[Ian Gerrie]
Uh, so I wanted to welcome you all,
uh, to hear our,
uh, second guest lecture 
of the academic year,
Doctor Ian McKay,
who's going 
to deliver a lecture entitled,
"Vimy Traps – Canadians and 
the Contested Memory of World War I."
And just before we introduce 
Doctor McKay,
I'd like to thank all those people
whose work has made 
the lecture series possible.
Uh, the committee members,
besides myself,
Jeoff Bull, Melanie Chaparian,
Angela Aujla, and Chandra Hodgson,
uh, Humber's
media service technicians,
who make everything work properly,
you know,
in the manner we've just illustrated,
um, the President's Executive Assistant,
Deborah Green 
and, of course, Humber's president,
Chris Whitaker,
uh, without whose support 
the series would not be possible.
And I'm delighted to say,
he's here with us today.
So thank you sir.
So I just wanted to take a moment
to, uh, highlight 
this semester's line up of speakers.
Uh, we kicked things off
on October the 6th
with, uh, journalist and author,
Carolyn Abraham,
who delivered 
a very interesting talk entitled,
"Every Genome Tells a Story –
Do you want to know yours?"
That was here 
in the seventh semester.
And our final speaker for the fall
is a graduate of Yale Law School,
York University,
and our own General Arts 
and Sciences program here at Humber.
His name, uh, is Jamil Jivani,
and, uh, he's definitely
kept himself busy
since returning from Yale,
uh, to Canada.
Uh, he's been working
as an articling student
at the law firm Torys.
He's also on the board of directors
for the Children's Aid Society.
And he gained
some media attention, uh, recently
for work that he has done 
for, um, a group that he founded.
Um, it's actually, um, it's called
the Policing Literacy Initiative,
and it's, uh, kind of
a grassroots think tank
and, uh, advocacy group.
It's very youth driven,
and it focuses on policing issues 
that are based here in Toronto.
So that's what he'll be talking
to us about.
And that one is going to be 
at the Lakeshore campus. 
Uh, his talk is entitled,
"Bridging the Divide 
between Police and Community."
So that'll be in the Community Room 
at the Lakeshore campus.
So, um, information about the talks
we feature each semester
can be found on our home page
and you'll also find an archive 
of our, uh, past speakers there, too.
So our first speaker, Carolyn Abraham,
is there, available for viewing now.
We also advertise our talks 
in the Humber Communiqué,
on Humber TV,
HSF bulletin boards,
the event pages of Facebook,
Google Plus, we even tweet.
So you can find out about us 
through all those means.
And I'd just like
to take the opportunity
to welcome everyone watching,
uh, via the live stream  
at the Lakeshore
and Orangeville campuses.
And just to expend- uh,
extend a special welcome 
to students in attendance today
from, uh, Nicolette Kadiri's
war and terrorism class,
welcome to you,
as well as my own st- uh, students
studying contemporary moral issues
in the General Arts 
and Sciences program,
welcome to you.
They're louder 
than the first group.
 I heard a,
heard at least one whoop.
Um, so this would be
that point where I remind you
to silence all those cell phones.
Um, and as you listen to the lecture,
don't forget to jot down, uh, questions,
we will have time 
for a Q and A session at the end.
Uh, we will have 
a microphone available,
probably this one, um,
or probably a different one.
It's over here.
Oh, it's up back there.
[laughter] So, just to the side 
of where everyone is.
We'll just ask you to use
that microphone for questions,
otherwise they won't be, uh, heard 
on the live stream.
So, uh, please do that.
And if you need 
the microphone brought to you,
we can certainly,
uh, do that as well.
We're going to have a little reception 
to follow with, uh, refreshments.
So if you can stick around for that,
that would be great.
And I would like to just now 
turn the floor over to Daniel Caudle,
who is a student 
in the Journalism program,
who is going to introduce,
uh, today's speaker.
Daniel.
[Daniel Caudle]
Hey everyone, thanks for coming.
Doctor Ian McKay
has taught Canadian History
at Queen's University since 1988.
His reser- research interests 
lie in Canadian cultural history,
particularly the history 
of Canada as a liberal order,
Canadian and international
left wing movements,
and the economic
and social history of Atlantic Canada
in the 19th and 20th centuries,
especially as this relates
to the working class movements
[clears throat]
and to tourism.
Doctor McKay has received
numerous awards and distinctions,
including
becoming an elected fellow
of the Royal Socie- Society 
of Canada in 2014.
His book,
"In the Province of History,"
received the Pierre Savard Award
for best book in English or French
by the International Council 
of Canadian Studies.
And his book,
"Reasoning Otherwise,"
won the Canadian
Historical Association's
Sir John A. Macdonald prize 
for best Canadian history book.
His most recent book,
"Warrior Nation –
Rebranding Cana- Canada 
in an Age of Anxiety,"
documents a transformation, bleh,
documents a transformation 
in post-war Canada's 
central myth symbols.
From a peaceful and just society
of multicultural tolerance
to one 
that is increasingly militarized,
authortarism,
and politically pol- polarized.
We are very happy to have him 
participate in our series today.
Please join me in welcoming 
Doctor Ian McKay.
[applause]
[Doctor Ian McKay]
Well my sincere thanks
to Ian Gerrie and Humber College
for inviting me to speak to you today
as part 
of the President's Lecture Series.
Under the able leadership 
of Professor Daniel Hambly,
last year your college hosted
a remarkable conference
on Representing World War I –
Perspectives at the Centenary,
which drew scholars from across Canada
and around the world
to debate issues that are raised 
by the Great War of 1914, 1918,
also, a.k.a., known 
as the First World War.
So some of us call it 
the Great War
because we kind of read 
a lot of English stuff,
and other people call it 
the First World War,
19 over 14, 1918 
also works as a name.
But you know what I mean,
 it's the First World War,
uh, often called the Great War.
Today, I wanna continue 
this reflection,
uh, process of reflection
on the war
and take forward
some of the themes I raised in my talk
at Humber College's c- conference,
uh, last year.
And I call my talk,
"Vimy Traps –
Canadians and the Contested Memory 
of World War I."
My theme is,
in a nutshell,
that Canadians have always disagreed 
about this war.
That there never has been,
and perhaps never will be,
consensus about this war.
From 1914 on, many Canadians,
especially linked to the federal state,
attempted with great energy and zeal
to convince Canadians
that, A, this was a good war,
and, B, that their own state 
had been spotless,
excellent organizers of this war.
But also from 1914,
those who opposed this war 
on moral, political,
and practical grounds
have never been 
in a small minority.
So we are essentially insisting
that this war is 
and remains a contested terrain.
So we hope to undermine
what I would call the first trap
or a kind 
of conceptual limitation.
And that is to imagine this war 
as kind of the birth of the nation.
Imagining Canada to be an organically,
unified, cohesive entity 
of the sort that you would think 
a person is.
So Canada was born
and reaches maturity
just like a person is born 
and reaches maturity.
And we further assume,
if we use these metaphors,
that Canada is a kind of-
should have a unified conception 
of something as big 
as the First World War.
I think such organic imagery of Canada
as one big, cohesive entity
tends to undermine
coherent investigation
into the real worlds of Canadians,
and it also undermines
creative thinking
about peace and war 
in the 20th century.
So my central point today,
the take home point, take away point,
is that the Great War never was
and should not become
the rallying point
for an official nationalism
in search of the birth 
of the nation.
Rather, it should offer us
an opportunity
to reflect more critically
and in an evidence-based manner
upon the legacies of military conflict 
in the 20th century.
Going to the painting.
