Warrior Nation documents militarization of Canadian history

New book shows how Harperites revise Canada's story to play up military.

 

by SGN staff

OTTAWA, June 14, 2012 — A new book documents a concerted attempt by Canadian right-wing extremists — led by Stephen Harper and historians like Jack Granatstien — to revise how Canadians view their country and make them view the military as most important to its history.

Authors Ian McKay and Jamie Swift, both of Kingston, appeared in Ottawa for a launch for their new book Warrior Nation (Between the Lines, 2012). Straight Goods News interviewed them for a YouTube video.

Ian McKay and Jamie Swift talk about their new book, Warrior Nation

 

Here is a text transcription of the interview:

Straight Goods News:
I guess I'll start with Jamie because I understand that Jamie recruited Ian for this project.

Jamie Swift:
"Recruited" is an appropriate metaphor given the nature of the product, but you can also use the word "press-ganged" which would also be militaristic. The word "press-ganged" would relate to the war of 1812 which was, ostensibly, triggered by the British press ganging American sailors into their navy.

The book is about a conflict over memory and Canadian identity — the current government's attempt to re-imagine and rebrand, as the title suggests, Canada as a country that's been all about war all the time. This year, 2012, the Harper government is investing 28 million dollars in commemorative events around the War of the 1812, which strikes one as odd in an era of austerity that this is seen as a top government priority. At the same time, this government has cut back dramatically on Library and Archives Canada, so that historians both professional and amateur will have a lot more trouble telling Canadian stories. So on the one hand, they are retailing a certain version of the war of

1812. On the other hand — and Ian can talk to the importance of archives to help historians to get at the nitty gritty of history — the Harper government is cutting that back.

The book goes from the 19th century up to the present day and looks at Canada's often ambivalent relationship with issues of peace and war.

SGN:
What got you going with the project?

Jamie Swift:
In 2006, during the war between Israel and Hezbollah in south Lebanon, a Canadian Major, Major Peyta Hes von Krugner… was working as a UN peace observer at a long-established base. That bunker was deliberately targeted, and the Major and his three UN colleagues were killed by the Israelis.

Prime Minister Harper, who had been elected a few months previously, his only response was to scratch his head and wonder aloud why this UN peacekeeper was in a war zone in the first place. This struck me as odd, because this was the Major's assignment. This is what his job was, to watch and observe the situation there.

I watched as the Major's cortege came into the armory in Kingston and his widow got out and it struck me that this, there might be a story here, a story of the death of peacekeeping as a Canadian avocation, or as a Canadian enterprise, something that many Canadians hold dear. And of course, 2006 was the start of Canada's folly in Kandahar.

SGN:
I see, but Ian was saying to me that, although many of us might like to see Harper's focus on Canada as a military nation as a total aberration and a departure from the peacekeeping ethos and era that lived in the past, it's not that simple.

Ian McKay:
I think one of the things that I have found most troubling is the way that this government is recovering old imperial ideas that go right back to the 19th century. So our book dwells to a considerable extent on Canada's role in building the British empire, very violently inflicting itself on Africa, and throughout the world as part of their great imperial project. But what I find most disquieting is about this present government is its zeal to recover this British imperial legacy, to the point that in the new citizenship guide John Buchan, who was our Governor General from 1935 – 1940, is hailed as our primary intellectual on multiculturalism and what it means to be Canadian.

It's a little weird to have a British Lord instructing Canadians on what it means to be Canadian in retrospect, but it's even more troubling when you look at John Buchan. He was a concentration camp administrator, a major race theorist, and throughout the period of his governor generalship he was counseling Canadians to be aware of Negroid and Slavic influences in culture and politics.

This is someone who they are resurrecting as a Canadian hero.

And that's just one small piece of this really I would call extreme right wing make-over of the country, an extreme right wing makeover that is not going to leave anything in Canadian history unscathed. Its a major attempt to re-program the country that will affect every one of us.

SGN:
Does the book document the people involved in this makeover? The writers, or theorists, or propagandists?

Ian McKay:
For sure.

SGN:
Was that the biggest surprise to you in doing the research and writing the book, this makeover, the comprehensiveness of it?

Ian McKay:
Yes how the decline of peacekeeping actually fits into a much bigger pattern of deliberate militarization of Canadian culture and the scope and depth of this is breathtaking. We are up against – not a government but a regime — a regime that really says that we can select who you should admire and coerce and force certain new understandings of Canada upon you that are very very dangerous.

SGN:
Who are the authors of this new thinking?

Jamie Swift:
There's a group of historians who have been chafing at more nuanced versions of Canadian history, militarist historians like Jack Granatstein and David Bercuson who the world of journalism often goes to for quotes whenever matter of military importance comes up. These are two historians that have questioned very fundamentally Canada's role as a peacekeeping power.

The book tries to point out the ambivalence of Canada as a peacekeeping power. We have a chapter on Lester Pearson and James Endicott and the conflict between these two men who grew up as Methodists in the early part of the 20th century, and how they had a falling out over peace and war and how Pearson was trying use peacekeeping as sort of a tightrope to walk between empires. Pearson most famously proposed the first big UN peacekeeping force in 1956 during the Suez Crisis, which marked the peacekeeping watershed symbolicly and probably actually the real watershed for the end of the British Empire. It was a total disaster for the British Empire, the Suez Crisis, and the rise of an American imperial, and Pearson tried to navigate that.

SGN:
What do you hope readers are going to take away from this book, what do you think will be outcome of the book?

Ian McKay:
I would say two things. One is to be very, very alarmed and worried about the scope and depth of this right-wing extremist approach to Canadian history. This is not a game, it's not just symbols, but these are actually core ideas about what it means to be Canadian, and they've really been thought out and proposed in a very intelligent and well crafted way. The second thing I would say is that there are substantial grounds for optimism, that there, that Canadians do have peace activism, thinking of themselves as a peaceful country,

There are still a substantial number of Canadians who will resist this program. This is by no means a counsel of despair that we are offering. It's a cry of warning, saying you have in your history alternative ways of thinking about peace and war, that Canadians realistically have evolved over the years over. You can still think intelligently and with sophistication about peace and war in Canada. And there's a sizable proportion of the Canadian population that still wants to do that. They just have to be energized and wake up to the peril around them that this new regime is proposing. 

 

© Copyright 2012 SGNews Staff, All rights Reserved. Written For: StraightGoods.ca