Rich Taiwan, Silver, Water, The Popular French Bulldog and a Nasty War Criminal.
August 14, 2023 Volume 4 # 13
Taiwan’s Link to the World: The Port of Kaohsiung
Kaohsiung is Taiwan’s main port. The city of almost 3-million is a shipbuilding centre— thus the dry dock straight ahead in the photo— along with related industries such as steelmaking. Taiwan is more than semiconductors, though they make up 15% of its economy. Taiwan supplies as many of 90% of the world’s most advanced computer chips, a worry as China threatens to take over the island.
Taiwan is almost 36,000 square kilometres, just a little bigger than Vancouver Island. It has a population of 23.5-million with more than 4-million living in the capital, Taipei. The country is super-successful. It is the fifth largest economy in Asia and the 17th in the world. It has a per capita GDP of US$32,811, according to Ceicdata, almost triple that of China.
Beijing maintains that Taiwan is part of China. It was established after the Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek lost the Chinese Civil war to the Communists under Mao Tse-Zedong in 1949. Western governments don’t officially recognize Taiwan. Some international organizations, such as the World Bank, don’t even include Taiwan in their list of statistics. Were China decide to take over Taiwan with force it would probably bring the United States and China close to war.
Silver
Silver is a key element in the new electric economy. The question is where to find it:
Silver closed on Friday at $22.69, but it is far from the high of $53 it set in 1980. That would be around $200 in today’s money. Speculative fever, driven by the Hunt Brothers in the United States, who tried, and failed to corner the market. I remember interviewing a woman who was in line at a silver dealer on Yonge Street in Toronto. She was cashing in Canada Savings Bonds— paying 11.5%— to buy silver. It was $11 an ounce a short time later.
Water Security
The world is a crowded place and there isn’t enough water to go around. Sometimes that can mean a lack of technology. Water security seems to follow national wealth.
There can also be too much water. Where I live part of the time in southern Quebec there has been nothing but rain of late. It means the hay crop lies sodden in the field.
History on One Page.
In 1785 English polymath Joseph Priestley designed a timeline of history covering 2,000 figures from 1200 BC to his own era. It is reproduced in the latest History Today, a British monthly. Priestley was the co-discoverer of Oxygen, among other things.
Though charts like this are common now, it was unique in its day. History Today called it:
The Invention of Time
A now commonplace device, Joseph Priestley’s timeline revolutionised how we view history.
“Priestley invented his timeline to better teach history, yet the Chart is also entangled with his belief that humanity is improving: it depicts the number of great figures increasing over time. Indeed, there is such a dearth in early history that Priestley fills the blank space with an ornate crest. He is glad that the last two centuries are ‘full’ with people of merit, for this gives us ‘security’ that ‘no more great chasms’ of greatness will disfigure the future,” wrote History Today.
Click here to open the entire article.
The Rise of the French Bulldog
The French Bulldog is the most popular dog in a lot of countries, even though it has never won Best in Show at Westminster or Cruft’s.
The Frenchie, as many people call it, is a small dog, 18 to 28 pounds, is not a barker and doesn’t need that much exercise. Its short coat makes it easy to groom.
The French Bulldog has eclipsed the Labrador Retriever in the United States and is in a similar race with the Lab in Britain. Labradors are still number one in Canada, according to the Canadian Kennel Club and Frenchies are only number six.
Essay of the Week
The lord of life and death. Imre Finta was a Hungarian war criminal who sent thousand of his fellow Hungarians, all Jews, to the death camps. He hid in Canada for many years and denied his guilt. I wrote his obituary for the Globe in 2004.
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Imre Finta was a captain in the Hungarian police force in the Second World War who was charged with rounding up Jews for deportation to death camps. Witnesses at his trial 13 years ago said he even identified people he had worked with in a theatrical troupe before the war.
