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War
Something we are that they are not
New American war resistors bring up a previously untouched subject in Canada
By Kevin Potvin |
The increasing appearance in Canada of American conscientious objectors to the Iraq war is causing a revision of a key episode in Canada’s history. For thirty years, the role of American Vietnam war resisters in Canadian culture and politics has gone largely unexamined. The fact that many of them were underground, even remaining so after some forms of clemency were offered when the Vietnam War drew to its infamous close, no doubt contributed to the low profile those refugees maintained here. Now, with a fresh influx of war resisters, Canadians are forced to confront again the causes and effects of the last influx of American war resisters.
Those effects are legion and go well beyond the prominent roles certain of those individuals have played in civic governments and at non-governmental organizations over the years. The Canadian self-image as an honest peace broker, an image that has contributed significantly to Canada’s foreign policy over the decades, was in no small part constructed out of the cultural shift Canadian society was subjected to upon the arrival of American war resisters in the 1960s and 70s. And domestic policies predicated upon the role of the state in smoothing some of the harsher corners presented by a corporate economy are also in no small way informed by a new consciousness about the possible relationships between the state and the community brought here by enlightened Americans fleeing repugnant domestic conditions.
Even more revealing for Canadians is a contemplation upon the causes of the influx of American war resistors then and now. There hasn’t been a similar experience in Mexico, a country just as handy for escape geographically as Canada. The influx is not due simply to geographic proximity. In a previous generation, Paris attracted enlightened Americans unable to countenance life in America. In a similar way, Canada is just as much a place these people are running to as America is a place they are running from.
What is it about Canada that causes enlightened Americans to flee here whenever conditions become too untenable at home? It isn’t a superior standard of living—the two countries enjoy very much the same level of living conditions. It isn’t the style of politics either. The two countries, relative to the range of political styles available in the world, are very closely aligned. There must be, Canadians are forced to imagine, something intrinsic to our culture that attracts them. And it must be something subtle because American and Canadian cultures are, in most areas of thought, also closely aligned.
The current influx of American war resisters, like the last influx thirty years ago, puts the lie to all commentators left and right who either complain or celebrate the apparent confluence of American and Canadian culture. There must remain some element of our cultures that is strikingly different, different enough to cause enlightened American war resistors to flee here in significant numbers, and to find satisfaction enough to mostly stay long past the immediate reasons that caused them to come in the first place.
What is that cultural difference? Whatever it is, it has endured intact for at least three decades and through many transformations in Canadian politics, not to mention through many encroachments upon Canadian culture generally by American culture. Whatever it is, it transcends the vagaries of conservative or liberal governments, and reaches further down than television and movies. Globalization has not snuffed it, nor has alignment of economies or militaries affected it. It has been around for a long time. The same thing attracted ex-slaves more than a century ago, an episode we call the “underground railroad.” Indeed, the very creation of Canada took place in the context of an ethnic cleansing of North America, an episode euphemistically called in America “The Indian Wars.” Further back yet, the country itself was founded as a refuge for disaffected British-Americans in the War of Independence.
The question about what causes current American war resisters to come here opens up for Canadians one more time the eternal question of what Canada is. And our repeated experience as a refuge for enlightened Americans distressed at repeated wars engaged with by America, makes clear that whatever Canada is that brings them here, it’s specifically something that America is not, and it’s got something to do with war.
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