Warrior Nation : Rebranding Canada in an Age of Anxiety

Jamie Swift, Ian McKay

Description

Once known for peacekeeping, Canada is becoming a militarized nation whose apostles—-the New Warriors-—are fighting to shift public opinion. New Warrior zealots seek to transform postwar Canada’s central myth-symbols. Peaceable kingdom. Just society. Multicultural tolerance. Reasoned public debate. Their replacements? A warrior nation. Authoritarian leadership. Permanent political polarization.

The tales cast a vivid light on a story that is crucial to Canada’s future; yet they are also compelling history. Swashbuckling marauder William Stairs, the Royal Military College graduate who helped make the Congo safe for European pillage. Vimy Ridge veteran and Second World War general Tommy Burns, leader of the UN’s first big peacekeeping operation, a soldier who would come to call imperialism the monster of the age. Governor General John Buchan, a concentration camp developer and race theorist who is exalted in the Harper government’s new Citizenship Guide. And that uniquely Canadian paradox, Lester Pearson. Warrior Nation is an essential read for those concerned by the relentless effort to conscript Canadian history.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Military
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Between the Lines
• Date de parution: 01 décembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781771130004
• Langue: English

Extrait

Praise for WARRIOR NATION
Warrior Nation is intended to stir controversy, and it will. With compelling prose and abundant evidence, this fearless book punctures one of Canada s most sacred myths while challenging a complacent national narrative and warning of a deeply worrying trajectory in national life. Ian McKay and Jamie Swift have written an important work of engaged and impassioned history, and it deserves a wide readership.
- A.B. MCKILLOP , Chancellor s Professor and former Chair, History, Carleton University
The stories that are told about Canada s past, its present, and its future are being reshaped by Canadian policymakers, the military and new warrior scholars in a way that both celebrates militarism and makes its costs invisible. . . . This excellent and timely book offers a much needed corrective to the new warrior scholarship that is becoming so pervasive. It should be on the reading list of anyone who is interested in Canadian politics, international relations, and foreign policy.
- SANDRA WHITWORTH , Professor, Political Science, York University
Revisiting Canada s military history as a sub-imperial military power of the Anglosphere, Warrior Nation recalls the massacre of women and children, the torture and execution of prisoners, and the true horror, lies, and prejudice that come with any war-even those our soldiers fight in the name of civilization, democracy, and peace. A welcome remedy to the Support Our Troops yellow ribbon epidemic.
- FRANCIS DUPUIS-DÉRI , anti-war activist and writer, and Professor, Political Science, University of Quebec at Montreal
WARRIOR NATION
REBRANDING CANADA IN AN AGE OF ANXIETY
IAN McKAY JAMIE SWIFT
BETWEEN THE LINES TORONTO
© 2012 by Ian McKay and Jamie Swift
First published in 2012 by
Between the Lines
401 Richmond Street West, Studio 277
Toronto, Ontario m5v 3a8
Canada
1-800-718-7201
www.btlbooks.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be photocopied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of Between the Lines, or (for photocopying in Canada only) Access Copyright, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, m5e 1e5.
Every reasonable effort has been made to identify copyright holders. Between the Lines would be pleased to have any errors or omissions brought to its attention.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
McKay, Ian, 1953-
Warrior nation : rebranding Canada in an age of anxiety / Ian McKay and Jamie Swift.
Includes bibliogaphical references and index. Also issued in electronic format.
ISBN 978-1-926662-77-0
1. Canada-History, Military. 2. Canada-Military policy.
3. Conservatism-Canada. 4. Canada-Politics and government-2006- .
I. Swift, Jamie, 1951- II. Title.
FC 543. M 45 2012 355.00971 C 2012-900792-7
Cover and text design: Gordon Robertson
Printed in Canada

