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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