Young Canadian men were brave and tough, but Vimy Ridge, the Somme and the rest had absolutely nothing to do with freedom and much to do with murderous nationalism and ridiculous racial stereotypes.
I’m not sure how ridiculous it is when you’re talking about a nation that’s “concocted an entire glossary to describe different varieties of pain…”
Anyhoo, Coren continues:
Today the myth has become a scandal. These wars, we are told, were fought to defend tolerance, civil rights and equality. Not only is this insultingly dumb and anachronistic, it also obscures the authentic guts and flesh reality of the Canadian soldier throughout the last century. He ran up beaches in France and hills in Belgium not for government grants to the transgendered or tax-funded courses in multiculturalism, but because it would have been cowardly, wrong and un-Canadian not to do so.
It is, ironically, this unquestioning but solid and remarkable patriotism that is so despised today by the very people who moan on interminably about fighting and dying for freedom. We’re probably less free now as Canadians than we’ve ever been.
What is more worrying, we don’t fight against it because we’re hardly aware it’s happening.
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