meant was that while the principal strike had ended, the movement, supported by a wide swath of activists who had proven their longstanding commitment to Indigenous spiritual rights, would continue if necessary. Ultimately, it was this combination of political and legal pressure through the concerted efforts of Indigenous women, the Native Brotherhood, legal teams, and other community activists including members of the anarchist and feminist  movements, and the strikers themselves that ultimately forced Kent into providing Indigenous prisoners access to spiritual items and religious practices. The first sweat lodge ceremony was held in December—“the first such ceremony inside the walls  of a Canadian penitentiary.” While Indigenous inmates and their allies across Canada held high hopes for similar rights to be extended in other institutions, the results were slow and uneven. In 1984, P4W’s Native Sisterhood explained that prison officials still largely believed Indigenous Peoples should abandon their “superstitions,” despite acquiescing to some demands for religious rights in prison, and this ensured rights were not universally recognized. The Sisterhood explained: 

Natives now have the right to practice their own religion (sweat lodges, sweet grass ceremonies) inside the walls. However, one must not forget that it has been a long and constant struggle to be able to practice Native Spirituality inside the walls. It is not as if C.S.C has made it easy for the Native Prisoner by giving it to them on a silver platter. There are many prisoners across Kanada who are not being given their right to practice their Native Spiritual ways.

This was certainly true at the Mountain Institution in Agassiz where, as late as March 1984, the Native Brotherhood was still trying to convince prison officials to allow the construction of a permanent sweat lodge (which they likened to the chapel available to other prisoners), religious implements to be held in the inmates’ cells, and permission to attend cultural ceremonies off site. Things were not much better at Millhaven Prison, where inmate Kevin Paul Doxtator began a spiritual fast in early 1985 after being denied the right to hold a pipe ceremony and keep sweetgrass in his cell. Referencing how Kent prison honoured freedom of religion  for Indigenous inmates, Doxtator called for the same at Millhaven. He noted:

Kent Penitentiary, which is also a maximum-security prison, has a sweat lodge as a permanent structure. Sweat Lodge ceremonies are held every second Wednesday of the month. Pipe ceremonies are allowed once every two weeks, and sweetgrass is allowed in aboriginal prisoners’ cells.

In Doxtator’s mind, and others agreed, there was no legitimate reason for some Indigenous prisoners to be denied rights recognized at other institutions."

- Sarah Nickel and Eryk martin, "“We want action now”: Indigenous Spirituality, Prison Activism, and Social Movement Mobilization,” Histoire sociale / Social History Volume 56, no. 115 (May 2023): 169-174

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Abul Hisham (Indian, 1987) - Departure II (2022)

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Sachiko Kazama — Shinjuku Chuo Park (Staffage H.L. Series) [woodblock print, sumi ink, japanese paper, on panel, 2008]

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"In December 1934 [Homer Stille] Cummings [Attorney General of the United States] convened a striking diversity of personalities at his National Crime Conference. Participants legitimated each other and their multipronged campaign against crime. Law enforcers offered credibility to the holistic welfare approach, and reformers celebrated police and prosecutorial power. The press covered the conference extensively. The front page of the New York Times published Roosevelt’s speech and devoted much of its second page to related issues, listing the seventy-three organizations and officials represented at the conference and crediting law enforcement for catching seventy-four kidnappers and 793 narcotics violators.

Roosevelt was the indispensable attraction. Cummings considered the president’s presence so important that he scheduled around it. The event was postponed, and its opening timed in the evening, to accommodate the president. The traditionally local issue of crime was now a national matter; Roosevelt branded the war on crime as an endeavor distinct to his politics yet deserving of national unity. Across politics, American leaders should give support and detractors should be marginalized. Interstate commerce of stolen goods and illegal drugs made the problem national. Roosevelt praised Justice Department cooperation with state and local governments. Social welfare and social science would guide the anti-crime campaign. Protection from “the lawless and the criminal elements” was a “component part” of his larger plans, like “feeding and clothing the destitute” and securing “agricultural, industrial and financial structures.” To go beyond “mere repression” of crime, “scientific research, highly trained personnel, [and] expert service” would co-ordinate “home, school, church, community and other social agencies, to work in common purpose with our law enforcement agencies.” The Justice Department had suffered “unscientific administration and lack of public support and understanding” along with poor local interagency coordination, with “heartbreaking results.” Roosevelt’s holistic strategy would draw on “every crime-preventing, law-enforcing agency of every branch of Government” and sincerely address “great crimes, lesser crimes and little crimes.” Roosevelt lamented that “public opinion” was still unprepared.