Many of us probably know
of Frederick Varley
as a member of the Group of Seven,
 the artists who attained fame
as Canada's most famous painters 
of landscapes.
So if you go to bank building 
anywhere in Canada,
you'll see somewhere in the-
on the wall, probably,
a Group of Seven landscape.
Yet he also deserves fame 
as a war artist,
who, in this capacity,
visited the va- the battlefields 
of France and Flanders in 1918.
So this painting is called,
"For What?"
and he is depicting 
a Canadian gravedigger, a soldier,
as he takes a break
from the gruesome tasks
of burying his comrades.
So we see a brooding sky 
divided against itself.
We see muddy ground  
red with blood.
We see a cart laden with corpses.
And the corpses themselves
are indistinct
and collectivized in death.
So it's kind of hard
when you look at the corpses in the cart
to tell which body is whose.
In some ways you could say
this is kind of
an upside down pastoral world,
 where you do see a farmer 
in a landscape,
which we would expect 
in a pastoral landscape,
but this farmer
is not planting new life
but actually dead bodies.
Varley thought to express
how disturbing
he found this landscape
of the war
in a letter to his wife,
and he wrote,
"We'd be healthier to forget the war 
and that we never can."
And then he continues,
"We are forever tainted
with its abortiveness
and it's cruel drama."
Tainted fields,
abortiveness, cruelty.
Varley is struggling with these words
to convey the weird way
in which the war 
had transformed nature itself.
Much in the same vein 
as Frank Underhill,
who used the expression
that almost got him fired
as a history professor 
from the University of Toronto.
He said that, "Canadians
were no longer interested
in sending their boys over
to fertilize the fields
of Flanders and France."
So you can see 
in both those moments,
people are trying to grasp something 
that's almost ungraspable –
the scope, the enormity, 
and horror of this war.
Today, if you want
to see the painting up front
in the real, real thing,
you can go 
to the Canadian War Museum 
in Ottawa.
It's been placed
in a poorly lit corner.
And it comes with this
fascinatingly argumentative caption
and I quote, "What do you think
that Frederick Varley is suggesting
with his evocative work 
and title?
Was the war pointless?
If the war had been pointless,
why had more
than 400,000 Canadians
continued to serve 
and fight overseas?"
It's rather unusual
for a museum to take issue
with a display 
of its own treasure on the wall.
It's very unusual for a Canadian museum
to take umbrage
at a display 
from one of the Group of Seven,
our sacred landscape painters.
But I think in the war museum's
evident discomfort about this painting
and about Varley's question,
for what?
In its discomfort,
you're seeing a telling indication
of the extent to which this question,
for what,
remains a burning one today.
We aren't comfortable with it.
Our official war museum
all but declares
that Varley should have never asked 
this question at all.
But if you look at how 
Canadians en masse handled this war,
especially in the 1920s and 1930s,
when it was a very fresh memory,
you will find them
asking Varley's question
over, and over,
and over again.
For what?
What did these mass deaths 
really accomplish?
In "Vimy Trap,"
which we're releasing next year,
Jamie Swift and I,
we're going to explore
how this question played itself out
from 1918 to our own time.
And what we have found is that 
across a vast spectrum of opinion,
left, right,
and centre,
there was an obsession 
with Varley's question.
There was a growing conviction
across this spectrum
that the best answer to the question,
for what, was something like this,
so that humanity 
may turn its back forever on war.
There was a drastic shift
in Canadian opinion
in the 1920s and 1930s 
against militarism and for peace.
Some of the Protestant ministers
who had made a name for themselves
in 1914, 1918
by de- turning their churches
into veritable recruiting halls 
for the war,
spent the 1920s repenting 
for what they had done.
They termed their militarism,
"The work of the devil."
The peace movement in Canada 
attained massive proportions.
No fewer than 480,000 Canadians
signed a peace petition in 1932
out of a population 
of eleven million people.
Even monuments 
to the dead of the war,
especially the Viny-
Vimy monument in France,
which has since become an icon 
of the entire country,
were as much monuments 
to peace as to war.
As you can see in this 1936 stamp
with the famous monument 
in the background,
one prominent peace group felt
that the Vimy monument
was the perfect illustration
to use
to convey its message 
of peace to the world.
And when the monument 
was unveiled in 1936,
 instead of military parades 
and artillery salutes,
what you found were such things
as Lloyd Stone's
internationally recognized peace hymn,
which was sort of
the "Give Peace a Chance"
of the Depression era.
Geoffrey O'Hara's rather
more combo- combative poem
called, "Guns,"
was also read out.
Part of which- this-
part of this poem reads like this,
"Let thy hand reach 
from shore to shore,
oh God of love forevermore.
Crush out the hated curse of war,
the guns, guns, guns."
This was the overwhelmingly
predominant theme
at the unveiling 
of the Vimy Memorial – no more war.
Prime Minister Mackenzie King,
a self declared member 
of the peace movement,
advised the crowd in a speech
that Canada demanded
that the nations of Europe 
serve to obliterate war forever.
"Obliterate all that makes 
for war and death," he wrote.
Canada appeals
to these countries to unite
in an effort to bring 
into being a world at peace.
If you look at the allegorical figures 
at Vimy, at the monument,
you will find Canada bereft,
a great big statue of mother-
sometimes called mother Canada.
You will not find a statue 
of Canada victorious.
You will find no depictions
of Canadians vanquishing the Hun,
but a broken sword 
signifying the urgency of peace.
Perhaps our most startling discovery 
through all of this
has been how many
returned soldiers
and their families 
shared this sentiment.
This was not a sentiment 
of a few isolated peaceniks.
This was a sentiment 
of vast numbers of soldiers.
We find, in fact,
that returned soldiers were very often 
the First World War's 
fiercest critics.
In 1934, the Toronto Star
and the Manitoba Free Press
ran a series on the First World War, 
a pictorial series.
A pictorial series that aimed
to really bring Canadians
 the visual truth about the war.
Yeah, okay. Okay.
Sure, no problem.
How's that?
Better?
To bring Canadians 
the visual truth about the war.
And this was an extremely 
provocative thing to do.
Consider that these photographs
showed bodies of dead an-
and mutilated soldiers 
and that people could recognize 
the bodies in the pictures.
Consider that this was at a time
when everybody had, uh, in Canada
would have known
people down the road
if not in their immediate families,
who had lost people in this war.
Consider that you had
just so much sorrow
and grief bound up in this war
and people were still 
in the process of bereavement.
So here we have the Toronto Star
running this series in 1934,
and some of the titles are like,
roasted men, boiled men, tortured men,
war, and what is the net result 
of war save death and ruin.
Now, the captions were written 
by a much loved Toronto Star columnist,
great Canadian humorist 
and sports writer, named Gregory Clark.
He was also a decorated veteran 
from Vimy Rige.
And Gregory Clark didn't hit 
quite as hard on this theme,
a bit more understated,
and yet,
all the way
through Gregory Clark's captions,
there is a kind of cynicism 
about the war.
Gregory Clark comment-
commenting on a shot 
of an excited crowd
outside Buckingham Palace
on the night of the declaration of war,
he writes,
"Whatever our honest  
and noble intentions that night,
if any eye in this throng
could have foreseen four years ahead
with a roll 
of one million British dead,
could we have cheered 
as we did then?
Now we know that a declaration of war 
is the occasion of national mourning."
Remember, this is from one
of Canada's most beloved writers
who had a huge reputation 
in Toronto,
became an order member 
of the Order of Canada in the 60s.
One of the most gripping photographs 
in this series was this one,
which was given the title,
"Canadian and German Boys at War."
