"We are at the beginning, not the end, of a process of reassessing our history, and filling in the silences that are needed to get at the truth." - Stephen Maher
WAYNE NORTHEY: It is the human condition that historians from within a culture generally silence any contrary narrative that might put into a negative light the moral rectitude of that culture/nation: a variation of the observation that history is always written by the victors, not the vanquished.
Sir Winston Churchill was no doubt right too that if we do not learn from history, we are destined to repeat it. He and Allies however used the language of inducing citizen terror in support of Britain’s Bomber Command headed by Sir Arthur Harris. We read:
An Associated Press war correspondent named Howard Cowan soon filed a dispatch (which inexplicably cleared the censors) stating that “the Allied air commanders have made the long-awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror bombing of German population centers as a ruthless expedient to hastening Hitler’s doom.” The report was widely circulated in the United States, to awkward effect. Among other things, Cowan’s phrase “the Allied air chiefs” linked the British and the Americans in ways that the Americans found uncongenial. (Sifting Dresden’s Ashes: Sixty years after the Allies’ bombing of Dresden enveloped the city in flames, controversy persists over whether the attack was militarily justified or morally indefensible. But another question, no less crucial, is seldom asked: Did wartime conditions allow military leaders to look away as they violated their own principles?, Tami Davis Biddle, Essays | Spring 2005, Wilson Quarterly Archives. (emphasis added)
Yet we Canadians (and Westerners!) do not like associating our military's past or present with “terror,” “genocide,” etc. See for instance: Canadian War Museum changes controversial wording on WWII bombing. We too prefer a sanitized history. See more generally my post: Why Canada’s special forces ‘shadow army’ is still fighting ISIS.
One wonders, Churchill notwithstanding, what or whether we Westerners have learned a thing about the inevitable “ethics” of war! For to start with, “ethics” and “war” in the same breath constitute an oxymoron. When it comes to war, we still keep on repeating . . . The most age-old historical repetition of all time!
Yet again, as the highlighted article indicates, the truth hurts. And the truth will out.
And so indeed: Sir John A. Macdonald can wait.
And yes indeed: Mr. Kenney, good Catholic that you are, our illustrious first Prime Minister was a certified racist1, and, good Anglican that he was, it was under his auspices that the perduring horror of residential schools was initiated. The Truth hurts, and indeed, The Truth will out—which, however painstakingly, is now happening.
In your denying the truth about Macdonald, it is hard to not think of you as in spirit one with “The Proud Boys,” or with the veterans at Canada’s War Memorial, who are more interested in protecting a mythical white settler narrative that does not square with the Truth. And one wonders: how do you align then with Jesus, who in your (and my!) belief is (the very incarnation of) “The Truth?”
Comments