The conference provided constant opportunities for coalition members to air their mutual admiration. Everyone praised Cummings. Harvard criminologist Sheldon Glueck celebrated his department for “becoming the symbol of efficiency in [criminal] apprehension and prosecution.” J. Edgar Hoover credited Cummings for bringing to his office “an indefatigable spirit and an appreciation of the practical side of criminal investigative work.” The editor Fulton Oursler thanked Cummings and Hoover for “winning some important battles” in what he called “an actual civil war.” Prison Bureau chief Sanford Bates flagged Cummings’s “enlightened leadership.” Republican Harry Anslinger, Treasury’s most famous law enforcer, followed suit.

After years of polarization by party, institution, and Prohibition politics, the infrastructure controversially leveraged against dissent and alcohol was taking aim at narcotics [and crime more generally]. .... The crime crisis required all hands on deck, all institutions, modern science, and an “extension of federal power.” .... Cooperation would reconcile progressive and scientific criminology to the repressive momentum of the anti-gangster war. Glueck railed against police abuses and antiquated patrolling methods, and compared the “patchwork of inconsistencies” in American legal development to the “lack of central planning and control that characterized the military efforts of the allies until the coming of [Ferdinand] Foch and centralized command.” Glueck quoted Cummings on the “glorification of the criminal classes” and condemned popularization of “the gangster . . . as a hero with good qualities of mind and spirit, while the police officer is represented as a mean or heartless individual, glutted with authority and stupid in the performance of his duty.” Cultivating positive impressions of lawmen unified criminologists, Roosevelt, J. Edgar Hoover, and Hollywood filmmakers governed by the new censorious 1934 Hays Code.

…

More intense dissent appeared outside the conference, where picketers from the NAACP protested Roosevelt’s failure to combat lynching, which had surged in 1934. Picketers were arrested and the president refused to give a hearing. The Chicago Defender credited the delegates for condemning unlawful “methods” in “industrial conflicts and racial antagonisms.” But the conference had “roundly scored” all the “minor infractions of the law” while neglecting the “real monster” imperiling the “progress of Christianity and civilization.” Alluding to the doomed project of Prohibition, the paper regarded “this highly-publicized meeting as just another ‘noble experiment.’” Along with Black Americans, labor activists would soon register skepticism. That same month an ACLU event on “Civil Liberties under the New Deal” offered a broad understanding that included jury trials and the rights of American Indians.

Despite these important caveats, Cummings’s conference maintained impressive political unity around a daring and comprehensive approach—preventive and repressive, scientific and messianic, humane and unapologetic, aspirational and pragmatic. Those involved in punitive approaches gave deference to the preventive and vice versa. Some speakers related crime to broader problems in culture and society. Earl W. Evans lamented declining respect for the law and argued that the most important thing in a “war without cessation” against crime was “eternal war against sin.” H. V. Kaltenborn criticized radio shows. Grove Patterson and Stanley Walker criticized shoddy newspaper coverage. Charles W. Hoffman of the Cincinnati Juvenile Court located crime’s “origin in childhood.” Katharine Lenroot, chief of the US Children’s Bureau, wanted juvenile law that could adapt to “our concepts of idleness, vagrancy and nomadism,” and promoted Civilian Conservation Corps employment of troubled youth. Anslinger touted the Public Health Service, the Treasury Department’s rehabilitative narcotics farms, and the need for the “Penal and Correctional method” to “be supplemented by medico-social work.”

We need “humane treatment . . . continued by supplementary assistance," Prison Bureau director Sanford Bates affirmed probation, as not “everyone can be put in prison.” James A. Johnson, the warden of Alcatraz, argued against “too much punishment,” which “may be worse than none at all,” and called for prisons to be “bettered, improved, modernized, humanized,” so the “finest prison we can build will stand as a monument to neglected youth.”

With such recognition of societal factors, the war-on-crime coalition was nevertheless enthusiastic about repressive power—dramatically amplified in 1934, when J. Edgar Hoover celebrated the state violence that Cummings encouraged him to unleash upon organized crime. The newly empowered Division of Investigation with the “cooperation of city, State and National law enforcement agencies” was finally crushing the domestic enemy:

John Dillinger, the flag-bearer of lawlessness, is dead, killed by Federal bullets. “Pretty Boy” Floyd, who for years laughed at the law— lies in his grave, dead of gunshot wounds inflicted in open battle by our Special Agents. The career of “Baby Face” Nelson is over; he died of seventeen bullet wounds while two of the finest men I ever knew, gave their own clean lives that they might serve society by ending his filthy one. Wilbur Underhill no longer carries the name of the Tri-State Terror. He, too, is gone, as well as such men as Homer Van Meter, Tommy Carroll, and others. That is progress.