And Gregory Clark writes 
of this photograph from 1918, he says,
"In 1918, down the tree lined roads 
out of Cambrai
come the hoards of youth of Germany
to look with wonder
at the youthful faces 
of their conquerors.
This remarkable photograph
is surely one
of the bitterest arguments 
against war ever advanced."
And what really, uh, got them
was the expression
on the face of this German boy,
it just seemed to sort of convey 
something of the enormity
of kids in the war
and the startling new realities 
that the war had entailed for him.
Well how did people react 
to this explosive series?
After reading the historians
and how the war 
was supposedly remembered,
we would have expected
an outraged response
and the tarring and feathering
of the unpatriotic journalists,
but, with very few exceptions,
exactly the opposite is the case.
Over 100 letters 
pour into the newspapers,
some from veterans
giving their military numbers
so that their bona fides 
can be checked.
They were overwhelmingly positive 
about the series.
Entire branches of the Canadian Legion
wrote in to congratulate the newspapers
for running such candid photographs 
 of the war.
For William Howey of Owen Sound,
the sights of desolation,
carnage, and suffering 
brought tears to his eyes.
"At last," he wrote,
"the Canadian people 
would begin to realize
better than ever before
the utter madness 
and hellishness of modern war.
If only every country 
would publish its war pictures,
the false glamour 
of Mars, the god of war,
would soon fade out forever."
J. Morris of the 10th Battalion –
and he gives his number, 417223,
in case you want to check him up –
J. Morris writes, "I do hope
that if another war should come our way
our youths will say,
no war for us,
our fathers suffered quite enough 
in the last war."
Another letter writer 
from Peterborough writes –
and he's-
interesting that he echoes
the very title 
of Varley's painting –
he writes, "No pen can do more 
than intimate the mental agony,
the torture,
and physical wretchedness endured,"
and then he asks, "for what?"
Over and over again, the correspondence,
many of them veterans,
use the very word
that has become forbidden
in fashionable discussions 
of the Great War – futile.
And this word, futile,
comes up again and again 
in the writings of the men 
who fought in the war.
So for many, many interwar Canadians,
including veterans,
the answer to Varley's question,
for what,
was something like,
so that humanity would realize 
that war under conditions
of mechanized modernity
is a horror show 
that should never be repeated.
One of the great merits 
of Tim Cook's two volume,
"Canadians Fighting 
the Great War."
An invaluable resource
from which I have drawn many
of the empirical examples
in this lecture
and which I would recommend 
to all of you.
Cook says that really explores
the number of times 
that Canadians 
actually fighting the war,
despite the military censorship
that they were under
and despite the fact
that they were right
in the middle of this situation,
they wrote the most cynical,
acerbic appraisals of this war.
Many of them, uh, started to say,
you know, nine tenths,
nine out of ten of the soldiers 
that I know fighting,
and this is from 1918,
would back any realistic peace proposal.
Or we could turn to Will R. Bird,
who is sometimes considered 
Canada's archetypal war novelist,
the guy, the, the go-to guy 
for the Canadian war for many people.
Sometimes Bird is rep- represented
as kind of gung ho on the war,
but this is actually 
a complete misrepresentation.
"Only the sky above you 
seems fit and clean,"
Bird remarked 
about the battlefields of Ypres.
"It is a place of horror,
tortured with sinister gullies 
and gulches, upheaved,
blasted, disemboweled.
An unsightliness 
few tourists can bear to see."
Or talking about
the battle of Passchendaele
with an admiring Briton 
while Bird was on leave.
Bird was told by the Briton
that a sol- as a soldier
in the famous battle of Passchendaele, 
he should be really proud,
pumped up to have been part 
of this world historic battle.
"He had lived a great day,"
said the Briton to him.
"I don't think so,"
was Bird's reply.
And then he adds,
in a most striking departure 
from today's common sense 
about the First World War,
Bird adds,
"This war is wrong."
So you see,
I think there is a simple mindedness 
to the caption the Canadian War Museum 
has attached to Varley's painting.
For, as in Bird's case,
persistence in the war 
did not necessarily mean 
a positive endorsement of the war.
In fact, in the company 
of a legion of other Canadians,
Bird came to regard the war 
as an almost unthinkable calamity,
which is, in fact,
the overall consensus 
of opinion in Europe.
What's rather astonishing,
given how often
and uniformly we've been told
that interwar Canadians were convinced 
of the sanctity of this war,
what's rather astonishing
is how seldom any of them
say anything about this war 
as the birth of a nation.
This theme is almost entirely absent 
in the interwar period.
So almost none of them
in response to Varley's question,
for what,
will say, well,
to give birth to Canada.
Even in 1927,
when the country was taken up 
with celebrating the diamond jubilee 
of Confederation,
when the Peace Tower was opened
in Parliament Hill,
and when only cave dwellers
could have not noticed
the extraordinary wave
of nationalism sweeping the country,
even in 1927, you'll find very,
very few people 
invoking any memory 
of Vimy, startling.
The idea that Canada fought a great war
of independence in 1914, 1918
and that the country was born
at Vimy Ridge
is not easily located 
in the 1920s and the 1930s,
and not easily found by the very people 
who fought in the war.
Contrast this picture
of pervasive interwar skepticism
about the war 
with the day's marshal nationalism.
Now, Vimy Ridge, birth of the nation,
is a massively promoted slogan.
You can buy the ball cap 
and you can buy the t-shirt.
The Great War has been cleaned up
and made presentable 
for the general public.
No more Varley-esque questioning.
In fact,
no more questioning, period.
Take, for example, this 2010 edition 
of Discover Canada,
the country's guide 
to intending Canadian citizens.
It presents us with a First World War,
highlighting the images 
of valiant men on horseback 
as you can see in the top left.
It presents us
with a flattering portrait
of Sir Arthur Currie
and he is presented to us as, quote, 
"Canada's greatest soldier."
The citizenship guide 
unequivocally declares,
"The war strengthened 
both national and imperial pride,
 particularly in English Canada."
The guide contains no images 
of death and destruction.
Even the word trench 
fails to make an appearance.
"It was Canada from the Atlantic 
to the Pacific on parade.
In those few minutes 
I witnessed the birth of a nation,"
 one man is quoted
in the citizenship guide 
about Vimy Ridge.
Typically,
this nationalist insight has arrived 
many decades 
after the event itself.
We are back
to Queen Victoria's British Empire
with valiant heroes
proving their martial excellence
on the field of battle.
And below them,
as if to make the romance 
of war complete,
is a female nurse
with downcast eyes
ready to attend 
to the battle wounds of men.
 In sharp disagreement
with the views
of many Canadians 
of the 1920s and 1930s,
including many of the soldiers 
who actually fought in it,
we are now urged
to remember this war
as a time of wholesome,
undivided national purpose,
gallant leadership,
and heroic achievement.
A time when,
and I quote
from the current 
Veterans Canada website,
"Canada truly achieved 
nation status."
Take that, Fred Varley.
Placing his considerable authority
behind this argument
that Canada was born 
at Vimy Ridge,
and let's call that argument 
Vimyism for short,
we find Don Cherry,
who on Coaches Corner 
on the 5th of April, 2014,
provided an invaluable distillation 
of the key themes of the argument.
As Cherry put it, and I quote,
"April 9th, boy,
this is when Canada 
became a nation.
Birth of a nation.
The French and the British tried
to take it for a whole year
and General Currie said,
"No Brits, no French involved.
I'm a Canadian general.
We will take it in two days.
We are the best.""
