Table of Contents
Introduction
History is the branch of knowledge that studies past assessing records of previous events that took place. Its writing is old as it was done in many different forms evolving as time goes by as a way of preserving and keeping record of past events. In this paper, I will discuss the various reasons for the killing of history of Canada. Such reasons include: Conditions for an anti-racist history in Canada, military spite and dissolution of culture and heritage.
Military Spite
We all fit together as identical pieces of some puzzle with our differences making the whole society more resilient and durable. A Story of Decline: The Tory Interpretation of History Professor Granatstein is well known to most readers of H-Canada, and his many books are authoritative guides to Canadian military, diplomatic, and political history. Galen Perras has recently provided a useful summary of the career of this most eminent of commentators, in his review of Granatstein’s _Canada’s Army: Waging War and Keeping the Peace_ (2002), posted on H-War.[1]
From Lester Pearson’s famous intervention in the Suez affair forward, the lamentable state of Canada’s military is due to the hostility to the military of much of Quebec’s Francophone population and to the unconcern of the Canadian people as a whole: ‘at root, the real killers of the Canadian military, the Canadian people’ (p. 202). But the logic of this argument would also place blame on the political structures that have taught the Canadian public to abandon what were once fiercely-held pro-Western loyalties, and so to disregard military issues almost entirely.
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Lester Pearson’s invention of peacekeeping during the Suez crisis of 1956 became national excuse for failing to equip the Canadian military with modern but expensive equipment. ‘It wasn’t Mike Pearson who helped kill the Canadian military,’ writes Granatstein, ‘rather, the idea of peace-keeping that his Nobel Prize made into Canada’s national mission is the culprit’ (p. 34). The accurate narrative of Ottawa’s policy during the Suez crisis, reminds us that the peacekeeping mission of 1956 was intended to be a temporary measure while a solution to the underlying disputes was negotiated. The peacekeepers were ejected by Nasser in 1967, leading to the war of that year hence consequences of Suez
Each major government of the past half-century was a culprit in the decline of the Canadian military. The effects of Pierre Trudeau’s ‘malign neglect’ (p. 95) of the military were heightened by integration of civil servants into the National Defence Headquarters command structure. Brian Mulroney came to power promising better funding, but aside from the purely cosmetic his priorities were elsewhere.
Jean Chrétien, finally, ‘finished off the Canadian Forces’ (p. 163), deploying the military on numerous politically opportune UN peacekeeping missions and shamelessly using Canadian soldiers as stage props for foreign photograph opportunities, though he regarded the Forces themselves with an unusual degree of hostility and repeatedly cut the military budget. Generally, the ideal of the nation is no longer located in the present or the future, but in the past.
Conditions for an Anti-Racist History in Canada
Anti-racism provides basis for understanding the past which is sensitive to requirements of generally accepted standards of historical criticism that shapes most of Canada’s historical writing. An anti-racist history takes existence of racisms seriously and questions their roles in shaping institutions and experiences. It encompasses previously excluded meanings through a broader understanding of the historical record: written, oral, and material.
It views rise of nationalism within context of European colonialism, transforming nationalist projects (such as the making of Canada) into historical problems to be explained. It also allows questioning on how some identities come to be seen as fixed, others become normalized and others marginalized. Anti-racism thus has the potential to develop a better history than the nationalist one whose loss is lamented by J. L. Granatstein in Who Killed Canadian History?.
Dissolution of the Canadian Culture and Heritage
In the 1960s, A.B. Hodgetts in his book ‘What Culture? What Heritage?’ distinguished the loss of our history. It’s argued that Canada is one of the few nations in the Western world not to teach its history to its young people and to its new citizens. The result: a nation that does not understand and respect its own past. What is worse, when history is taught in our schools, it is too often processed through the filter of political correctness.
Society lays the blame on a number of culprits: schools that are too busy teaching trendy subjects, and dealing with the needs of recent immigrants; universities where history has been reduced to a series of subjects; ministries of education that have dropped Canadian history as a required course and approved ‘dumbed-down’ textbooks; the federal government with its misguided policies; even the media, which should be above political pressures, too often uses history to search for villainy.
It is shown that other countries, much older than Canada, have understood how to treat history as an important condition of existence offering wise and reasoned solutions to problems undermining our sense of belonging at a time when national understanding is essential.