“Federal bullets” meant federal “progress.” Hoover’s bloody expeditions completely jibed with the New Deal vision. He cheered the new jurisdictional coordination: the “campaign against crime depends as much upon the county sheriff as upon the police of the largest city.” He decried the “wealth and privilege,” the “deference to political pull,” that had corrupted American justice. He celebrated social science, fingerprinting, forensics, and crime labs. While he said the criminal only understands one threat—the “certainty of going to the penitentiary”—and while he called criminals “vermin” and his agents “soldiers,” he celebrated rehabilitation, reform, and crime prevention. “Given the right kind of respect for law,” many potential Dillingers, Floyds, and Nelsons could “become good citizens.” But should social reform fail, the others could have every confidence that Hoover’s Bureau would wage “a war to the death.” And Cummings gave him the guns and bullets to do it."

- Anthony Gregory, New Deal Law and Order: How the War on Crime Built the Modern Liberal State (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Univervisity Press, 2024), 110-116.

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Letter from E.B. White to a man who wrote to him in despair over the bleakness of the human race. That's all I've got today, friends.

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Anecdotally, within my friend group - who skew towards queer women who like the arts and/or are artists - their childhood love of Harry Potter did not translate to reading other fantasy or science fiction. The idea of reading, for instance, the Earthsea books (and were largely responsible for my inoculation against Harry Potter) was of no interest

I'm sorry, I don't believe that anyone who has read regularly since childhood would still count Harry Potter as the best book they've ever read.

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Sci-fi illustrations by Gino d’Achille (1935-2017), for Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars series mostly.

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"In its entire lifetime (from 1936 to the early 1950s), the new penal system [of the Republic of Turkey] worked on the basis of a duality of “old” and “new” prisons. The four-stage progressive system was actually never implemented. In practice, there were only two stages: staying in the old prisons (all non-labor-based prisons) and working in the new labor-based prisons. The original stage system was allegedly abandoned due to financial inabilities (to construct individual cells for each inmate was too expensive for a small economy). However, I argue that the emerging duality was in perfect accordance with the broader bureaucratic project in which the prisoner world was divided into two spheres based not on (temporal) stages but on (functional) compartmentalization. The old prisons served as a deterrent in order to tame the working prisoners in the new labor-based prisons, whereas the latter served as an ideal to reach for those in the old prisons.

It was not compulsory to go to the modern labor-based prisons; in fact, it was a privilege. The convicts of petty crimes, the recidivists, and the political criminals were excluded from the new prisons. For the rest, an age-limit (a maximum of thirty to forty years) and a restriction on the minimum remaining prison term (between one and four years) applied. Moreover, the forms filled out by prison administrators and physicians in each prison would indicate whether prisoners had shown “good conduct.” Once transferred to the new prison, each working day counted two days of imprisonment, in other words, the remaining sentence was reduced by half. In addition, the prisoner-workers earned daily wages, and they did not stay in an actual prison building but in dormitories. If a prisoner-worker broke the rules (which was presented as “betrayal”), he was sent back to the old prison, and all of his earned days and money were appropriated.

In consequence, the prisoner-workers and the reserve army of prisoners lived immensely different lives in two dissimilar institutional spaces. The ruinous situation of the old prisons was the recurrent subject of complaint in the reports of the regional congresses in 1933. In 1940, 1945, and 1946 the deputies made visits to their electoral districts and wrote reports to the Ministry of Justice regarding the unhygienic conditions and primitive environment in the prison houses. All old prisons were suffering from a lack of sanitary toilets, of sunlight, of modern buildings, and of sufficient space (in one case, six hundred to eight hundred convicts lived in an old church that had been converted into a prison). Among others, the typhus epidemic of 1943 hit the prisons so seriously that the Ministry sent steam cabinets to sanitize the clothes of the inmates.

