Posts Tagged ‘cornwall’
[URBAN NOTE] Four notes about changing cities in Canada: Hamilton, Edmonton, Cornwall, Antigonish
- Hamilton’s Christ Church is striving for continued viability, in part through selling off vacant land for condos. Global News reports.
- Edmonton’s Accidental Beach, a byproduct of construction berms on the North Saskatchewan River, has gone viral. Global News reports.
- Meagan Campbell of MacLean’s looks at how the refugee crisis did, and did not, effect the garlic festival of border city Cornwall.
- The successful integration of a Syrian refugee family of chocolatiers in the Nova Scotia town of Antigonish is nice. The Toronto Star carries the story.
[LINK] “Cornish identity: why Cornwall has always been a separate place”
Philip Marsden had an article published in The Guardian responding to the recent recognition by the British government of the Cornish as a distinct ethnicity. Cornwall, as Marsden argues, is a region of England that is not just a region of England, but rather a place with its own distinctive ethnic identity.
Why did the resurgence come so late? It might just be a matter of numbers. Only a few hundred people claim the (revived) Cornish language as their main language. The population of all Cornwall is comparable to the number of people in Wales who actively speak Welsh, and the population of Wales is six times that of Cornwall. I do wonder how long this effort can be sustained, but if Cornish wish it, why not?
When I first drove down to live in Cornwall more than 20 years ago, I was met by a graffiti message on a railway bridge near Truro: “Go home, English!” I should have taken it personally. I should have politely turned around to head back across the Tamar. I was exactly the sort of incomer who was swamping the last little islands of Cornishness. But in fact, I found it heartening. Cornwall was not England – that was why I’d come.
Since then, Cornwall’s distinctiveness has, rather than being smothered, become resurgent. In those days, the monochrome simplicity of St Piran’s flag was an unusual sight, confined to places of nationalist fervour like Hellfire Corner at Redruth rugby ground. Now it is everywhere – in the logos of Cornish companies, on car stickers (usually with some jokey tag like “Pasty on Board”), or fluttering importantly from Cornwall council buildings. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the Cornish language was likewise invisible, a barbarous and long-vanished practice, like piracy and smuggling. Now it receives government funding to be taught in schools and appears on the bilingual signs at the Cornish “border” on the A30, and on street signs for every new housing development.
It is tempting to regard such reinventions as quaint, like Morris dancing or beating the bounds; some of the most vigorous St Piran’s flag-waving comes from English, or even American, settlers. But Cornwall’s separateness runs deeper than that. It is less folksy and more physical, something from the soil itself, like the radon gas that seeps out of the granite of Carnmenellis or West Penwith.
The survival of Cornish identity can be traced, on one level, to the quirk of geomorphology and tectonics that placed the sea on three sides and made most of the fourth out of the river Tamar. The shape is reflected in the name: the “Corn-” comes from the Cornish “kern”, or “horn” ( the Cornish name for Cornwall, Kernow, is now as ubiquitous as St Piran’s flag, and has the same root). Trying to identify Cornwall’s appeal, Jacquetta Hawkes reached for its shape: “Cornwall is England’s horn, its point thrust out into the sea.”
Such a position has always made Cornwall tricky to administer. The Romans didn’t bother trying, as long as their supply of tin was secure. Saxon villagisation did not extend far into Cornwall. When the Tudors tried to unite the realm, the Cornish proved unbiddable. Two of the fiercest rebellions of the time came from the far south-west. In 1497, a revolt against taxation began in the village of St Keverne on the Lizard; within months, 15,000 restive Cornishmen had reached London, where they were soundly routed. In 1997, the Keskerdh Kernow 500 commemorated the revolt tracing the original route from St Keverne to Blackheath. The smaller, more benign band of flag-waving Cornish that wound through the market towns of southern England helped to re-establish the sense of Cornish identity, at least for those who took part.
[BRIEF NOTE] On Cornwall. abuse, and conspiracies
The small eastern Ontario city of Cornwall has just seen the end of an exorbitantly expensive inquiry into claims of an organized pedophile ring there. Triggered when police officer Perry Dunlop learned of a sexual abuse scandal that the Roman Catholic Church had quietly settled in 1994, matters quickly spiraled into speculation that dozens of men were systematically abusing young men. Following a series of failed trials, an inquiry into the who affair began, and was already going badly by the time that Dunlop skipped the inquiry. The whole situation is a catastrophe.