As one of the officers who did the dirty work of collecting Jews for transportation to camps, Imre Finta was charged with sending 8,617 people to their deaths. Almost all of the 700,000 Hungarian Jews shipped out in 1944 died in the death camps run by Nazi Germany.
Finta, who died in Toronto last month at the age of 91, was the first person to be tried under Canada's war-crimes legislation. He was acquitted at his 1990 trial by Ontario Supreme Court Judge Archie Campbell. Because of the failure to convict in so complex a case, with most of the witnesses dead, the government did not prosecute many more war criminals. Instead, it preferred to try and strip them of citizenship and then deport them.
Imre Finta: Former Hungarian gendarme, accused of kidnapping and confining thousands of Jews, leaves court.
Finta's acquittal came in spite of people such as Joesepha Vardi, an Auschwitz survivor, who said Finta loaded Jews onto waiting freight cars and remembered that "Finta was the lord of life and death at the time."
Finta said he was only moving Jews to new locations, not murdering them. Using a Canadian example, he said in his defence that he was doing little more than what the RCMP did in interning Japanese Canadians during the war.
One survivor described that as a cynical lie.
"Where did he think we were going? Little Red Riding Hood in the forest?" Margit Klein told a CTV reporter in 1983. She identified Imre Finta as one of the officers leading the Hungarian Police. "The guards knew because they shouted to us: 'You don't need water, you're going to die anyway.' So how could they not know?"
People close to the trial say the acquittal was a result of an incompetent police investigation. Others say it was because Canadian law and courts were too lenient, allowing Finta a defence that would have had him convicted in other jurisdictions.
"Canada was one of the only countries that allowed the defence of following orders," said Leo Adler, Canadian director of the Simon Wiesenthal Institute, the organization that still works to track down war criminals. "So we end up with this guy dying peacefully in his sleep."
In his own defence, Finta said some of his best friends were Jews. That was true. Before the war he went out with many Jewish women.
"My first fiancé in Szeged [the town where he grew up and worked as a police officer] was a Jewish girl," Finta told a CBC interviewer in October, 1974. "I love the Jewish people and I can't understand why Wiesenthal [wants] after 30 years more trouble and bloodshed."
After the war, Finta slipped through the cracks, like many low-level suspects involved in the Holocaust, and turned up in Canada. He prospered, running a couple of restaurants Toronto and publishing a book on healthy eating for older people that even managed to get an endorsement from Governor-General Roland Michener.
There seemed to be two Imre Fintas. He described himself as "a Bohemian, a show-business man" who, during his trial, would hold the elevator door open for elderly women who were members of the Jewish community and wanted to see him convicted. He was also the courtly Toronto restaurant owner who kissed the hands of his female patrons and had his picture taken with celebrities who dropped by.
Like a story line from a thriller, Imre Finta's whereabouts and history had been discovered by fluke. In 1964, a Hungarian immigrant, then a student at the University of Toronto, walked into Finta's restaurant looking for a summer job as a dishwasher. The name Finta sounded familiar and he wrote to someone who knew Captain Finta in Hungary during the war, but who by then lived in Vienna.
Magda Wagner, who survived and lived in Vienna, had converted to Catholicism to avoid deportation. But her parents had lived in Szeged and she testified that Imre Finta deported them to the camps.
Ms. Wagner contacted the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. On a visit to Ottawa in 1967, Wiesenthal raised the issue of war criminals with cabinet minister Mitchell Sharp and mentioned Imre Finta by name. In October of 1974, Wiesenthal wrote a letter about Finta's past and the story broke in the newspapers.
By the mid-1970's, Finta was a pariah, accused of working with the Nazis. From then on, there were media exposés, lawsuits, payouts and finally the trial, which ended in Finta's acquittal.
There were two bizarre libel actions involving the Finta case. The first involved The Toronto Sun, which ran a story in 1983 with the headline "The Nazi Who Never Was." Sabina Citron of the Canadian Holocaust Remembrance Association was singled out in the article. She sued both the newspaper and Finta. The Sun settled out of court for $100,000 and an apology. Ms. Citron continued the case against Finta and he was ordered to pay her $30,000 plus costs.
