Is Canada a peacekeeping nation? Or is it a warrior nation? These questions are the subject of two Spring 2012 books by Noah Richler (What We Talk About When We Talk About War) and Ian McKay and Jamie Swift (Warrior Nation: Rebranding Canada in an Age of Anxiety). They are notable for the vigour of their arguments and, not least, because both take aim at the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute and at David Bercuson and Jack Granatstein. Yes, David and me. Ordinarily, I would not respond to attacks of this sort (David can make his own decisions!), but the issue is important and I’ve decided it’s worth a reply.
That Canada was a warrior nation I take as a given. The nation’s 20th-century record speaks for itself, as do the military efforts in Afghanistan and Libya in the first years of this century. This is Canadian history, and the authors may not like this, but they simply must accept it — and by and large they do. What they object to, what they attribute in part to Bercuson and me, is the way military history has been pushed to the forefront of public consciousness, or so they claim, and the way in which the Harper government has used this interpretation of the past and the Afghan war to change the public narrative. In effect, they argue that Canada has become a warrior nation thanks to the current government’s efforts and the writings of a few military historians sheltering under the broad wings of the CDFAI.
There is some truth in this, but mostly it’s a lot of hooey. The government built up the military — and is now rolling back the defence budget. Despite my best efforts, polls demonstrate Canadians know very little of their military past. Moreover, other than in a few universities, Canadian military history is not much taught. But there is substantial publishing in the field, and the public buys and reads these books. More military history sells, I suspect, than McKay’s unreadable tomes on the glories of the Canadian left. But that’s a dispute for another day.
What was the narrative before the warriors “perverted” it? To Richler and McKay-Swift, Canada as peacekeeper is much more realistic, more acceptable to the public, more attuned to what Canada is and should be. Now, there is no doubt that the Canadian Forces has done much good work in peacekeeping since the early 1950s, and there is similarly no debate that the public likes this role. Every opinion poll confirms this. And there is also no gainsaying the fact that governments, Liberal and Conservative, have exploited this, building the grand peacekeeping monument in Ottawa, putting peacekeeping on our coins and bills, and talking it up at every opportunity until recently.
Richler at least understands that this was largely mythmaking, but he prefers the peacekeeping myth to the war-fighting reality. McKay and Swift sometimes seem to accept the myth as fact.
It is, of course, made up of whole cloth. Peacekeeping was never more than a subsidiary role for the C.F. NATO and NORAD commitments absorbed most of the personnel and budgetary resources, while peacekeeping at its peak received at most 10 per cent. But the myth appealed to Canadians, and their governments, eager to cut budgets and looking for a uniquely Canadian role to trumpet, went along with the story.
A personal anecdote, one that Richler uses in his book to slam me. When I went to Ottawa in 1998 to become the director and CEO of the (old) Canadian War Museum, I found the third floor of the cramped museum devoted to peacekeeping. Why? I asked. Because my predecessor had polled visitors and been told they wanted to see more on peacekeeping. The problem was that the CWM’s exhibits almost completely omitted NATO and NORAD, a total bowdlerization of postwar history. So I reduced the peacekeeping exhibits substantially and put in big exhibits on Canada’s two main alliances. To Richler, this was the triumph of the warrior nation idea over the peacekeeping ideal. Maybe, but to me, it was simply getting the history right, the task of a museum just as much as it is (or should be) of historians.
Getting it right matters. So does smashing myths and creating new ones. But surely it is critical to understand the difference between history and myth first.
Original Article
Source: canada.com
Author: J.L. Granatstein
That Canada was a warrior nation I take as a given. The nation’s 20th-century record speaks for itself, as do the military efforts in Afghanistan and Libya in the first years of this century. This is Canadian history, and the authors may not like this, but they simply must accept it — and by and large they do. What they object to, what they attribute in part to Bercuson and me, is the way military history has been pushed to the forefront of public consciousness, or so they claim, and the way in which the Harper government has used this interpretation of the past and the Afghan war to change the public narrative. In effect, they argue that Canada has become a warrior nation thanks to the current government’s efforts and the writings of a few military historians sheltering under the broad wings of the CDFAI.
There is some truth in this, but mostly it’s a lot of hooey. The government built up the military — and is now rolling back the defence budget. Despite my best efforts, polls demonstrate Canadians know very little of their military past. Moreover, other than in a few universities, Canadian military history is not much taught. But there is substantial publishing in the field, and the public buys and reads these books. More military history sells, I suspect, than McKay’s unreadable tomes on the glories of the Canadian left. But that’s a dispute for another day.
What was the narrative before the warriors “perverted” it? To Richler and McKay-Swift, Canada as peacekeeper is much more realistic, more acceptable to the public, more attuned to what Canada is and should be. Now, there is no doubt that the Canadian Forces has done much good work in peacekeeping since the early 1950s, and there is similarly no debate that the public likes this role. Every opinion poll confirms this. And there is also no gainsaying the fact that governments, Liberal and Conservative, have exploited this, building the grand peacekeeping monument in Ottawa, putting peacekeeping on our coins and bills, and talking it up at every opportunity until recently.
Richler at least understands that this was largely mythmaking, but he prefers the peacekeeping myth to the war-fighting reality. McKay and Swift sometimes seem to accept the myth as fact.
It is, of course, made up of whole cloth. Peacekeeping was never more than a subsidiary role for the C.F. NATO and NORAD commitments absorbed most of the personnel and budgetary resources, while peacekeeping at its peak received at most 10 per cent. But the myth appealed to Canadians, and their governments, eager to cut budgets and looking for a uniquely Canadian role to trumpet, went along with the story.
A personal anecdote, one that Richler uses in his book to slam me. When I went to Ottawa in 1998 to become the director and CEO of the (old) Canadian War Museum, I found the third floor of the cramped museum devoted to peacekeeping. Why? I asked. Because my predecessor had polled visitors and been told they wanted to see more on peacekeeping. The problem was that the CWM’s exhibits almost completely omitted NATO and NORAD, a total bowdlerization of postwar history. So I reduced the peacekeeping exhibits substantially and put in big exhibits on Canada’s two main alliances. To Richler, this was the triumph of the warrior nation idea over the peacekeeping ideal. Maybe, but to me, it was simply getting the history right, the task of a museum just as much as it is (or should be) of historians.
Getting it right matters. So does smashing myths and creating new ones. But surely it is critical to understand the difference between history and myth first.
Original Article
Source: canada.com
Author: J.L. Granatstein
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