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O Canada, tedious and history-free U.S. writer says our past lacks civil wars, 'memorable atrocities' Wednesday 6 September 2000 - One of the most influential newspapers in the U.S. has dismissed Canadian history as forgettable, saying this country has never fought a civil war, never produced a great world leader -- and never committed any "memorable atrocities." The front page feature in the Washington Post, written by the Post's outgoing Canadian correspondent, Stephen Pearlstein, appeared in yesterday's editions. Its publication has left Canadian academics disturbed by the contention that history is nothing more than blood and might. "I think it is simply nonsense," said Jack Granatstein, one of the country's eminent historians. "We have a different path than the United States, and one that I at least think is rather better." Carleton University history professor Blair Neatby said the relative merit of Canadian history depends very much on how the subject is defined. "If history is wars and confrontation and winner-take-all decisions, then we don't have much of that," he said. "But if you think that history can be a record of individuals arriving at decisions through consensus, negotiation or through the political system, then we have a pretty long and commendable record." The Post article examined the fragile Canadian identity and the possibility that the country could be swallowed by the United States within 25 years. Mr. Pearlstein highlighted the growing economic, political and cultural links between the two countries, then suggested that Canada's resulting identity crisis has been deepened by its brain drain and the defeat of Quebec nationalism. "Having beaten Quebec nationalism into remission and marginalized French language and culture in the process, English Canada has begun to face the disquieting reality that nothing so characterizes its identity as the absence of a distinctive national identity," writes Mr. Pearlstein, who spent two years in Toronto. "Over the years, Canadians might have coalesced around a shared sense of history but for the fact that they have so little of it they consider worth remembering. The country never fought a revolution or civil war, pioneered no great social or political movement, produced no great world leader and committed no memorable atrocities. As one writer put it, Canada has no Lincolns, no Gettysburgs and no Gettysburg addresses." Mr. Granatstein said that view of history fails to appreciate the importance of compassion and compromise, hallmarks of the Canadian experience. "You might think it a great history to settle the West peacefully, instead of having Indian wars," he said. "You might think it a great history to form, with continuing difficulty, a bicultural society or to create a multicultural society. You might think it's a great good thing that a country has never fought an aggressive war, but only helped its friends. Those things are to my mind triumphs for Canada." Mr. Granatstein argued that John A. Macdonald's achievement -- knitting together English and French Canadians, Catholics and Protestants to found a nation in 1867 -- compares favourably with the work of George Washington a century earlier. He also suggested Canada's longest-serving prime minister and its wartime leader, Mackenzie King, "looks very good by comparison" with any American president of the 20th century. University of Toronto professor Michael Bliss called Mr. Pearlstein's view of history uninformed. "That's a juvenile approach to history: to say that only certain great and terrible things are worth remembering," Mr. Bliss charged. "History is vastly more complicated than that, and our reasons for remembering it are more complicated." For his part, Mr. Pearlstein said in an interview yesterday that his intention was not to diminish Canadian history but to highlight the fact that Canadians know little about their past. "I don't know whether it (the article) diminishes Canada," said Mr. Pearlstein, who has returned to Washington as an economics writer. "But if you were to give a world history course outside of North America, I'm not sure how often Canada would come up. Does it come up in American history courses? No." Even in Canada, he noted, it's possible to graduate from high schools in three provinces without ever studying Canadian history. "It is isn't true nothing happened there, but history does not seem to be a unifying factor there," he said. Mr. Granatstein, a longtime promoter of mandatory history credits in high school, agreed with the sentiment: "It's sad that Canadians don't know much about their history and seem to be more stirred by Mel Gibson fighting the American Revolution in a mythical way than they would be by watching a film about the Canadian West being settled peacefully. "In a country that worries about being swallowed by the Americans, our history is something we can use as a defence, a buttress," he said. Mr. Pearlstein said he enjoyed his time in Canada, particularly travelling through the French parts of the country, and liked Canadians "but for some of their anti-Americanism." Andrew Duffy The Ottawa Citizen http://www.ottawacitizen.com/national/000906/4095652.html janet paterson 53 now / 44 dx cd / 43 onset cd / 41 dx pd / 37 onset pd tel: 613 256 8340 url: "http://www.geocities.com/janet313/" email: [log in to unmask] smail: POBox 171 Almonte Ontario K0A 1A0 Canada