For a more academic version 
of Vimyism,
you might turn to the writings 
of Professor Jonathan Vance,
since the 1990s
one of Canada's preeminent writers
on the Great War.
According to Vance,
the First World War 
brought Canada
a new sense of nationhood
as its citizen army fighting for,
and I quote,
"Democracy, freedom, justice,
and Christianity,
carried Canada's colours,
resisting an atrocity
perpetrating enemy
and thus inspired 
an entire people."
These soldiers willing to defend,
and I quote again,
"Canada, Western civilization, 
and Christianity,"
became,
and I quote,
"In a very real sense,
the nation in arms,
the life force of Canada 
transported overseas."
"And at Vimy Ridge,"
Vance continues,
"the Canadian corps," quote,
"stunning success.
A triumph of organization, preparation,
training and raw courage 
constituted nothing less than,"
here we go again,
"the birth of a nation."
The Great War thus constituted 
the crucible of Canadian nationhood,
and upon it has written-
risen Canada's myth,
the great narrative
of sacrifice for freedom
in which all full-blooded Canadians 
are expected to believe.
For the victory of the Allies 
in the Great War constituted,
in Vance's mind,
quote,
"A victory over the forces 
of barbarism."
Canadians who really get Canada,
the myth of Canada,
understand this basic truth.
Take that, once again,
Fred Varley.
Obviously not up to stuff  
as a Canadian,
whatever your status 
as a Group of Seven painter.
Vimyism, almost unknown 
before the 1960s,
provides a fascinating example 
of the uses of history.
Certainly in the 1920s and 1930s,
you can find some examples 
that sort of edge on the verge 
of Vimy, birth of the nation.
Mackenzie King,
Prime Minister,
clearly senses that maybe
his Conservative enemies
are cooking up something 
a little bit like that.
They taunt him relentlessly 
about not having served in the war,
say he's yellow-bellied
and he's, you know, a coward
and not a real Canadian.
In 1926, he's even posed
in a major election
against Governor General Byng,
who was the hero of Vimy Ridge.
If you bought the line, you will say,
well there was no contest.
You've got a guy that didn't find
the time to serve in the war
versus Governor General Byng,
victor of Vimy Ridge.
Surprise, surprise,
who wins the 1926 election?
Mackenzie King,
and in an election 
in which he was repeatedly baited 
for not having done his bit in the war.
The Diamond Jubilee of 1927 
does feature a few voices saying,
"Gee, the war was 
a formative moment for Canada."
But not many and not many 
unambivalently positive ones.
At Vimy in 1936,
the crowd certainly did hear words,
especially from King Edward the Eighth,
for instance,
congratulating Canadians 
on their epochal feat of arms.
Yet in all such examples 
of martial nationalism,
we find very rare voices.
To a startling extent,
down to the 1960s,
the claims that victor- Vimy
was the birth of the nation
and the First World War
somehow constituted
our war of independence 
are almost inaudible,
even among the veterans
whom one might have thought susceptible
to the suggestion  
they were Canada's number one heroes.
But then, in the warm,
nationalistic glow 
of centennial celebrations,
some Canadians began 
to romanticize the war,
which is now placed 
alongside the fur trade,
the building of the CPR,
and the founding of the NHL
in the great arch 
of the colony to nation narrative.
A significant milestone here 
was Pierre Berton's "Vimy," 1986,
in which Canada's 
most popular historian,
you know, his books would sell hundreds 
of thousands of copies,
everyone would give them 
to the their, uh, kids for Christmas,
immensely popular guy.
Pierre Berton in 1986 does write
a very interesting book
about Vimy,
full of useful detail,
and he concludes that because of Vimy 
our country found its manhood.
And I think this was kind
of an epochal step
towards the coming of Vimy
into the mainstream 
of Canadian nationalism.
So now, the answer 
to Varley's question, for what,
was emphatically,
so that Canada might be born.
But to be fair to Berton,
he immediately added after saying that,
was it worth it?
The answer, of course,
is no.
Having contemplated all the horrors 
of the actual battle,
Berton himself said,
"This price was not worth it."
The immense irony of Vimyism today
is that we have retained
Berton's fevered evocation
of national pride,
but we have lost
his anguished questions
about its supposed price tag.
It's very much like the gult-
cult of Gallipoli in Australia.
It very much resembles
the Anzac myth
that the Australians
and the New Zealanders have developed
about their own military.
And like the Gallipoli myth,
it really takes flight in the 1990s.
As in Australia,
some historians 
and many Conservative politicians
got fed up
with Feminists,
gays and lesbians,
aberg- Aboriginal people 
and tutti quanti 
raising guilt provoking questions 
about Canadian history.
You don't want Canadian history
that's gonna make
your school kids feel bad 
and upset about themselves.
So rising up
against these supposed history killers
and against any notion of Canada
as a peace keeping 
and peaceable kingdom,
a powerful cohort of intellectuals,
many of them attached to the military,
began an extensive rehabilitation 
of the Great War.
It was strongly encouraged 
to do so by the federal government,
by such organizations 
as the Dominion Institute,
and the Vimy Foundation.
And in the dramatically refurbished 
Canadian War Museum, opened 2005,
in addition to the snide caption 
about Fred Varley,
you'll find
the explicitly argued proposition
that Canada was molded by war.
Although which big bang
got Canada started
seems a matter of some debate.
Thanks to Veterans Affairs,
harried educationists 
in search of teaching materials
can now access
an abundance of war oriented stuff
for children
 from kindergarten to high school.
Those aged from five to eleven,
for instance, 
are introduced to tales 
of animals in war.
By the time of Vimy's
90th commemoration in 2007,
in a new Conservative 
citizenship guide of 2008,
veneration for Vimy
had become de rigueur
that Canada's Great War had really been
a really, really great war,
had become a pervasively held 
and proper opinion.
Well stepping back a bit,
one might say 
there are five conceptual elements 
to this Vimyism. 
First, we find the general theme 
of the battle's great grandeur,
nobility, sublime nobility,
and world historic significance. 
That the Great War is no picnic
is emphasized,
but the hardships
of the Great War are- were endured
by our soldiers
who sacrificed themselves
for the greater good 
so that Canada might exist.
Second, there is a focus
on the heroes who made the nation
and even remade the world.
If Vimy was the birth of the nation,
Canada's soldiers –
above all, Canada's greatest soldier,
Arthur Currie –
were its male midwives.
Third, there is the theme 
of Canadian exceptionalism.
The Candians won at Vimy because,
unlike the British 
and unlike the French,
they knew how to get things done.
Unencumbered 
by useless old traditions,
unafraid of hardship and death,
Canadians brought their can-do spirit
to Vimy
and prevailed 
where others had failed.
We carried the day,
and it is sometimes even implied,
turned the tide of the entire war.
Fourth, there's the idea
that Canadians-in-arms were united
by Vimy as never before.
The soldiers were disunited 
before they came to Vimy,
united and disciplined afterwards.
"For the Canadian troops 
who fought at Vimy,"
explained- exclaims 
one contemporary martial nationalist,
"it was one of those rare moments 
of truth.
This was the first time 
those soldiers recognized who they were.
They went up the ridge as regionals,
and they came down as nationals."
Other versions of the saying,
that they came up-
they went up the ridge as people
from Nova Scotia,
and Quebec, and British Columbia,
and they came down 
as people from Canada.
This miraculous transformation
in the course of four days
was then quickly communicated
over the ocean to Canada itself
 as Canadians en masse thrilled
to the victory of victory at Vimy
and overcame 
their longstanding divisions.
