The Vimy myth

We travelled to an SCA event in Whitby yesterday, and returned to Windsor today.  For most of that drive we listened to CBC Radio One.  Excellent material, more excellent than usual.

The most thought-provoking program today was the Sunday Edition (closely followed by "The House," the regular parliamentary affairs show, this weekend devoted to the role of colonial parliamentarians in the negotiation of Canadian Confederation).  Sunday Edition talked about the role of the battle of Vimy Ridge in the First World War in creating modern Canadian nationalism.  

Sunday Edition started out by giving the usual account of why Vimy was important:

It wasn't until April, 1917, the story goes, when Canada stormed a battlefield in the North of France and seized a hill that had been held by the German army, that the country came of age, emerging as a united, resourceful, vigorous and valourous 50-year-old nation.

The Canadians were given little chance of taking Vimy Ridge from the Germans. But the four divisions of the Canadian Expeditionary Force — all fighting together for the first time in the Great War — hurled an awesome artillery barrage at the German position and surged across the battlefield, forcing the Germans to retreat. 

After a four-day battle, nearly 36-hundred Canadian soldiers lay dead in the cold, corpse-littered muck and slime, and 7-thousand more were wounded. But they held the Ridge and helped shift the course of the war toward an Allied victory.

Since that time, Canadian politicians have seized on the Vimy victory, as a symbol of Canada's coming-of-age, o f its independence from Britain, as the smithy in which Canadian nationhood was forged.

The segment was an interview with Ian MacKay, one of the authors of "The Vimy Trap."  According to MacKay, there was no surge of Canadian nationalism connected with Vimy.  As late as the 1930s, the overwhelming evaluation of the war, especially among those who fought it, was that the Great War was a futile catastrophe and that peace was a necessity.  Two people who felt strongly that way were two future prime ministers, John Diefenbaker (Conservative) and Lester Pearson (Liberal and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize).  They like many others made no connection between  the Great War and the growth of Canadian nationalism and sovereignty.  Canada's military history is not universally lauded as an encouragement to nationalism.  In both world wars, for instance, French Canadians were extremely skeptical of the need to support the British Empire, for obvious reasons (note the Seven Years War otherwise known as "the Conquest" and Canadian participation in the South African (Boer) War.)

I find it very unfortunate that both of our most recent prime ministers (one Conservative, one Liberal) have gone out of their way to talk up the Canadian war record for its supposed nation-building role.  I was not raised Canadian so the First World War holds no magic for me.  Indeed, when I have taught the war --not as part of Canadian, U.S. or European history but always as part of world history-- I've had to  hold myself  back from denouncing it as one giant war crime.

A Canadian Viking in the Governor-General’s Court: Medievalism in Pre-war Canada, by Janice Liedl

An interesting article  at academia.edu about a late 19th century attempt to use Viking exploration and settlement of Canada as a symbol of European settler unity.

A great sorting out?

Two experts in the Middle East have been more useful to me than most of the more prominent ones. They are Juan Cole and Joshua Landis. If you are interested in what is going on there and how it will affect us in North America, read this and this.


Here is an example of what Landis has to say:

My advice to Obama would be to lay low. This sectarian-nationalist process has been boiling up for a more than a century. It should be seen as part of the breakdown of the Ottoman order and emergence of nationalism. I compare what is going on in the Levant today to Central Europe during WWII. In Central Europe, the great powers drew national borders after WWI, carving up the lands of the defeated empires without rearranging the peoples to fit them. Thus Poland was only 64% Polish before WWII. Czechoslovakia was made up of close to 25% minorities. WWII was the “great sorting out.” (Read:http://qifanabki.com/2013/12/18/landis-ethnicity/ ) Over the war years, the peoples of central Europe were rearranged according to the WWI borders. By the end of WWII, Poland and Czechoslovakia had been reduced to their core Polish and Czechoslovak peoples. They got rid of their unwanted (Jews) or guilty (think the 12 million Germans of central Europe) minorities, along with many others. It was a nasty and brutal nation-building process.

Of course, in the Middle East, the emergence of national identities is bedeviled by competing religious identities, which seem to be stronger than both “Arabism” or “Iraqism.”

I doubt we will see high degrees of Shiite-Sunni cooperation in the coming months. If the U.S. sticks its long oar into this mess, the U.S. will end up with a broken oar. It seems possible that within the next two years, ISIS will largely be destroyed by the concerted action of both Iraqi and Syrian forces with help from Iran and possibly the U.S.  Sunni Arabs will not be pacified so long as they receive scant justice and minimal political representation in both Syria and Iraq, but ISIS cannot represent their needs. It is an expression of sectarianism run amok.

Jeff Sypeck reviews The Battle of Kosovo 1389

Albanians, Serbs, Christians and Muslims face each other across one of the most hard-fought fields of the 14th century.

Unhappy; or, what's the matter with kids today?

A certain number of people in France think they are unhappy about Muslim immigrants and their children for not fitting in to the French way of life. I am not so sure that their self-diagnosis is correct.

The issue that everyone is talking about is the government policy forbidding women -- Muslim women -- from wearing in many public places veils of various sorts and more concealing garments like the burqa. Although there are about 5 million Muslims in France, it is estimated that only a few thousand or maybe even a few hundred women actually wear these things. Yet the government is rolling out the big guns against them.

It was when I read the Globe and Mail report about the wider context of this move that I began to doubt that Islam is really that central to this feeling of France is on the wrong track. Look at these quotations and you tell me:

The public hearing [part of a government-sponsored national debate] was called to discuss one question: What does it mean to be French? It got off to a rocky start...

The next speaker wanted to talk about globalization. “Kids today,” he said, as people around him rolled their eyes, “identify more with Michael Jackson and Madonna than with France."

...

The French have also been uninhibited in their response to the call for debate, with more than 40,000 comments posted in the first month on the government's national identity website. About 6 per cent, according to the Immigration Ministry, were racist or hateful enough to be removed.

The posts that remain run the gamut from quotations from 19th-century French philosophers to rants about immigrants.

“France has become a colony of Africa,” wrote one contributor. To be truly French, wrote another, one must have “French blood” from both parents “and going back several generations.” Others said all schoolchildren should be required to memorize the Marseillaise and to sing it, on pain of punishment, at least once a week.
...

Nadine Morano, the junior minister for family affairs, has tried to backtrack for days after she was filmed at another debate advising young French Muslims how to fit in. “What I want,” she said, “is that they love France when they live in this country, they get a job, they not use slang … and not wear their caps back to front.”

I absolutely love the junior minister's remarks about the characteristics of all powerful, unstoppable, heritage-endangering Islam. If you somehow missed that in the last paragraph, that dangerous foreign religion apparently consists of:

Hating France

Not getting a job

Using slang

Wearing [baseball] caps back to front.

Straight out of the Arabian desert in the seventh century! I might buy some of this had I not been a teenager in the 60s, when I was told that wearing jeans to school and growing your hair too long made you some kind of outlaw. Same, same.