When the Canadian War Museum opens a new exhibit today that promises "a glimpse of war" in Afghanistan, the rebranding of the Canadian soldier as a creature of combat will take another giant leap forward.
The exhibit, designed to convey the human experience of Canadian soldiers and Afghan civilians, features wreckage from a Canadian military vehicle destroyed by a roadside bomb and Canadian Press photos of soldiers in combat.
It's one of the only times the museum has mounted an exhibit of an ongoing war.
"This exhibition," museum director Joe Geurts has said, "will offer a glimpse of a current conflict, one involving Canadians in the type of heavy combat we have not seen since the Korean War."
The groundbreaking exhibit also promises to accelerate the image makeover of the Canadian soldier from peacekeeper to combatant.
Historian Jack Granatstein, author of a new book, "Whose War Is It? How Canada Can Survive in the Post 9/11 World," said the rebranding is overdue.
During the past two decades, he said, Canadian troops have faced combat situations in Croatia, Kosovo and Somalia, but the "pernicious" idea of the soldier as peacekeeper has been difficult to displace.
"It seems to me it has taken Afghanistan, and what is clearly combat against an irregular force, to bring the combat soldiers back into the Canadian consciousness," Mr. Granatstein said in an interview.
"The peacekeeping mythology has been a terrible drag on us."
A gentleman was once defined as one who thinks his wife is the most beautiful woman in the world, but doesn’t talk about it. That seems to describe the near-unspoken pride more and more Canadians are taking in their long-patronized and marginalized Forces.
Despite marshaling herculean efforts in the world wars and doing its full share in Korea, Canada really has no tradition of a military ethos outside of historical garrison towns like Halifax. This is especially true of the urban well-to-do, for whom any connection to the military through friends or family is rare. For most of us, soldiers and sailors are high school grads from small towns one might occasionally come across in a bus station if one were the sort of person who frequented bus stations.
Beginning in the ‘60s, the military complement and budget were slashed repeatedly to ultimately laughable levels. The Forces became the politically impotent plaything of left-liberal tranzi impulses that even Conservative governments were prey to, and they were subjected not only to repeated financial squeezes, but also to wave after wave of spirit-destroying “rational” reorganizations, bureaucratic corruption, political correctness and open careerism in the officer ranks, all the while being forced to make do with near welfare-level pay and equipment older than they were. The warrior impulse was disdained as an un-Canadian anachronism and statues of peacekeepers (for some reason always looking afar through binoculars) started to pop up to overshadow memorials to the dead of past struggles. There was no political constituency to challenge all this. How the rank and file kept up any morale at all is a mystery, but they did.
In the panic following 9/11, the Forces were ordered not to wear their uniforms in public to avoid attracting terrorists. The response was the closest thing to a general mutiny in Canadian history and the order was rescinded within two days. In late 2001, the navy was sent off to Asia by a leftist Governor-General who told them they were going to fight for peace, which earned her silent stares and a lot of flak in the media. The Liberals famously passed on Iraq, but budgets started to climb and in 2005 a tough-talking new Commander took over and began using language nobody had heard for generations. Many of us held our breaths waiting for him to be sacrificed to political correctness by the many powerful defenders of four decades of leftist transnationalism, but not a word was said. Suddenly and for the first time in living memory, everybody sensed the troops were being prepared for inevitable death.
Since last year, 45 Canadians have been killed in Afghanistan, inconsequential by American standards, but the West's third highest sacrifice in the war on terror. Morale has never been higher and recruitment applications have soared. A couple of leftist parliamentarians tried to do Cindy Sheehans over early casualties and were publically put down by bereaved, but proud families. No one has tried that for some time. Recently, several NHL games have featured Armed Forces Appreciation Days, which would have been unthinkable and embarrassing a few years ago. Although fairly subdued affairs, the cameras pan huge crowds applauding reservedly but endlessly in open respect and even awe of the troops gathered in combat fatigues on the ice. Until a few years ago, recruitment ads for the Forces were feel-good films of young folks having a ball visiting exciting places and getting a free education in gender-balanced harmony. “There’s no life like it” was the title of the accompanying jingle. They are gone and instead middle Canada is now being sobered by this ad (Click "Fight Fear") between contestants on American Idol.
What this all means for the war is hard to say. Polls show the country is split and it isn’t easy to see how Afghanistan can keep on indefinitely when the U.S. is more and more openly looking for an exit from Iraq. Even in the face of spectacular successes in battle, there is still plenty of the fussy equivocation and self-righteousness we’re famous for. But even among many liberals and progressives, one senses a confused new-found admiration for the uniform that transcends politics and that one hopes will finally erase past humiliations and restore the well-earned stature of the brave men and women of the Canadian Forces.
2 comments:
Hear hear!
Yes, well and thoroughly said.
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