Thus, the nation emerged 
as a unified entity,
unanimously and rightly impressed 
by the deeds of its valiant saviors.
Fifth,
on a mental level,
there was the pervasive assumption 
in Vimyism,
which Vance makes explicit,
that the Great War was fought 
for decency, democracy, and freedom.
To defend our values 
against their values.
To defend civilization 
against barbarism.
Democracy against tyranny.
So in response to Varley's question,
for what,
the- this correct answer would say,
so that Canada could be born 
and attain its stature
as a stalwart defender
of the liberal democratic values 
against our freedom hating enemies.
In our book,
Jamie and I will argue 
that each of these positions
is empirically untenable
and that their diffusion threatens
to trap Canadians
in Victorian forms of militarism 
unsuitable for a 21st century country.
Today, I will give you 
the condensed version of our argument.
First, the official Vimy narrative's
misleadingly focused
on the four day run up
to the ridge itself
from April 9th to the 12th, 1917.
What's generally neglected
in all of this
and what meets- misleads you
is the overall context of this battle,
which is that Vimy Ridge was part 
of the wider Battle of Arras,
which, in turn, was designed
to be a, essentially, a diversion
from a much bigger struggle 
being waged further to the South.
You probably aren't interested,
and I don't think
I could hold your attention
if I go into all the machinations
between Lloyd George,
and the French in Paris,
and their poster boy,
General Robert Nivelle,
who was going to solve the,
the whole problem 
of the st- the stalemate
on the Western front
with a grand, heroic offensive.
Suffice it to say, that Vimy Ridge 
was one part of the Battle of Arras,
which, in turn, was a diversion 
from this much bigger struggle.
Alas, for the Entente, i.e. our side,
this great gamble did not pay off.
The offensive was 
a dismal failure.
So you see, the Canadians
of Vimy Ridge are there in 1917
as part of a much bigger political
and strategic picture
over which they exerted
almost no influence
and, in a sense,
they did not fully understand.
We had no powerful person sitting
around the decision making tables
when these strategic decisions 
were made.
So the Battle of Arras,
of which Vimy Ridge is part,
did not constitute
the breakthrough
for which Lloyd George
and company had been praying,
nor, indeed,
does the taking of Vimy Ridge.
Once the ridge was taken,
the Canadian soldiers are unable
to press any further
and the Germans simply 
reconsolidated their lines further East.
So here is the nub.
Among many German write ups 
of Vimy Ridge –
including the official histories 
of some of the regiments,
the German regiments,
that fought at Vimy Ridge –
Vimy Ridge is not considered 
a defeat.
Some of them consider it a victory.
 And sometimes the Germans say,
"Well, it was basically a draw."
They even-
the Germans even struck a medal
to recognize the valor
and success of their soldiers
in withholding 
a much more numerous enemy.
So the suggestion 
that Vimy Ridge was a decisive victory,
let alone a war deciding one,
is wholly misleading.
Nothing important was decided 
about the war in Vimy Ridge in 1917.
Even General Arthur Currie,
proud of his achievement,
conceded that Vimy Ridge  
had been vastly overrated.
It barely makes the footnotes
of many general histories,
even in ultra-patriotic 
British chronicles of this war.
And Currie himself,
to move to the second point,
is difficult to turn
into a military hero
of Napoleonic proportions.
Tim Cook aptly likens this former
Victoria real estate speculator
to the CEO of a company.
And he does seem to have possessed 
a rare administrative capacity,
but he was neither loved 
nor respected by many of his troops.
In 1918,
as the Germans pushed ahead 
in their last desperate drive 
to win the war,
Currie issued what he hoped
would be an inspiring message 
for his soldiers.
He urged them to stand fast 
against the Germans and he wrote,
"You will advance or fall 
where you stand facing the enemy.
To those who will fall I say,
"Your names will be revered forever
and forever by our grateful country
and God will take you 
unto himself.""
This was grand, noble rhetoric.
His own soldiers 
thought it comical.
Some rudely satirized 
their leader's messed up syntax.
They asked each other,
"Do you stand where you fall?"
And one of Currie's remarks,
Currie's friends remarked afterwards,
"Appeals to the higher ideals 
only made them ill."
A hero to many historians,
General Currie was, by 1918,
reviled by many, if not most,
of his men,
who blamed the core commander
for the loses suffered in the war
and now for the delay 
in getting home.
It did not help matters
that at a time
when his troops were complaining 
of inadequate rations,
he himself had grown quite fat
on the better food
and staying in royal palaces.
I quote from Tim Cook,
"It seemed 
that while they had grown thin 
on bully beef,
their general had grown fat 
on boeuf bourguignon."
He had also grown fat off rank 
and file soldiers in a more direct way.
In 1913,
when Currie was trying to raise
a milt- a new militia regiment 
in Victoria,
he confronted many a property,
property speculator's dilemma,
which is impending bankruptcy.
He had just overextended himself,
invested in some dubious properties,
you know, it happens.
So, being Currie,
tying to raise a new militia 
having to pay a lot of bills,
he diverted government funds
intended for his troops
into his own pocket 
to the tune of 10,000 dollars 800-
10,833 dollars 
and 34 cents to be precise.
Currie's never prosecuted crime 
was an open secret in Ottawa.
It was even discussed in cabinet.
So Canada's greatest soldier 
stole money from his own men.
At least, however,
to move to, onto our third point,
Currie can be said to have initiated 
the Canadian way of war.
Well, not so fast.
Recent scholarship points out
how much Currie actually owed
to the Europeans 
and primarily to the French,
who had first devised at Verdun
many of the approaches 
later adopted at Vimy.
And if the French supplied 
many of the ideas,
British support in planning,
artillery, leadership, and fighting 
was instrumental to the battle.
Many historians credit the Canadians'
undoubted esprit de corps in April 1917
to that British blue blood,
General Julian Byng,
the man to whom Currie reported.
It is a mistake,
a fundamental mistake in other words,
to regard Vimy as a Canadian battle 
in either conception or execution.
But there's even
a more daunting challenge
confronting the thesis of consade- 
Canadian exceptionalism.
The Canadian exces- expeditionary force 
was, at the time of Vimy,
demographically dominated 
by Britons.
Even six months after Vimy,
55.48 percent of the Canadian Corps 
was foreign,
i.e. born outside Canada.
Offered a chance 
to serve in the military,
most eligible Canadian-born men 
gave it a pass.
And the evidence that Canadian soldiers
evinced post-Vimy higher levels
of Canadianism 
 is also tenuous at best.
Some of the French Canadians
who were dramatically 
underrepresented at Vimy,
continued to express acute resentment
against the Anglo arrogance
of their British-Canadian
counterparts,
who had never warmed 
to the notion of a bilingual Canada.
Much of the weak evidence implying
a new Vimy induced Canadianism
is, in fact, highly suspect
and comes from the 1960s
and was often elicited in response
to the enthusiastic prodding 
of nationalistic interviewers.
So, you know, you go up 
to your veteran, you say,
"Would you agree, Fred,
that you've felt a new feeling 
of pride being a Canadian 
when you went up Vimy Ridge?"
And Fred would say, "Yeah, I guess so,"
and that's what got into the record.
Really, it was a classic instance
of oral historians prodding
and producing exactly the kind
of answers they were looking for
at a time of high nationalism
when everyone was trying
to find things
about Canada to celebrate
from the CPR to the fur trade.
Moreover, throughout Vimyism
you find the questionable assumption
that if some Canadians
felt something in Europe
that made them more Canadian,
their sentiments were shared 
by most Canadians at home.
But this is 
a highly problematic slippage.