Life in the labor-based prisons, however, was represented in total contrast to the conditions of the old prisons. The İmralı Island Prison, in particular was turned into a dream-world for the new penal regime. Over the years, many ministers of justice (once even the president) made ceremonial visits to the island, accompanied by journalists and politicians; many columnists publicized the experiment in the national papers. In the 1940s, hundreds of law students made research trips to the island and prepared reports and monographs. In one instance, Professor Sulhi Dönmezer stayed for ten days on the island in order to investigate its autarchic economy. Even high school students and teachers were brought to this symbol of modern life. Visitors were amazed by the freedom enjoyed by the prisoners in this setting without handcuffs or prison bars. Economist and bureaucrat Vedat Nedim Tör found here the essence of an ideal life and even wrote a play entitled The Men of İmralı. Cambridge Professor Clive Parry, after his visit, published an article on İmralı and wrote: “I have no hesitation in saying that the Imrali penal settlement is the finest thing of its kind which I have seen in any country.”

There is no evidence to suggest that these representations of the ideal docile convict-worker were simply ideological fabrications. In fact, albeit probably exaggerated, this relatively better-off life in the labor-based prisons was a direct outcome of the dual structure of the prison system, which divided the prisoner pool into a reserve army (in the old prisons) and a labor aristocracy (in the new ones). There were lower levels of brutality in the new prisons, not necessarily because of humane ideals, but because of the threat of being sent back to the old prison in which the reduction of sentence by half would cancelled. In that sense, there was no “job security.” Contrary to generic prison regulations (for example, of the Ottoman period), which on paper forced all prisoners to work (without any success, ever), this dual system creatively established a miserable nonworking space and a privileged working space so that the structure itself enforced voluntary laboring. Hence, “being fired” was a real threat in the new prisons. On İmralı Island, for instance, 443 prisoners (out of 4,889) were sent back to the old prisons between 1935 and 1947 for various disciplinary reasons, and among the 19 escape attempts, 16 were captured and sent to the old prisons with heavier sentences while the other three died.

The effect of the structural violence created by the dual prison system was also observed in the Zonguldak coal mines. The case of the mines is particularly illuminating because it gives an opportunity to compare the situation of the prisoner-workers to other forced-laborers who were employed in the coal basin under the Compulsory Labor Regime enforced during World War Two. The Compulsory Labor Regime was the response of the state to the so-called “labor problem,” which had prevailed since the early 1930s. In a nutshell, the labor problem denoted the lack of a steady labor force (not to the lack of a labor force). Many male villagers used to work in the mines and in other factories for a short time in order to earn some cash; however, since they kept being connected to their village economy and household or had opportunity to change their job, they did not compose a full-fledged working class, an enduring labor force attached to one single factory. Thus, the labor turnover rates were high: It was 68.3 percent in the Karabük iron factory and 24.7 percent in Ergani copper mines in 1941. In the Ereğli coal mines basin, a worker spent fourteen days per month on average in the mines in 1936. Absenteeism prevailed, too: For example, in Guleman East Chromes, in July of 1943, only 116 of 402 workers showed up every day (30 days).

Accordingly, the new National Protection Law (1940) allowed the government to take extraeconomic measures over workers during the extraordinary war years. The relevant articles of the law were immediately implemented in February 1940 with a decree that constituted compulsory labor regime at the Ereğli coal basin, and the sanctions were toughened in 1942 with another decree. Numbers demonstrate the inordinate system: In 1948, of 27,000 workers in the basin, only 5,000 (18 percent) were free workers; the others were conscribed from men living in the Zonguldak region. Of these compulsory workers, 5,000 were steady workers, and the remaining 15,000 were working alternately for one and a half months. In addition, there were 1,000 to 1,500 soldiers and 1,261 prisoners working in the mines. Apart from mines, the forced labor regime broadened to include construction of public works (roads, bridges, railroads). In sum, what war mobilization in 1940 aimed to accomplish was to secure a fixed worker supply for the growing state-run enterprises.

Even though both compulsory work and prisoners’ work are forms of unfree labor, the structures of force and legitimacy were in complete contrast. Peasants under the yoke of compulsory labor regime tried their best to frustrate the implementers. Every one out of ten forced workers succeeded in running away from Ereğli coal basin (9.7 percent in 1942 and 10.7 percent in 1943). Villagers made use of the infrastructural incapacity of the state to escape this “collective conviction-psycho” in the mines. Compulsory labor regime, seen as drudgery, had no legitimacy at all, and the forced workers had every reason to sabotage the system. This was, however, not true for prisoner-workers. Although the official declaration that the prisoner-workers in Ereğli/Zonguldak mines were working “like sheep” should not be accepted without reservation, substantial evidence exists regarding the submissive attitudes of the convicts. In 1939, the official inspectors reported that prisoners and free workers work together without having any coordination problem. It was testified in 1994 by one of the workers, Sabri Eyüp Demir, that the prisoners’ working conditions had been “very good; they had no difference from us.” The prisoners were, it was reported, not only hard-working but even more productive than the free workers. The 1949 observations of Gerhard Kessler, professor of sociology and social policy, supported the reports:

Because every day spent in the pits is regarded as two days of confinement and because their life in mine basin is freer than that in the prison, they are ready to tolerate everything in order to spend most of their sentence here; they constitute the most obedient part of the work force.

