Jason Silver

Thursday, September 23rd, 2004

Rewriting History to Suit Our Needs

Interesting-- I've also felt like the Canadian history we've been learning in school doesn't match up with reality. Thanks to Trudeaupia for this link.

Far from being a young nation-state, we are in fact one of the older ones -- certainly one that has had representative institutions and the rule of law for much longer than some of the most storied nations on this planet. When we pretend that Canada is a new nation, that we are still coming to discover who we are and what we can do -- I feel that we are closing our eyes to what we have been, for good or for ill. And that sort of misperception cannot be sustained.

When people speak of how peace-loving Canadians have always been, I think of the burning of the Parliament Buildings in Montreal in 1849 by an anglo-Montrealer mob -- which probably was what prevented the city from being the capital after Confederation. I think of the desperate battles of the First World War, when Canadians won victories on the battlefields that Britons and Frenchmen could not, when our best general, Arthur Currie, was knighted on the battlefield by King George V and later took possession of Kaiser Wilhelm's suite in the Palais Schaumburg (in Bonn). I think of the battles in Northern France in the Second World War, when Canadians ended up in a grudge match with the Panzer SS division that contained the Hitler Youth, when neither side would take prisoners (they started it -- they murdered fifty Canadian POWs on D-Day), and the Germans labelled our troops "the British SS".

There's more, go read it.

~Jason