IP: A brave and modest nation. (For IP)

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

April 26, 2002
> Salute to a brave and modest nation
>
> Kevin Myers
> The Sunday Telegraph
>
> As our country honours the last of its four dead soldiers, we reprint a
> remarkable tribute to Canada's record of quiet valour in wartime that
> appeared in the Telegraph, one of Britain's largest circulation newspapers.
>
> =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
> LONDON - Until the deaths last week of four Canadian soldiers accidentally
> killed by a U.S. warplane in Afghanistan, probably almost no one outside
> their home country had been aware that Canadian troops were deployed in the
> region. And as always, Canada will now bury its dead, just as the rest of
> the world as always will forget its sacrifice, just as it always forgets
> nearly everything Canada ever does.
>
> It seems that Canada's historic mission is to come to the selfless aid both
> of its friends and of complete strangers, and then, once the crisis is over,
> to be well and truly ignored. Canada is the perpetual wallflower that stands
> on the edge of the hall, waiting for someone to come and ask her for a
> dance. A fire breaks out, she risks life and limb to rescue her fellow
> dance-goers, and suffers serious injuries. But when the hall is repaired and
> the dancing resumes, there is Canada, the wallflower still, while those she
> once helped glamorously cavort across the floor, blithely neglecting her yet
> again.
>
> That is the price Canada pays for sharing the North American continent with
> the United States, and for being a selfless friend of Britain in two global
> conflicts. For much of the 20th century, Canada was torn in two different
> directions: It seemed to be a part of the old world, yet had an address in
> the new one, and that divided identity ensured that it never fully got the
> gratitude it deserved.
>
> Yet its purely voluntary contribution to the cause of freedom in two world
> wars was perhaps the greatest of any democracy. Almost 10% of Canada's
> entire population of seven million people served in the armed forces during
> the First World War, and nearly 60,000 died. The great Allied victories of
> 1918 were spearheaded by Canadian troops, perhaps the most capable soldiers
> in the entire British order of battle.
>
> Canada was repaid for its enormous sacrifice by downright neglect, its
> unique contribution to victory being absorbed into the popular memory as
> somehow or other the work of the "British." The Second World War provided a
> re-run. The Canadian navy began the war with a half dozen vessels, and ended
> up policing nearly half of the Atlantic against U-boat attack.
>
> More than 120 Canadian warships participated in the Normandy landings,
> during which 15,000 Canadian soldiers went ashore on D-Day alone. Canada
> finished the war with the third-largest navy and the fourth-largest air
> force in the world.
>
> The world thanked Canada with the same sublime indifference as it had the
> previous time. Canadian participation in the war was acknowledged in film
> only if it was necessary to give an American actor a part in a campaign in
> which the United States had clearly not participated -- a touching
> scrupulousness which, of course, Hollywood has since abandoned, as it has
> any notion of a separate Canadian identity.
>
> So it is a general rule that actors and filmmakers arriving in Hollywood
> keep their nationality -- unless, that is, they are Canadian. Thus Mary
> Pickford, Walter Huston, Donald Sutherland, Michael J. Fox, William Shatner,
> Norman Jewison, David Cronenberg and Dan Aykroyd have in the popular
> perception become American, and Christopher Plummer, British. It is as if,
> in the very act of becoming famous, a Canadian ceases to be Canadian, unless
> she is Margaret Atwood, who is as unshakably Canadian as a moose, or Celine
> Dion, for whom Canada has proved quite unable to find any takers.
>
> Moreover, Canada is every bit as querulously alert to the achievements of
> its sons and daughters as the rest of the world is completely unaware of
> them. The Canadians proudly say of themselves -- and are unheard by anyone
> else -- that 1% of the world's population has provided 10% of the world's
> peacekeeping forces. Canadian soldiers in the past half century have been
> the greatest peacekeepers on Earth -- in 39 missions on UN mandates, and six
> on non-UN peacekeeping duties, from Vietnam to East Timor, from Sinai to
> Bosnia.
>
> Yet the only foreign engagement that has entered the popular non- Canadian
> imagination was the sorry affair in Somalia, in which out-of- control
> paratroopers murdered two Somali infiltrators. Their regiment was then
> disbanded in disgrace -- a uniquely Canadian act of self- abasement for
> which, naturally, the Canadians received no international credit.
>
> So who today in the United States knows about the stoic and selfless
> friendship its northern neighbour has given it in Afghanistan?
>
> Rather like Cyrano de Bergerac, Canada repeatedly does honourable things for
> honourable motives, but instead of being thanked for it, it remains
> something of a figure of fun.
>
> It is the Canadian way, for which Canadians should be proud, yet such honour
> comes at a high cost.
>
> This week, four more grieving Canadian families knew that cost all too
> tragically well.



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