Ian McKay - Warrior Nation: Rebranding Canada in an Age of Anxiety

Warrior Nation is intended to stir controversy, and it will. With compelling prose and abundant evidence, this fearless book punctures one of Canadas most sacred myths while challenging a complacent national narrative and warning of a deeply worrying trajectory in national life. Ian McKay and Jamie Swift have written an important work of engaged and impassioned history, and it deserves a wide readership.

A.B. MCKLLLOP , Chancellors Professor and former Chair, History, Carleton University

The stories that are told about Canadas past, its present, and its future are being reshaped by Canadian policymakers, the military and new warrior scholars in a way that both celebrates militarism and makes its costs invisible. This excellent and timely book offers a much needed corrective to the new warrior scholarship that is becoming so pervasive. It should be on the reading list of anyone who is interested in Canadian politics, international relations, and foreign policy.

SANDRA WHITWORTH , Professor, Political Science, York University

Revisiting Canadas military history as a sub-imperial military power of the Anglosphere, Warrior Nation recalls the massacre of women and children, the torture and execution of prisoners, and the true horror, lies, and prejudice that come with any wareven those our soldiers fight in the name of civilization, democracy, and peace. A welcome remedy to the Support Our Troops yellow ribbon epidemic.

FRANCIS DUPUIS-DRI , anti-war activist and writer, and Professor, Political Science, University of Quebec at Montreal

2012 by Ian McKay and Jamie Swift

First published in 2012 by
Between the Lines
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be photocopied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of Between the Lines, or (for photocopying in Canada only) Access Copyright, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, M5E IE5.

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McKay, Ian, 1953
Warrior nation [electronic resource] : rebranding Canada in an age of anxiety / Ian McKay and Jamie Swift.

Includes bibliogaphical references and index.
Electronic monograph issued in multiple formats.
Also issued in print format.
ISBN 978-1-77113-000-4 (EPUB).--ISBN 978-1-77113-001-1 (PDF)

1. Canada--History, Military. 2. Canada--Military policy. 3. Canada--Politics and government--2006-. 4. Conservatism--Canada. I. Swift, Jamie, 1951- II. Title.

FC543.M45 2012 355.00971 C2012-900793-5

Cover and text design: Gordon Robertson

Printed in Canada

Between the Lines gratefully acknowledges assistance for its publishing activities from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program and through the Ontario Book Initiative, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

Educated at Dalhousie University, Halifax, and the University of Warwick, England, Ian McKay has taught history at Queens University, Kingston, Ont., since 1988. In 2009 he was the recipient of the John A. Macdonald award from the Canadian Historical Association for Reasoning Otherwise: Leftists and the Peoples Enlightenment in Canada, 18901920. He is also the author of Rebels, Reds, Radicals: Rethinking Canadas Left History.

Kingston author Jamie Swifts first published article appeared in This Magazine in 1975. It exposed Canadas corporate and foreign policy links to Brazils military dictatorship. He has since written a dozen books of critical non-fiction and biography, including Cut and Run: The Assault on Canadas Forests and Odd Man Out: The Life and Times of Eric Kierans. In addition to the writing life, he works as a social justice advocate and teaches at Queens Universitys School of Business.

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), The War Prayer

Walter Benjamin, Peace Commodity

IN CANADA TODAY a determined right-wing elite is making full use of government power to change how we think about our country and its history. Canada, these new warriors declaim, has nothing to do with peaceful accommodation and steady improvement in the public good prompted by movements for fairness. Rather, it was created by wars, defended by soldiers, and kept free by patriotic support of military virtues. It is a Warrior Nation. It is a place where the horrible emotions of war are deployed for political gain, in the hopes of gaining a patriotic sense of shared purpose.

This toxic rebranding of their country demands that concerned citizens resist the war machine. But it also requires an engaged understanding of the complicatedand contestedhistory of Canadian attitudes towards war and peace. The following pages include scrutiny of the lives of four Canadians: Bill Stairs, a Victorian explorer and imperial emissary; Tommy Burns, a veteran of two wars who was also a leading war theorist and ultimately an ambassador for disarmament; Lester Pearson, whose famed formula for UN peacekeeping was combined with the passions of a Cold Warrior; and James Endicott, who struggled to find a path to peace and justice in a world divided into rival atomic camps. Their lives are a prism through which Canadian engagement with matters military are reflectedfrom African misadventures to the twentieth centurys major wars to the peacekeeping enterprise. Then came the end of the Cold War and the promise of a peace dividend, a period that Canadian militarists call their Decade of Darkness. Then came the disaster of the Afghan War, accompanied as it was by an official effort to rebrand Canada as Warrior Nation. Through all of this we explore Canadas experience of war and peace, and we insist that the enthusiasm and passion so often brought to war can energize opposition to the grim business of mass killing.