Finta launched a suit against CTV because of a 1983 story on W5. After a long case, the network won a $180,000 judgment against Finta. His house was sold by bailiffs to pay the debt. The prolonged litigation left him penniless. He told reporters after his acquittal that a Hungarian publisher had agreed to publish his autobiography, My Life, My Love, My Fate. He said he expected the book to be translated into English and German and that, anyway, everyone was profiting from the Holocaust. "I lost my home. Everything is gone. Now, I would like to make some money."
Over the years, other Hungarians in Toronto recognized Finta.
"He lived in the same building in Toronto as my mother and would smile at her and be polite, the hypocritical bastard," said George Preger, who survived as a boy in Budapest by pretending to be a Christian. "He was a captain in the gendarmerie. I remember them. They wore feathers in their caps and the sight of one would terrify me as a Jewish child trying to stay alive."
Other witnesses at his trial described him in videotape testimony from Israel and Hungary. One woman, who was once smitten by the good-looking young dandy, said "he called us stinking whores, Jewish whores" when he was at the railway station. Another woman testified he called Jews "a plague on the body" of Hungary.
Some testified that while they were working in the factory, Finta had made daily announcements over the public address system, warning Jews to surrender valuables or face "death punishment." Others talked about the conditions on board the trains. One woman said that 90 people were jammed into her boxcar with no food or water and four pots for toilets. Eight people died, including a lawyer who committed suicide.
The Jews of Hungary were safe for most of the war. Although Hungary was an ally of Nazi Germany and had anti-Semitic laws from 1938 on, it was only when the Nazis took over the country's administration in March, 1944, that the Jews were murdered. Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer in charge of the Final Solution, was outraged when he drove through Budapest and saw what he assumed were Jewish idlers sitting in cafés. Eichmann immediately ordered Hungarian Jews be deported to the camps.
Imre Finta was born on Sept. 2, 1912, in Kolozsvar, then in Hungary, now in Romania. His family moved to Szeged in eastern Hungary after the First World War and Finta attended officer's school and became a member of the police force, or gendarmerie, posted to rural areas of Hungary.
Before the war, he also worked in some travelling theatrical groups. During this period he was described as quite bohemian. He also went out with many Jewish women, although his friendship with Jews ended abruptly when Hungary, encouraged by Germany, brought in anti-Jewish laws in 1938.
When the Russians reached his town on Oct. 11, 1944, Finta disappeared but was later captured by the Allies. From 1946 to 1951, he lived in Germany and was sentenced in absentia to five years in jail for war crimes by the Hungarian People's Court.
After living in France for two years, where he claimed to have gone to a cordon-bleu cooking school (like many other details of his life, that turned out to be a lie) he came to Canada and in 1953 bought the Candelight restaurant in Toronto. It closed and he then opened the Moulin Rouge restaurant at Avenue Road and Dupont Street as well as a catering business. He gained citizenship in 1956.
He lived in obscurity after his trial, although in 1999 the Crown appealed his acquittal. In its decision to uphold the acquittal, the Supreme Court approved a defence based on following orders and on harbouring an honest belief that one's actions were legal at the time.
Even where the orders are manifestly unlawful, the defence of obedience to superior orders and the peace-officer defence will be available in those circumstances where the accused had no moral choice as to whether to follow the order," Justice Peter Cory wrote.
The Supreme Court also ruled unanimously that the legislation was itself constitutional. Enacted in 1987, the war-crimes law was a response to a royal commission that examined the extent to which Nazi war criminals might be present in Canada and recommended methods of dealing with them.
Imre's final lie was the paid death notice that appeared in newspapers. It described him as a poet, writer and man of culture. It left out 8,617 dead Jews.