Some thoughts on _Unrepentant_

and on Kevin Arnett's persistent evocation of the holocaust in pursuit of his definition of the residential schools as agents of white Canadian genocide on the native peoples of Canada. Primo Levi wrote in SE QUESTO È UN UOMO of his survival of the Auschwitz death camp: "The worst survived, that is, the fittest; the best all died" and considered as later does Hayden White and Berel Lang, that to write of the holocaust could only diminish its horror.

bearing this in mind, it is quite easy to see the white Kevin Arnett as quite fit and an able survivor of what he presents quite convincingly as a home grown genocide. his churlish "i can see through all the bullshit" quips combined with his unconvincing attempt to pin his divorce on United Church officials (c21:40- Q: did you talk about your intentions to do this [challenge church directives] with your wife? A: well, yeah. later we talked all about it. but they sent someone to my house to...) pale in comparison with the actual pain shown by the Native subjects of the film who, as both Levi and Lang note in their holocaust writings, do not talk directly about what happened: the survivors memories are buried, often vague, and the language they use is indirect. you do not hear them say 'the teacher put his penis in me'. rather, the victim says "and he was there, with the vaseline and, you know, he did that three times with each of the boys. for his pleasure. i was six, or eight. maybe nine - i am unsure". this, then, the believable response of a holocaust survivor. not eloquent, barely said, often drawn out by other events.

i suppose what i am saying is that Kevin Arnett and Louie Lawless are unsavory profiteers in the sense of the Native politicians they decry and the Michael Moore's who make such a self-aggrandizing spectacle of other people's suffering. distasteful and, in Levi's sense per the above quote, perhaps the worst of us. that said, someone must tell the story to prevent such atrocities from recurring...though interestingly, that reason for truth-telling is never given by Arnett. i don't profess to understand why not, though perhaps that is because i can not, as Arnett does, reasonably consider myself in the light of a holocaust survivor.

blog time: 23 minutes.
film and research time: 2h17m.