Between the Lines gratefully acknowledges assistance for its publishing activities from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program and through the Ontario Book Initiative, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.
To Robert and Janet
and Sister Peggy Flanagan
About the authors
Educated at Dalhousie University, Halifax, and the University of Warwick, England, Ian McKay has taught history at Queen s University, Kingston, Ont., since 1988. In 2009 he was the recipient of the John A. Macdonald award from the Canadian Historical Association for Reasoning Otherwise: Leftists and the People s Enlightenment in Canada, 1890-1920 . He is also the author of Rebels, Reds, Radicals: Rethinking Canada s Left History .
Kingston author Jamie Swift s first published article appeared in This Magazine in 1975. It exposed Canada s corporate and foreign policy links to Brazil s military dictatorship. He has since written a dozen books of critical non-fiction and biography, including Cut and Run: The Assault on Canada s Forests and Odd Man Out: The Life and Times of Eric Kierans . In addition to the writing life, he works as a social justice advocate and teaches at Queen s University s School of Business.
It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and sputtering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spreads of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun. . . . It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety s sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.
- Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), The War Prayer
To stress one s own love of peace is always the close concern of those who have instigated war. But he who wants peace should speak of war. He should speak of the past one . . . and, above all, he should speak of the coming one.
- Walter Benjamin, Peace Commodity
CONTENTS
Preface and Acknowledgements
Mons, 1918
1 War and Peace and Paper Cranes
2 Pax Britannica and the White Man s Burden: The African Exploits of William Stairs
3 From War to War to War: The Battles of Tommy Burns
4 Pearson, Endicott, and the Cold War: Peacekeeping as Passive Revolution
5 Peacekeeping and the Monster of Imperialism
6 The Decade of Darkness : Peacekeeping at a Crossroads
7 Yellow Ribbons and Indian Country: New Warriors on the March
8 Military Fantasylands and the Gated Peaceable Kingdom
Notes
Illustration Credits
Index
Preface and Acknowledgements
In Canada today a determined right-wing elite is making full use of government power to change how we think about our country and its history. Canada, these new warriors declaim, has nothing to do with peaceful accommodation and steady improvement in the public good prompted by movements for fairness. Rather, it was created by wars, defended by soldiers, and kept free by patriotic support of military virtues. It is a Warrior Nation. It is a place where the horrible emotions of war are deployed for political gain, in the hopes of gaining a patriotic sense of shared purpose.
This toxic rebranding of their country demands that concerned citizens resist the war machine. But it also requires an engaged understanding of the complicated-and contested-history of Canadian attitudes towards war and peace. The following pages include scrutiny of the lives of four Canadians: Bill Stairs, a Victorian explorer and imperial emissary; Tommy Burns, a veteran of two wars who was also a leading war theorist and ultimately an ambassador for disarmament; Lester Pearson, whose famed formula for UN peacekeeping was combined with the passions of a Cold Warrior; and James Endicott, who struggled to find a path to peace and justice in a world divided into rival atomic camps. Their lives are a prism through which Canadian engagement with matters military are reflected-from African misadventures to the twentieth century s major wars to the peacekeeping enterprise. Then came the end of the Cold War and the promise of a peace dividend, a period that Canadian militarists call their Decade of Darkness. Then came the disaster of the Afghan War, accompanied as it was by an official effort to rebrand Canada as Warrior Nation. Through all of this we explore Canada s experience of war and peace, and we insist that the enthusiasm and passion so often brought to war can energize opposition to the grim business of mass killing.
Canada s history has seen shifting phases of imperial dependency and inner disunity. It is a country ever divided and ambivalent about war. Warrior Nation, choreboy of empire, fireproof house, peaceseeker. But never solely Warrior Nation. With today s empires waning and warfare changing, Canada may have more potential autonomy to draw creatively on its rich and mixed experience of the horrors of war, and on the rigours and dangers of peace work, to help build a national and global culture of peace. Yet in seeking to reinvent imperial Canada and make the crusading soldier the epitome and essence of our history, the new warriors are not only twisting the priorities of the present, but fundamentally distorting the past.
Throughout this book, we often come back to Kingston, where we both live. It was a military town long before there was a Canada. It still touts its martial heritage. And we also believe that activists and scholars should attend closely to the everyday world around them. In Canada, to adapt an old saying, All military politics is both global politics and local politics, and those who seek to change the country s direction need to pay close attention to the local as well as the grand manifestations of the new ethos. We would like to thank our fellow citizens and activists in Kingston, many of whom have spoken out courageously against militarism.
With thanks for research assistance from Nancy Butler, Spencer Roberts, Dave Steele, and Tena Vanderheyden. Special thanks to Jonathan Barker for diligently reviewing and commenting on the manuscript in two different stages; to Bill Robinson for reading the final manuscript in a rush; to Karen Dubinsky and Geoff Smith for providing inspiring examples of committed scholarship; to Jean Christie, Susan Gottheil, Len Prepas, and Joe Gunn for hospitality and good company; and to Robert Vanderheyden and David Wood for their photos. Audiences at activist and academic gatherings at Carleton University, Concordia University (People s Commission Network), McMaster University, University of Manitoba, University of Nipissing, Saint Mary s University, and York University provided