If, indeed, the Great War was in fact,
and generally seemed to be,
Canada's war of independence,
one might have expected 
some echoes
in the contemporary evidence
that Canadians realized 
they had ever fought in such a war.
But nobody used that language then,
not even in the Diamond Jubilee 
celebrations of 1927.
This supposed war of independence is,
in fact, an invention of our own time.
And consider the naiveté
of imagining
that Canada earned its autonomy
in the British Empire
because of widespread gratitude 
for Vimy Ridge.
This is not really 
how international power politics works.
Empires are not scout troops
handing out badges
to their well behaved 
and self-sacrificial members.
In 1922, Lloyd George blithely assumed
that Canada would fall into line
when the British Empire contemplated 
its new war on Turkey.
He seemingly had not got the memo 
about Canadian independence.
In fact, Canada was, in real terms,
less independent in 1921 
than it had been in 1918.
As Jack Granatstein 
usefully points out,
to pay for the war
the country had become
much more dependent 
on the Americans.
And the argument
that Vimy unified Canadians
with can- within Canada
and provided a secure basis 
for Pan-Canadian nationalism
is even flimsier.
In the wake of Vimy,
and in part inspired by it,
Prime Minister Robert Borden
made the fateful decision
to implement conscription 
in Canada.
He then orchestrated an election
 marred by unprecedented levels
of ethno-religious prejudice 
and hatred.
So conscription means 
you're gonna force people who,
who don't wanna join,
if they're of the right age 
and the right gender,
they'll still be compelled 
to join the military service.
And this election in 1917
was over the top amazing
in terms of the level of hatred 
projected against Catholics,
against French Canadians,
against people of colour,
against anybody who was not-
did not fit an archetypal definition 
of Canadiansim.
It was, perhaps,
our ugliest election ever,
and that's saying quite a lot.
And consider what happens 
after the imposition of conscription –
Candian soldiers 
slaughtering their fellow citizens
on Easter weekend
in Quebec City in 1918
because those citizens had expressed 
their disagreement against the war.
One of the bloodiest riots 
in Canadian history.
What about the biggest claim of all
that this was a Great War 
pitting good against evil,
civilization against barbarism?
The claim echoes, of course,
the propaganda of the day.
Symphony orchestras in North America
moved to ban the playing of music
by those barbarians –
Bach and Beethoven.
We even had debates in Canada
about renaming the province
of New Brunswick 'cause Brunswick has 
an ominously Germanic tinge.
And you all know that Kitchener, Ontario
used to be known as Berlin, Ontario
when, basically, the city is coerced
into changing its name
by armed gangs of thugs.
Can we seriously affirm 
this stark civilization,
barbarism dichotomy today?
Was the entente, our side,
solely in the right?
Debate on that question has raged 
ever since 1914,
generating entire libraries 
of contentious books.
Still, it is fair to say that in 2015,
only a very unusual historian 
would attribute 100 percent
of the responsibility
for the war to Germany.
Such a verdict
simply does not tally
with the vast mountain 
of empirical evidence.
And notice that in our zeal
to make the 1914, 1918 war
basically all about Canada,
and we're sort of using the war
as our selfie,
and we're sort of putting it up there 
and saying,
"Oh, you know, we, we really are 
the centre of the universe."
The war as we're telling it 
to ourselves is like, all about us.
It's useful to remember
that more African porters
than Canadian soldiers died 
in the course of the Great War,
and many of these porters died
for a British Empire one is hesitant 
to deem a model of democracy.
Was the Canadian way of war
really morally superior
to that of the enemy?
The Canadian War Museum makes much 
of Canadian suffering from poison gas.
And I think, perhaps, we can all agree,
especially in Ian's course on morality,
we can all agree
that poisoning your enemy
with doses
of chlorine and phosphine
is not one of the 20th centuries
more morally uplifting examples
that we can take into the 21st.
There's something kind of icky 
about poison gas warfare.
Dis- corta- kills sneakily,
it, it kills indiscriminately,
it, it is just,
it does not conform 
to anybody's idea 
of chivalry in warfare.
Now, as it happens,
the turn to chemical warfare
was initiated by our side, the French,
though it is undoubtedly the case 
that the Germans
took this dark ate- art
to much, much deadlier levels,
with some of them
hoping and arguing
that such a weapon 
would rapidly end the war,
rather like the partisans 
of the atomic bomb in 1945.
Pleased to be the pure of heart,
peaceable,
pleasant people of the planet,
at least in our own minds,
Canadians have yet to really acknowledge
how enthusiastically
we, ourselves,
adopted chemical warfare.
As Jack Granatstein put it in 2007,
"We used it because it worked.
There is simply no doubt 
that it eased the way."
Eased the way –
there's a phrase that ought 
to be nominated for the award 
for military euphemism of all time.
Death from the ingestion
of our Canadian chemicals
might take you as long as 18 hours
as the body discharged gallons 
of yellow pus and bile.
It was an agonizing way to go.
We dote on dis- descriptions
of Canadians suffering from this fate
at the hands
of the merciless Germans,
but we avert our eyes
from our own enthusiastic adoption
of this same deadly weapon.
And gas, of course,
played a central role at Vimy Ridge.
So when your celebrating
Vimy Ridge,
you're also, in a way,
celebrating chemical warfare.
As Tim Cook puts it 
in a pungent phrase,
Canadian soldiers were led, quote,
"like blind cattle 
mounting the slaughterhouse ramp,
as they sought to move
behind a toxic, gaseous barrage
at Vimy 
on the 1st of March, 1917."
Poison gas is a tricky weapon.
If you ever attempted to use it,
you needed to sort of read 
the user's manual fairly carefully.
Much of it depends 
on prevailing wind conditions.
You really have to know how the gas 
is gonna travel in the atmosphere.
 Many junior officers at Vimy tried 
to warn their senior, uh, brass,
you know, this isn't a great scenario 
for the use of gas warfare.
It's kind of hard to persuade the gas 
to go up a ridge,
everything just has 
to work perfectly.
So the tactic, they kept saying,
is not likely to work 
and lo and behold,
it didn't work.
The gas went halfway up the ridge
and started to go right back
down the ridge
onto the Canadians 
who it was supposedly helping.
The casualty rate among 
the Canadian attackers was 43 percent.
One lieutenant u- termed the use of gas 
murder not war.
"This is not war, it is simply murder,"
wrote another.
"You can no longer call it war,
it is mere murdered,"
uh, says- agreed a German of,
of a similar mind.
"This butchery is madness,"
adds another.
"I should not call this war,
it is slaughter,"
wrote 
a desperate Canadian private.
All these quotations drawn 
from Tim Cook's book.
At Vimy, so overcome
were the Germans themselves
at the sight of the mountains
of dead Canadians
killed by their own poison gas
that they compassionately arranged
for an interval in the hostilities
so the Canadians could collect 
their Vimy dead and bury them.
Near Lens in 1917,
the sun fell upon a battlefield 
overlaid with bloated corpses,
forcing out odiferous gla- gases day
and night
that jerked soldiers to attention.
Mounds of bodies were reduced
to mounds of body parts
as dead flesh was dismembered
and churned up by the cascading shells.
Echoes of Varley's, "For What,"
and his landscape of hell.
One Canadian captain wrote that,
"If only some
of those famous orators
who shout, fight to the finish,
could see this sight,
they would pause
and they would wonder
whether they were in hell
or whether they were living
in the supposedly enlightened 
20th century."
I sense a further complication
for Vance's civilization,
barbarism dichotomy 
in the record 
of the Canadian treatment of prisoners.