Hence, desertion was considerably rare among the prisoners in comparison to the compulsory labor force. Demir, the above-mentioned worker, said, “I didn’t hear [any escape affairs]. Their concern was to finish the sentence, and go away.” Erol Çatma, historian of the coal basin, concluded that the convict workers were in general quite content, and they attempted to run away only when they were afraid of being sent back to the old prisons. The common reason of sending them back was sickness, which turned the convict into a useless burden for the enterprise. Of significance is the fact that while being hospitalized meant for forced workers at least a temporary escape from the mines, it was a disaster for the convict workers. For them, the alternative to the mines was not being sent back to their village, but to the old prisons. Nevertheless, epidemics such as syphilis, malaria, and typhus were widely seen in the basin due to the impact of war and the absence of public health measures. Thus, the attempts of hospitalized prisoners to escape turned into a serious problem to be related by the public prosecutor of Zonguldak to the minister of economics. The penal system based on labor caused “the abandonment of unproductive prisoners to the margins of penitentiary life.”

In conclusion, the dual-prison system had a peculiar structural effect on convict workers’ attitude in the workplace. Both in the agricultural prisons like İmralı Island and in the mining zones of mixed labor like the Zonguldak coal basin, prisoners worked under threat of being “fired”—that is, of being sent to miserable conditions for a reduplicated period of time. It was not only in the propaganda of the national press that the degree of physical violence in the new prisons was considerably low; similar to the rules of free labor market, without any workers’ rights, oppression was shifted from workplace to the general labor structure. In the compulsory labor regime, however, violence was extensively observed, as “firing” was not an option. In other words, forced workers had nothing to lose for being subversive, but the prisoner-workers had something to lose, which made them work voluntarily even more than the free workers. While debates in the literature previously focused on whether (and how) unfree forms of labor contributed to or impeded the development of capitalism, scholars have now turned away from a rigid dichotomy between free and unfree labor and have instead proposed “a multiplicity of forms of exploitation.” The dual structure of the penal regime in Turkey in the 1930s and 1940s complicates the free/unfree dichotomy by highlighting a particular form of unfree labor, which differed not only from the compulsory labor regime in Turkey, but also from other convict labor cases like chain gangs and prison industrial complexes."

- Ali Sipahi, “Convict Labor in Turkey, 1936–1953: A Capitalist Corporation in the State?” International Labor and Working-Class History No. 90 (Fall 2016): 247-250.

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"The productive alliance formed between British missionaries and feminists came as something as a shock for the local elite in Victoria. Local reformers had long called for an assisted female migration, arguing that only white women could ensure British Columbia’s entry into the exalted status of respectable, prosperous, white settler colonies. A member of the Vancouver Island House, Selim Franklin, made something of a career of promoting female migration as a panacea for the colony’s many ills. In 1859 his election platforms included exploration, road-building, a new land policy, and assisted immigration of ‘respectable females.’ In 1861 he told the house that female migration would render the colony’s migratory population permanent, and he ‘canvassed the electors with a promise to bring out from England or somewhere a cargo of damsels.’  While people might object to other aspects of his platform, they thought that if ‘he had fulfilled his promise he would have proved a father to his country,’ an interesting comment given Franklin’s status as a Jew and a bachelor. 

This history of agitation did not prepare Victoria’s elite for the inauguration of the long-sought-after immigration. ‘This London “Columbia Mission Meeting” has taken us quite by surprise,’ wrote New Westminster missionary H.P. Wright in a private letter to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts in April 1862. While he had told metropolitan friends of British Columbia’s desire for white female immigrants, he expected neither the pace nor the form that the emigration took. ‘The Bishop is as much puzzled as I am,’ Wright added. It was not until June that a ‘local committee’ was formed in Victoria to cooperate with CES. This committee looked much like the other manifestations of the local, improving elite, constituted, as it was, by a potent mix of Anglican clergy, improving businessmen, colonial officials, and naval officers. Yet communication between London and Victoria remained limited and unclear, and efforts to form a committee on the Mainland failed altogether.

