A rchive Date
[ 13-04-2007 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[http://calsun.canoe.ca/News/Columnists/Kaufmann_Bill/2007/04/13/4002086.html
National narrative rarely questioned
By BILL KAUFMANN
Fri, April 13, 2007
War's cost is so steep, there's never been a statute of limitations in wringing some value from it.
The words of the Queen and our PM at the Vimy Ridge memorial earlier this week are further testimony to war as an indispensable sacrament of nationalism, one we've been conditioned never to question.
Of course, the sheer tactical brilliance of Canadian troops in taking the heavily fortified German position 90 years ago is no myth, though the strategic significance accorded it is.
As an essential ingredient of a national narrative, a type common to many countries, it's come to be expected and rarely challenged. Our monarch referred to Vimy as pivotal, while it was hailed by Harper as a breakthrough and a turning point. It was none of those, though it was an inspirational victory that set the stage for later, truly decisive contributions by the Canadian Corps who'd been blooded as the Allies' elite shock troops.
The Vimy onslaught was actually a diversion in the larger Battle of Arras, and its ultimate military significance to the war at hand kept it so after the failure of our allies to exploit the Canadian success.
Even with those vital heights won, the bloody stalemate on the Western Front continued into the next year. In a subsequent letter to British generals Sir Douglas Haig and Sir William Robertson, British PM Lloyd George voiced his concerns over the prospects ahead.
"Could Robertson promise anything better than Vimy Ridge and Messines ... 'brilliant preliminary successes, followed by weeks of sanguinary struggles, leading to nothing except perhaps the driving of the enemy back a few barren miles - beyond that nothing to show except a ghastly casualty list,' " George is quoted in Leon Wolff's In Flanders Fields.
In fact, a turning point would only be reached with the collapse of Czarist Russia later that year, enabling the Germans to transfer troops to the West for the so-called Kaiser Schlacht in the spring of 1918 - an almost successful bid to wrest the initiative from the Allies.
Once those offensives were expended, the writing was finally on the wall and it was up to the attacking Canadian and Australian Corps to administer the coup de grace on August 8, 1918 - what German warlord Paul Von Hindenburg dubbed his army's "Black Day." He'd soon sue for an armistice.
In many books chronicling the Great War, aside from Canadian accounts, the Vimy triumph is often absent or granted cursory mention - a prominent footnote.
But the hyperbole surrounding Vimy isn't unique. D-Day, June 6, 1944 has also been wrongly acclaimed as the following conflict's great turning point. That recognition belongs to the earlier Stalingrad and Kursk battles won by our soon-to-be Cold War foes.
We're not immune from illusions of our own exceptionalism, encouraged by or leading to re-written history. Our children's ignorance of our military heritage is regularly lamented, but which version of it do we want taught?
It comes as no surprise that war - mankind's greatest failure - requires embellishment to feed the patriotic narrative.
That principle isn't confined to the past - we see it with Canada's doomed adventure in Afghanistan where the deaths of our soldiers are touted as "a price to pay for our freedoms."
Yet it's obvious none of our foes in Afghanistan remotely possess the intent or power to storm our shores and any terrorist attacks at home are likely to be provoked by Canada's military deployment.
In the meantime, our troops prop up a corrupt Afghan government sprinkled with drug dealers and war criminals eager to swing deals with the Taliban.
None of it plays well to the militarist orthodoxy pushed increasingly by our leaders who implore us by billboard and TV ad to "fight."
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