Home and native land

The main finding of this study made me angry, and if I was in a mood to be more intellectually rigorous, I think I'd turn this blog post into an rational yet seethingly-passionate diatribe about how zero-sum conceptions of state loyalty can exist only in puny minds. I might throw in a sidebar about how the whole to-do over the Lebanese evacuations was barely-veiled racism, and perhaps make note of how that whole weird France-hating complex of the American conservative movement probably translated over to some pimply kids in the Conservative Party war room, which resulted in those Dion-bashing dual-citizenship ads.

But not today. Instead I'll seize on the below quote:

What Griffiths did find disturbing was that around 30 per cent of Canadians say part of what makes Canada successful is the lack of a strong national identity.

Dear Mr. Griffiths,

I understand the view you and your like-minded commenters get of the world is necessarily a little obstructed. After all, its hard to take in the broader sweep of human narrative when you're busy licking maple syrup off of Jack Granatstein and Desmond Morton's erect nipples. Perhaps you'll note that nations are delightful little post-feudal constructions that usually involve some sort of embarassing national dance, an indigenous flatbread of some nature, and some endearing ritual involving children and holidays best captured in oil paintings.

Nations can be fun things. All told, I'm rather happy with the one I was born with: highlights for my tribe are conspicuous consumption of alcohol and proud literary tradition, which I suppose makes up for also getting black pudding and a rather naff mythology involving people turning into swans and pots of gold. But if, as is the fate of all humans someday, I'd been born as an ethnic mutt and grown up in a cosmopolitan environment in which I had no predominant tribal group to assimilate into, I'd be fine, too. Inheriting a particular national identity is a bit like being able to roll your tongue: every so often, it's fun to hold it over your friends who can't do it, but really it means fuck all.

Nations can also make people do stupid, stupid things. I'll avoid any Hitler examples, but how about we look at, oh, pretty much every action that occurred in the Balkans from 1991 to, well, now. Remember, in order for there to be a concept of genocide, there must be a concept of genos.

Nation-forming is a lengthy, messy, and often a sort of pointless process. Colonial peoples can and do coalesce into nations: Americans and Afrikaaners come immediately to mind, and yeah, I'd include the francophone canadiens and Acadians in the two centuries in which they were cut off from their original French nation, first by limited transportation links and second by political occupation. Were any of these peoples better off because over a great deal of time, they bred exclusively with one another, developed unique cuisines and art forms, and started to think of themselves as nations? Hell if I know.

But I do know that no number of last spikes, no number of Vimy Ridges, no number of Labatt Beer commercials will change the fact that Canada doesn't count. Canada isn't, like most other states, home to a reasonably-homogenous tribe that sees assimilation into the tribe as a proper precondition to Canadian-ness. And creepy books from Mark Steyn notwithstanding, we're doing quite okay for ourselves.

Canada's continued existence as a (reasonably) prosperous, happy, bilingual, socially-integrated state, home to as robust a society as found anywhere else, puts to a lie the stance that you and your crazy gang of timbit-counters that Canada isn't a "real" country unless it has a "real" national identity. Sorry, guys. Just because the Serbs do it, doesn't mean we should. And, again with the history, this sort of post-nationalism isn't actually anything all that radical: we're just proving the point made by Athens and Sparta and the Holy Roman Empire: the nation-state is just one particular way of doing things. Frankly, I think it's a way of doing things whose time has come and gone.

So this Canada Day, you'll forgive me for not raising my glass to the mighty nation, or marching in some parade commemorating some medieval battle or apocryphal saint while beating on a uniquely-national drum. I'm going to celebrate the fact that through assorted accidents of birth and circumstance myself and my fellow Canadians have been brought together on a patch of dirt and we've done a pretty good job at getting along with one another.

As for the 30% that agree with me? Soon there'll be more of us. Deal with it.

I'd pay to see that Heritage Minute

Judging by the front pages of the newspapers today, it would seem to be obligatory to spare a moment or two today to talk about the Battle of Vimy Ridge. I happened to have a high school history teacher who was something of a Vimy nut—like, if they had Vimy Ridge conventions he'd be the guy there dressed up as a Klingon. Consequently, I've always had this air of detached expertise whenever the subject of Vimy came up. It's all seared into the databanks upstairs: rolling artillery barrage, Arthur Currie, prior failed attempts, surprisingly low mortality rates. That's before we get into the whole business of national myth-making and the contrast between us and the Aussies at Galipoli and birth of the nation and our glorious dead.

What I'm sorta getting at in a roundabout fashion is that there's very little that's said about Vimy that doesn't sort of prompt at least a teensy bit of eye-glazing, simply because I've heard it all before. That's why I got so excited this morning when I read something intriguing about Vimy that I can't recall having heard in the past. That might have been a moment in Mr. Prowse's class where I was staring at the girl in front of me or something.


Now, there are plenty of other fun blogs and the internet where you can get your daily fix of hip-hip hurraying Hitler. This is not one of those blogs. Hitler had a, shall we say, particularly creative relationship with the concept of pacifism: this is the man who was none too keen on his WWI experiences himself but then seemed to devote his life to inflicting the horrors of war on others. This little Vimy anecdote though, really continues to fill in some of the quirkier blanks in my own understanding of the guy.

In fact, I have to say it's prompted a little curiousity as to why this aspect of the Vimy story isn't included in the conventional grab-bag of coverage of the battle that gets reproduced every few years. I mean, I don't think anyone reading that article is about to write to the Bank of Canada asking them to stick in a portrait of the führer on the back of the ten dollar bill in celebration to his remarkable contribution to Canadian heritage. But the fact that even the most sadistic of men could see the Vimy monument's rejection of triumphalism and respected its message of universal peace strikes me as one of the more resonant commentaries on Canada's military history.