Limited communication hints at a deeper conflict between the intentions of the metropolitan female emigration movement and the settler community. FMCES [Female Middle Class Emigration Society] embraced emigration as a means of fostering female independence. A contributor to the English Woman’s Journal noted that ‘the promoters of female emigration look upon it as anything more than one among many means of improving the condition of women.’ 

Distancing themselves from those who equated female emigration with the marriage market, FMCES warned women to never look upon immigration as a mere means to marriage: they must ‘fully understand that they go for work for independence, not to marry, and be idle.’ From the outset, white British Columbians made clear that their reasons for supporting the assisted migration of white women were different. They wanted female immigrants to be wives for working-class white men, especially miners. The Victoria Press’s London correspondent interpreted female emigration as an effort to ‘supply the market with that most desirable of all commodities – wives for the diggers.’ 

White working-class female independence was not ultimately compatible with the colonial project. The ability of colonial discourse to subvert the possibility of women’s independence in this realm suggests the extent to which the feminist intentions of the female migration movement were modified in colonial contexts. Upon receiving news that British Columbia was to be an object of FMCES’s benevolent intentions, the local press made clear that the colony would accept the assisted migrants only on explicitly anti-feminist terms:

We never knew a man with matrimony in his eyes who expressed any affection for “bluestockings. The women we want in this and other colonies are women prepared to rough it as well as ourselves, women who, while acting as domestic servants, the class we particularly lack, will possess all the fair graces of womanhood and the virtues which will make them an ornament to their sex, at once model servants as well as model wives.

Like Greg, this journalist saw female migration as a means of fortifying the binary status of nineteenth-century gender. Feminist approaches to emigration were undermined by existing colonial discourses and the unwillingness of metropolitan feminists to provide a substantive critique of them. 

Divergent political goals did not dampen local excitement about the boat-load of young white women. As the Tynemouth neared, local journalists kept track of her movements, the cargo she carried, and her staff. They worked hard to build anticipation about the ship’s arrival. ‘Sixty single ladies – think of it, ye single, bald-headed, and a-little-on-the-grey order, and build your habitations larger!’ bid the Victoria Press. The British Colonist thought the arrival of the Tynemouth a cause for real celebration: ‘A general holiday should be proclaimed; all the bunting wave from the flagstaffs; salutes fired from Beacon Hill; clean shirts and suits of good clothes brought into requisition.’ 

The Tynemouth rolled into James Bay on 19 September 1862, bringing a formidable mixture of scandal and thrills to Victoria. The three-month passage around the cape was eventful: the coal-passers struck, some twenty sailors deserted, the crew broke into open mutiny twice, and passengers were forced to serve as sailors between the Falkland Islands and San Francisco. The conditions of the female immigrants was another cause for rumour and outrage. The women were kept entirely separate from the other passengers, which may have protected them from male attention but did not shelter them from dark and poorly ventilated accommodations.  Another passenger, artist Frederick Whymper, remarked that ‘they must have passed the dreariest three months of their existence on board, for they were isolated from the rest of the passengers and could only look on at the fun and amusement in which everyone else could take a part.’ The young women, reported Hills, had indeed ‘objected to being restrained.’ 

The troubled voyage did not prevent Victoria from transforming the arrival of all these white female bodies into a spectacle unlike any seen before. The small city was abuzz with news of the nearing of the Tynemouth. Miner and observer John Emmerson wrote:

The arrival of those girls was anticipated several months, and formed the main topic of conversation: and on the first intimation of the approach of the vessel with its fair freight the inhabitants were at once on the tip-toe of expectation, and turned out en masse to witness the disembarkation.

Charles Hayward’s diary entry for 19 September read: ‘Excitement in town owing to girls’ arrival.’ The hype extended well beyond the city limits. On the road between the Cariboo and Yale, missionaries ‘heard of the arrival of the Tynemouth steamer from England.’ 

The spectacle escalated when the Tynemouth entered Victoria’s harbour. Five men tried, without success, to board the ship to ‘catch a glimpse of the rosy-cheeked English beauties.’ The women were eventually brought from the Tynemouth to James Bay on the ultimate symbol of colonial authority, the gunboat Forward, watched, as one newspaper noted, ‘before the admiring gaze of some 300 residents.’  So thick was the crowd watching the women move from gunboat to their accommodations at the Marine Barracks that ‘it required the united exertions of four policemen and the same number of stalwart marines to obtain a passage for the fair immigrants.’ ‘Every available inch of ground from which a view could be obtained,’ wrote the British Columbian, was ‘occupied by men of all ages and colors, eagerly looking for a sight of the long looked for and much talked about cargo.’  The ‘large and  anxious crowd of breeches-wearing bipeds’  followed the women to the Marine Barracks and continued their surveillance project. The ‘young women,’ a journalist remarked, ‘were unable to enjoy a walk in the enclosure without being subjected to the gaze of a rabble of some forty persons, who hung about the premises, and leaning on the fence, scanned the inmates in a manner that was disgraceful.’

