Veterans Are Aliens In Their Own Land
It's not every day it is insinuated that one's father-in-law is soft on Nazism. But as the controversy over the proposed Holocaust gallery in the national war museum in Ottawa has heated up, those responsible for the project are hurling ever wilder allegations against their critics. My wife's father, columnist Peter Worthington, has joined the anti-gallery fight with his customary vigor, and as a result has received some of the most vicious of the abuse.
It's not my custom to hobnob with Nazi sympathizers, and since we're expected at Casa Worthington in three weeks for some seasonal eggnog, I thought I'd better delve into this. Otherwise, things could get mighty awkward.
I did my research, and discovered -- amazingly -- Worthington is actually a veteran of the war against Nazism. So, it turns out, is almost everyone else who's taken a stance against the Ottawa Holocaust gallery. Which suggests there must be some other reason for their opposition.
Normally, after all, one would expect soldiers to welcome as part of the story of their war an account of the evil of the enemy they sacrificed so much to defeat. But nothing is normal about Canada's relationship with its military history. The Holocaust gallery is the latest episode in the long-running cultural clash between the men who waged the Second
World War and the postwar generation that has run this country since the 1970s. The Second World War generation has endured the systematic obliteration of every one of the symbols that defined the nationality of the country for which
they shouldered arms. Their flag: gone. Their national anthem: gone. Their uniforms: gone. Their head of state: virtually gone. The armed services themselves: withered, bureaucratized and corrupted.
We seldom build them statues or monuments, and when we do, they are ugly and meaningless (think of the notorious 'Gumby' statue in honor of Canada's airmen on Toronto's University Avenue). The memory of their devotion and valor
has been lost to the young because we no longer teach our young history. (Last summer, Angus Reid conducted a survey of Canadians aged 18 to 24 for the Dominion Institute, and found only 35% could offer any account at all of what
happened on D-Day and only 33% know that Nov. 11 was the last day of the First World War.) And when our public broadcaster produces a television series to revive that memory, as The Valour and the Horror was supposed to do, it can understand veterans only as either killers or victims, but never as what they were: soldiers called to do a soldier's brutal work in defence of civilization.
We have made our veterans aliens in the country for which they bled. Even their war museum has been subordinated to a board of directors headed by that ultra-perfect embodiment of left-wing Canada at its most self-satisfied, Adrienne Clarkson. Our veterans, in other words, have become highly sensitive to insults in the making. And they sense just such Defenders of the Holocaust gallery promise it will be reasonable in scale -- only 12% of the exhibition space of an enlarged museum. They promise it will be placed on the second floor, leaving the main floor and a great atrium for other exhibits. They assure us it will not overshadow the rest of the museum's story. If those promises are kept, a Holocaust gallery would only add glory to the military victories whose memory the museum preserves. But, after 20 years of abuse from establishment Canada, you can see why Canadian veterans are so suspicious of such promises. They fear that rather than showing the evils of Nazism, a Holocaust gallery will be transformed into an Originally published in The Financial Post
a potential affront in the Holocaust gallery.
indictment of Canada -- attacking it for not welcoming Jewish refugees from Hitler, for not prodding the Allies to do more to stop the death camps. Those accusations are true, but the memorial to the men who did the dying to stop Hitler is not the right place to do the accusing. Canadian veterans are entitled to a full and complete account of the contents of the proposed Holocaust gallery, and they are entitled to presume the worst until they get that account. And accusing the veterans of pro-Nazi sympathies when they decline to believe the smooth assurances of those who have so often lied to them before -- well that only confirms their worst fears of what this renovation of their museum is really
about.