Canadians killed a lot 
of their German prisoners.
It became a tradition,
one that was well noticed 
by other nationalities involved 
in the war.
From Ypres in 1915,
to Vimy Ridge in 1917, 
to Amiens in 1918,
accounts of Canadian prisoner killing  
abound.
At Ypres,
in one soldier's reminiscence,
"We had enough to do
to take care of ourselves
and our own wounded 
to bother about prisoners."
In the Battle of Amiens,
Germans bearing white flags 
were disregarded, and I quote,
"When the garrison stepped out
with raised hands,
they were annihilated,
almost to a man."
And at Vimy Ridge,
one soldier remembered,
"Fritz lambasted us 
'til we got right up to him.
They threw their hands up 
and said, mercy, comrade.
But I don't think 
they got much mercy."
Perhaps the single
most memorable reminiscence
of Canadian prisoner killing 
and Cook's mangum opus,
comes from Courcelette 
in September, 1916.
From one dugout emerged a steady line 
of terrified captive Germans.
As they rounded a corner,
each one of them was killed 
by the Canadians and I quote,
"One German
tried to escape the slaughter
by jumping out of the trench,
dodging in and out amongst us 
to avoid being shot.
Crying out,
"Nein! Nein!"
He pulled out from his breast pocket
a handful of photographs
and tried to show them to us 
in an effort to gain our sympathy.
As the bullets smacked into him,
he fell to the ground motionless,
the pathetic
little photographs fluttering
down to the earth around him."
In addition to its willful avoidance 
of awkward facts,
nationalistic narrowing of focus,
insistent search for martial heroes,
and stunning n- neglect 
of the Canadian minorities,
who will never see this Great War 
as their war of independence.
There is a deep childishness 
to Vimy.
Against all the evidence
of the impersonality, cruelty
and massive scale 
of modern mechanized warfare,
Vimyism wants us
to imagine war as chivalry
as signaled
by the citizenship guide's visual homage
to the horse-mounted cavalry.
Such hers- horse-mounted charges were,
in conditions of modern warfare,
"exceedingly gallant but futile,"
 to quote one contemporary soldier.
Perhaps here, we find 
the most serious trap of all,
the trap of perpetual childhood.
It demands of us
that we forget we live
under conditions of modernity
in which all that was solid 
has melted into air,
including Victorian notions 
of individualism and heroism,
clear cut boundaries 
between civilians and soldiers,
even firm distinctions 
between peace and war.
Well after November the 11th, 1918,
the Germans were deliberately starved 
and perhaps as many
as a million perished
under the terms 
of our economic blockade.
For some scholars,
this was perhaps the most serious 
and consequential war crime
of them all
because it so blatantly targeted 
innocent civilians.
In so many official representations 
of the war today,
we find a willful denial of a fact
so apparent
to those outraged soldiers of 1934
who wrote in to the Toronto Star.
We find a denial of the fact
that under conditions of modernity, 
war has changed.
It has changed utterly 
and forever.
And it is a fool's errand to try 
and recover its lost gra- glamour.
For a look again 
at Varley's, "For What?"
In it, much that is solid,
the lines between life and death,
peace and war,
our antique certainties 
have started to dissolve.
Varley has used the form 
of a conventional pastoral landscape,
a farmer in his field,
to highlight how co- unconventional 
and how unpastoral was the world 
the Great War had ushered into being.
This was a new normal,
a brand new world,
a terrifying new world.
As Tim Cook writes 
near the conclusion of his work,
"The Great War for civilization,
in fact, destroyed the civilization 
that came before
and created modernity
in countless fields of human ideas,
expression, and identity."
From 1918 onwards,
many Canadians,
gazing with awe and dread 
upon this landscape of modernity,
hoped against hope 
that they might never see it again.
[Ian] So, we do have, uh, time 
for some questions.
I'll just remind you again,
if you do have a question,
uh, for Doctor McKay,
if you'd just use the microphone
over at the side there.
That would be excellent,
then we could hear you.
Any takers?
[man] Can you hear me?
Oh, here we go.
[laughter]
[Doctor McKay] Yeah, I can hear you.
[man]
Uh, I just wanted to thank you 
for coming to Humber today
and just give us this talk.
And I'm glad to see
that so many people came
as well to listen to you.
My question is pretty simple.
I just was wondering
if you had an opinion
on if Vimyism is connected 
to, uh, the Harper government,
uh, championing 
of the War of 1812,
where they just obsessed over it 
on the 200 year anniversary,
or the government's, also obsession, 
with finding those wrecked ships 
in the Arctic, which I don't 
even remember their names?
[Doctor McKay]
Yeah, I think that's a, a good question.
Um, it does start
before Ha- the coming of Harper
and I've- I wonder
if the demise of Harper
is really going to be 
the demise of Vimyism.
But I think you, you're asking
something really good
about how, um, essentially,
the past government really tried 
to change how we understand 
Canadian history.
So you can see anticipations of that 
before the coming of Harper,
uh, but I think it greatly accelerated
with the Harper government
and I think it's now, maybe,
going to go through, you know,
maybe at least, 
at least a change of key 
if not, and one might hope, you know,
a totally change of theme.
Um, that the bill for the great-
the, uh, War of 1812 commemoration 
was about 33 million.
And I've heard estimates
for the Great War,
it's going to be 
in the neighbourhood of 90,
90 million dollars.
So it's not like they're not 
spending money on this.
Uh, but it's really interesting,
you know, how, how people are,
or, how Canadians have,
in a sense,
respected this message 
and yet resisted it.
So poll after poll, you know,
the latest one I, I just saw last week 
from the Association 
of Canadian Studies.
They said,
"What do you most admire about Canada?"
You know,
this is a scientifically conducted poll
and,
over a thousand respondents,
two percent said, uh, the wars,
ten percent said peacekeeping,
nine percent 
said Canada is a peaceful country,
eight percent said 
multiculturalism.
So there is a way in which 
all of this push, this militarism,
has, has somehow 
not quite found its target.
I mean, remember the war
in Afghanistan
and how insistent the media were
and everybody was
that this was, uh, very much
a kind of a sacred crusade
for Western civilization 
and for Canada.
It was striking how after an, you know,
initial b- burst of sort of support,
the polls for that just kept going down,
and down, and down, and down, down.
So, I think, you know,
to go back to the lessons 
that people learned from the war,
Fred Varley's lesson, it was,
I think Canadians sort of absorbed
in their DNA the idea
that war under conditions 
of modernity is, is slaughter.
A- and, you know,
every progressive, uh, step
along this path has been one 
towards human extinction.
And I think that's,
that was a,
that's far from a minority standpoint 
in Canada.
[Ian]
Uh, anyone else have a question?
[woman] So just going along 
with those disparities that we see,
do you- are there any initiatives
to make changes
in, like, the education system 
over how we, um, how we view war?
[Doctor McKay]
I think there's a lot of struggle
in each classroom, in each school 
about how wars are approached.
My son is a school teacher
in, uh, Whitby,
and, you know, he says
he knows of some teachers in his school
with, basically, you do trench warfare 
half the year in your, your course.
And, you know, the guys just love it
'cause you get to sort of talk
about guns and build trenches
and, and you get all of this stuff 
from the government,
uh, free teaching materials you get,
you know.
And would you rather
sort of sit in a classroom
and hear
about the Canadian Constitution
and, you know,
federal-provincial relations,
or would you rather get into something 
rather more dramatic like the war?