This spectacle was organized primarily around the right of men to access the migrant women as the cargo that they were. And judge them they did. The British Colonist’s journalists managed to get aboard the steamer, and they took ‘a good look at the lady passengers.’ They found them acceptable and remarked on their suitability as wives. ‘They are mostly cleanly, well built, pretty looking young women – ages ranging from fourteen to an uncertain figure; a few are young widows who have seen better days,’ was their evaluation. ‘Most appear to have been well raised and generally they seem a superior lot to the women usually met with on emigrant vessels. Taken altogether, we are highly pleased with the appearance of the “invoice.”’ The competing British Columbian was more ambivalent. ‘Altho’ in the lot there are perhaps few that might be called good-looking,’ one wrote, ‘as a whole, they were neat and tidy, and presented a very creditable appearance.’ After negotiating the crowds of men, the women were sequestered at the Marine Barracks, while the committee worked to place them as domestic servants. With the bishop away and the government providing no support beyond authorizing the temporary use of the barracks, this task fell on a disorganized group of local elites.  Edmund Hope Verney enumerated the many ills and disadvantages that plagued the committee’s efforts: 

Until three days before she came in, no preparations had been made for the reception of the females beyond plenty of discussion at committee meetings: we concluded that we could do nothing because, as a committee, we had received no information that such a ship as the ‘Tynemouth’ was on her way out, nor did we know, as a committee, on what terms she was bringing out female emigrants: so when ladies came to us to engage servants we could not answer what wages they would expect, nor whether they had made any agreement to accept such situations as the committee should procure from them: in addition to this, we could procure no official recognition of our existence as a committee from the governor or any one else ... an official recognition of our existence as a committee, was sent to us by the Colonial Secretary after the women were landed: add to this that  the Bishop is at Cariboo, the Governor in British Columbia, and the Archdeacon at New Westminster, and you will divine how aghast the Committee looked, when they were told that their sixty young ladies might be expected in two days or less. 

In a defensive and detailed report, the committee explained how they borrowed food, supplies, and labour to transform the Marine Barracks into accommodations considered suitable for the young white women. Sketches of their quarters illustrating the fence surrounding the barracks and the police presence suggest the committee’s interests in both protecting women and creating a space that, like the panopticon, famously analysed by Michel Foucault, would facilitate surveillance of the women. 

A committee constituted by prominent wives of the colonial elite was formed after the arrival of the immigrants and seems to have performed much of the work involved in despatching the young women. Despite initial praise, the Ladies Committee was later criticized for confining their work to ‘keeping down the price of wages by combination than to doing the best in their power for the benefit of their charges.’ Such charges suggest that the bourgeois ladies’ class interests overwhelmed their gender solidarity. These committees were controversial because of their responsibility for the task of protecting the women from that very thing that justified their importation – male attention and desire. Their dilemma is one that underwrites much of the history of modern sexuality, namely, the difficult necessity of simultaneously encouraging heterosexuality and limiting and shaping heterosexual practice. Verney told his father that the few women who ‘straggled away’ were ‘brought back by the vigilant police.’ When a young woman ‘engaged in an animated conversation with a young man on the outside of the enclosure,’ two clergyman and a naval officer quickly intervened. The British Colonist mocked their prudishness by suggesting that a guard of marines be placed around the barracks and that interloping men be bayonetted. Ideology went hand in hand with more overt surveillance.

A week after their landing, the Tynemouth chaplain Reverend Scott gave a highly publicized sermon to the women, bidding them to remember their role as colonizers and representatives of English womanhood. Scott admonished them ‘always and under any circumstances to shape their conduct so that they might prove a credit to their English mothers, from whom many were now departed forever.’ These efforts aimed to ensure that the brideships would produce respectable heterosexuality, and not easy, expressive, working-class sexual contact."

- Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia, 1849-1871 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), p. 153-160

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Construction connected to military training had its most profound economic impact in the Prairies, where the greatest number of BCATP [British Commonwealth Air Training Plan] bases were concentrated. Large numbers of army recruits could be trained at places such as Camp Borden and Camp Valcartier in Ontario and Quebec, which had been built during the Great War, although they required upgrading and new construction. But for air training, two-thirds of wartime facilities had to be built from scratch, as Canada possessed relatively few — and generally small — airfields before the conflict.