It wasn’t long before the original premise grew to shocking proportions: a ring or clan of pedophiles that reached into the city’s highest corners — priests, a bishop, a Crown attorney, lawyers, probation officers, possibly senior police officers.
Because so many powerful people were involved, went the theory, the original investigation was blocked, forcing Mr. Dunlop to circle around his own police force. He was the whistleblower extraordinaire, unafraid to put his career on the line to protect abused children.
[. . .]
Mr. Dunlop’s role in the case, however well intended, has contributed to a breathtaking expenditure of public resources — time and money — not to mention the stain on an entire community.
And Mr. Dunlop doesn’t want to talk about it?
Briefly, there were two Cornwall police investigations in 1993, an Ontario Provincial Police probe in 1994 and, finally, the launching of Project Truth in 1997. It spared nothing: The allegations of 69 complainants were investigated, leading to 672 interviews.
Four years later, the OPP were satisfied there was no pedophile ring in the city, but laid 115 charges against 15 individuals. There was but one conviction.
[. . .]
At least one of the witnesses — an original complainant — has testified he never saw evidence of a pedophile ring, contrary to an earlier written statement. Those named in the statement? Nah, never saw them. The statement itself? Didn’t even read it, he testified.
He claimed he was pressured into making the statements by one Perry Dunlop. Nor was he the only witness to retract outlandish allegations.
“I did anything (Mr. Dunlop) told me to do,” said one alleged victim.
Even though the inquiry has, 53 million dollars later, come to the conclusion that there wasn’t a conspiracy, the idea will still remain active.
An explanation that to some appears to debunk a conspiracy theory just further confirms others’ suspicions, said University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan B. Peterson.
“It’s very difficult to disprove a conspiracy theory, because every bit of disproving evidence can be just written off as additional evidence that these conspirators are particularly intelligent and sneaky,” he said.
Conspiracy theories are usually started by people who are very untrusting and it gathers steam among others who are somewhat untrusting, Peterson said.
They’re psychologically compelling because they neatly tie together troubling facts or assertions, he said. When things go badly there are often many explanations, and an orchestrated conspiracy “should be pretty low on your list of plausible hypotheses,” Peterson said.
“A good rule of thumb is: Don’t presume malevolence where stupidity is sufficient explanation,” he said.
“Organizations can act badly and things can fall apart without any group of people driving that.”
While Glaude made no definitive statements about a ring, he declared there was not a conspiracy by several institutions to cover up the existence of any such operation, rather that agency bungling left that impression.
By now, the majority of Cornwall has dismissed the allegation that once spread like wildfire there, but among a small group of people the theory will never die, said columnist Claude McIntosh with the Cornwall Standard-Freeholder.
When historical allegations of sex abuse started surfacing in the 1990s people were certainly talking about the issue, he said. Then a group of townspeople started a website and posted names of people they named as pedophiles.
They also posted an affidavit from one man detailing the most sensational allegation, that ritual sex abuse was performed by men in robes with candles on weekend retreats. He would later recant that allegation at the inquiry.
This sounds a lot like the various panics over alleged Satanic ritual abuse in the 1980s and 1990s, triggered by moral panic related to concern over the breakdown of traditional mores, like the nuclear family or conventional religion. What happened in Cornwall seems to me the consequence of the moral crisis triggered by revelations of clerical abuse. Cornwall is not only a strongly Roman Catholic community, it’s a community that has experienced significant economic stresses with high unemployment and low education levels and a relative lack of investment in public facilities. A Roman Catholic priest really did abuse a child; the Roman Catholic Church really did try to cover it up. Especially when life is already strained, it’s not such a big stretch go from a trusted religious authority betraying the public interest in a specific fashion to any number of trusted authorities engaging in orchestrated horrors. Besides, as Peterson notes, conspiracies tend to be more coherent than the idea that bad things just happen in isolation for no particular reason, more comforting in a way since they offer a sense of predictability and thus an ability to control the conspirators through public action.
I also recommend Religioustolerance.org’s analysis.
A Bit More Detail 