 So his analysis is that half
of people
who are teaching the Great War
have this kind 
of rah-rah Vimyist perspective,
and the other half are trying to inject 
something critical into it,
and the curriculum is so broad 
that you can kind of do either.
So this is something to really watch 
 if we're trying to change this channel.
Uh, you know, the resources
that have been poured
into this narrative are enormous,
uh, the resources that are con... 
construct a counter-narrative,
uh, who knows what they are.
But there's certainly a lot,
in, in the educational system 
are a lot of people sort of struggling 
with this issue almost very day.
[woman] Just following along with that,
is there a lot of resistance,
uh, resistance to,
to making changes then?
[Doctor McKay] You'll find, uh,
especially, uh, a lecture like this,
uh, you know, it does 
enliven my email box.
"I, I have to say, you know,
Professor McKay,
you know, you have no right 
to say any of these things."
 And, you know, I try and be
as empirically factually based as I can
and also not rev it up and say things
that I, I honestly don't think are true,
but some people really feel that,
that I have no right to say this.
Nor, and yet, you know,
I, I keep saying,
well, these aren't,
these aren't my words.
These are words actually coming
from hundreds of veterans from 1934.
So isn't your argument really
with Fred Varley
and these veterans,
and not with me?
So I think it's a, it's a debate 
that has to be engaged carefully,
um, factually, uh,
and with respect for,
you know, I, I would also, I,
with respect for people who,
for whom war is,
is still very deeply attractive.
I mean, I, you know, look at the,
look at video game culture.
Um, uh, you know, I,
I would submit 
that most people don't go back
to their Xbox
and, and work on intricate debates
between two sides
and how you can find 
a peaceful resolution.
I suspect most,
most shooter games,
you're trying to get rid 
of those guys, you know,
and blast as many,
you know, hundreds 
of people as you,
you can before breakfast.
Uh, I mean, that's just,
that's the....
War is attractive.
War is seductive.
War is how generations 
of men, especially,
for millenia have learned 
to measure their worth,
their courage, their valor.
And the tragedy
for people who think that way
is that there's almost going to be
no realistic scope
in a truly modern world 
for that perception,
uh, because the next world war 
is not going to be fought,
uh, valorously 
with people on horseback,
it's gonna be fought by people
behind computer monitors
pressing buttons as they do 
with drone warfor- warfare today.
So all the traditional virtues 
that we associated with war.
You know, go back to the Bible
or go back to, uh, Homer,
or go back to any
of the great myth symbol complexes
that we've-
nourishes us,
go back the the Narnia books 
if you read those as kids.
You know,
war is a really big deal.
War is how you get 
the narrative going.
War is sort of how you have 
a beginning,
and a middle,
and an end to the story.
It's, it's how, how we've defined 
ourselves as people for a long time.
It's gonna be awfully hard
to get over that
and yet, as a culture,
we kinda do.
Uh, the most gripping projects 
facing the species,
global climate change,
for example.
It's hard for me to understand
how dropping bombs
on changing climate is actually going 
to help things very much, right?
Um, and if you wanted to have 
an optimistic take away point,
you know, look at, uh,
Ernie Regehr has 
just brought out a great book 
called, "Peacebuilding."
And he points out
that this is the first time
in recent human history,
like over 50 years,
where you can find no record –
this is when he was writing the book,
it may have changed since then –
you can find no states fighting war 
against other states.
You can find wars being fought
against quasi-state things
and terrorist groups and everything, 
but war is a solution of statecraft,
which was kind of a normal thing 
in the, you know,
up to the... the First World War,
really.
You know, this is how you settled,
if, if diplomacy fails,
you send in your warriors
and you, you settle it that way,
and the territory changes,
and then things go back to normal.
Slowly, I think, people are grasping
that under conditions of modernity,
that old 18th century model 
of war has vanished.
It's no longer plausible
and that's why you're seeing
the steady disappearance of war
as an instrument of statecraft 
and, also, wars just don't work.
Um, I mean, the, I, the,
groups have done, now,
statistical tabulations of,
uh, you know,
interesting st- tabulations,
of the 99 wars 
that we've had since 1945.
For example,
how many actually resulted in outcomes
that the people who were,
start waging the war 
said that they wanted to have?
Almost none.
Uh, it... so that the practicality
of modern warfare
has, essentially,
gone down the drain.
It's kind of sad if you,
if you really dream of being a warrior.
But maybe you need 
to then take those energies,
and that idealism,
and that sense of being independent 
and self, and self-propelling 
 and put it into a new field,
uh, where your courage and valour 
can be expressed in different ways.
[woman] Thank you.
[Doctor McKay] Okay.
[man]
Um, hello?
Uh, I was just wondering 
if the romanti- 
the romanticization  
of the First World War,
if you feel it had any links to feelings
about the Second World War
and the Cold War 
that immediately followed?
[Doctor McKay] Yeah, I think especially 
with the Second World War,
the coming 
of the Second World War,
y- you can only appreciate 
how anguished that debate was.
A Canadian populace
that had moved massively
against the war by '34,
uh, is then up against 
the reality of Hitler.
Uh, what do we do?
Do we just send him a note saying,
we wersh- we wish you were 
a nicer person, you know.
Uh, which, you know,
Mackenzie King actually tried that.
But I think, myself,
the Canadian response 
to the coming 
of the Second World War was right.
I think it was
the right war to fight.
I also think Canadians 
were right to agonize over it,
to think of any conceivable alternative
that they might find
to escape this tragic,
uh, dilemma.
So much of the Second World War 
was paved by the first,
this- the- especially the,
the mass starvation inflicted 
by the Allies 
after November the 11th.
Can you imagine the toxicity 
that that created in Germany?
Uh, it's not that this
directly caused the rise of Hitler,
but it gave someone,
a demagogue like Hitler,
enormous, uh, amount
of material to work with
as he was, uh, basically paving the way 
for the Second World War.
But the peace activists in Canada,
you know, the, the line about them,
the sort of slanderous line,
is peace activists equaled appeasers.
Peace activists meant people 
who wanted to go easy on Hitler.
The opposite is true for most 
of the Canadian peace movement.
Peace activists wanted
a League of Nations
that would really enforce sanctions
on dictatorships
that were invading 
peaceful countries.
They wanted the League of Nations,
as an international body,
to weigh in and stop those dictators 
from doing what they were doing.
Uh, so it was a very,
it's a very different position 
than the one 
that's often attributed to them,
Which, you know,
people say
well they're just unrealistic 
or they were dreamers.
These peace activists 
were extremely realistic.
They were realistic enough to know what-
this is what war looks like,
and that fuelled so much 
of their passion into the 1940s.
And, you know, many of the ideas
that were in the League of Nations,
which, you know, among,
I would say most can- historians now,
they, they say the League of Nations
and they kind of snicker
 that it, bad id- you know,
complete waste of time, failure.
Well a lot of the institutions
and ideas
of the League of Nations 
flowed right into the United Nations.
And, actually, all those energies 
of the 30s were not lost,
they were simply preserved
in a new form
in modern international diplomacy 
after the 1940s.
So that's,
that was kind of the- that-
those are the connections
I would draw between this generation
and the, and the generation 
that fought the Second World War.
[Ian] Do we have any 
other questions for Doctor McKay?
Alright.
Well if you think of one,
I was going to invite everyone 
to linger if you, uh, are able.
We have, uh, some light refreshments 
over at the side there.
Maybe it's an opportunity 
to speak informally with Doctor McKay,
I know he's sticking 
around for a bit.
Uh, thank you all for coming 
and if you could join me again,
once again,
in, uh, thanking Doctor McKay 
for a very interesting lecture.
[applause]