…

With riches in the offing, allegations were sometimes heard that the federal Liberals chose locations for the bases to reward areas loyal to the party. However, no such correlation was proven; it was simply a matter of mathematics that most bases were located in Liberal ridings since, after the March 1940 federal election, the party held nearly three-quarters of the parliamentary seats. Indeed, realizing the crucial importance of establishing bases and graduating air force personnel quickly — and the likelihood of political catastrophe if it were concluded that patronage compromised these goals or the lives of trainees — the Liberals made a point of separating the process of base selection from the political level. This task was handed over to technical experts, primarily at the Ministry of Transport. They sought out locales with topography best suited for good-quality airfields and with large expanses of surrounding space free from potentially dangerous obstacles.

Before the war, military construction had been the responsibility of the Royal Canadian Engineers, but to rapidly meet the huge requirements of the BCATP, Ottawa created a new directorate under R.R. Collard, vice-president and general manager of the Carter-Hall-Aldinger Construction Company of Winnipeg, who was well experienced with large contracting projects. Collard, assigned the rank of air marshal, recruited engineers and draftsmen from civilian construction firms to prepare designs for hangars, drill halls, and barrack blocks, and many of these companies were awarded building contracts by Munitions and Supply. For speed and efficiency, standardization was implemented, parts often arrived pre-cut, and buildings were put up in as little as a day.

Contractors and labourers were imported into less populated areas, thus precipitating boom conditions. To build the $800,000 aerodrome in Yorkton, Saskatchewan, companies and crew came from Winnipeg and Saskatoon. The BCATP also provided civilian employment beyond construction needs. With initial shortages of skilled air force pilots in Canada, and wartime demands that prevented the release of British personnel, civilian air clubs were hired until the plan could produce its own instructors. Bases frequently offered employment for civilian mechanics, janitors, cooks, and stenographers." Also of tremendous significance was the business generated by airmen on leave. Advertisements in BCATP base newspapers give a taste of local desire to capitalize on this new resource. In the Slipstream, printed for the No.7 Service Flying Training School in Fort Macleod, Alberta, the Macleod Photo Studio publicized its “special RCAF frames”; the Java Shop billed itself as the most “swinging joint” in town; and Al’s Billiard Hall, with its new air conditioning system, said it was the “coolest.”

Although discontent was felt in northern Alberta over the distribution of BCATP bases, it soon dissipated. By the end of 1940, three separate delegations of local politicians and businessmen from Edmonton had visited Ottawa, and arrangements were made to transform the city’s exhibition grounds into an air force manning depot. An air observer school, an elementary flying school, and an initial training school soon followed in Edmonton.

Of far greater significance, both to Edmonton and areas further north, was the creation of the Northwest Staging Route, which in late 1941 started supplying the Soviet Union with military hardware, including aircraft. Edmonton served as its base of operations, and for a short period in early 1942, with additional activity relating to the construction of the Alaska Highway, the city’s airport, Blatchford Field, was the busiest in North America. The Americans, who directed both the staging route and the highway, provided Blatchford with $3.5 million for buildings and $6 million to upgrade and increase the number of runways, thus ensuring its status as Edmonton’s main airport for years after the war. The next year, to ease pressure on Blatchford, the Americans spent another $7 million to construct the Namao airfield, with two 7,000-foot runways, eight miles north of Edmonton’s then-current city limits.

The staging route, which ended in Fairbanks, Alaska, consisted of a line of thirteen small airports, built at the cost of $58.5 million, eleven of which were on Canadian soil. Between 1941 and 1944 the route accommodated some 9,000 flights by fighter and bomber aircraft. Usually to mixed responses, the airfields opened up small, often isolated, communities, some with a high percentage of Aboriginal peoples. There was plenty of work to help construct, maintain, and supply the airfields and accompanying facilities, especially in the “principal staging points” of Grand Prairie, Alberta, Fort St. John and Fort Nelson, British Columbia, and Watson Lake and Whitehorse in the Yukon. Each of these airports was equipped with a 4,000-foot runway with lighting for night landings. Also, because atmospheric conditions often interfered with radio signals, the Americans installed 2,400 miles of landlines, which tremendously upgraded communication facilities in Canada’s northwest and far north."

- Jeffrey A. Keshen, Saints, Sinners, and Soldiers: Canada’s Second World War (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004), 48-50