In the first installment of a five-part series in the National Post aimed at correcting Canadian "misapprehensions" of their friendly and well-armed neighbors to the south, historian J.L. Granatstein tries to break the myth of "Canada as a nation of peacekeepers and the U.S. as a nation of warmongers." It’ll bring tears to the eyes of all you Yanks out there. Here’s just a sample:
Yes, the Americans are a troublesome people. They are suffused with
a grandiose sense of their "manifest destiny." They want to make the
world’s peoples more like them, with a McDonald’s in every town and
Coke in every grocery store. They bluster and boast, and wave the flag.But let’s look at the last 100 years. Would the Allies have won the
Great War if Woodrow Wilson’s America, promising a war to end all wars
and pressing idealistically for the creation of a League of Nations,
had not entered the conflict in 1917? Would Adolf Hitler, Benito
Mussolini and Hideki Tojo have been defeated if America had not sent
its soldiers and sailors and the products of its factories and fields
to war? Would Western Europe have been protected from Soviet agression
if the United States hadn’t galvanized the creation of the North
Atlantic Treaty?Yes, Canadians have done their part in the great conflicts, too.
There are more than 100,000 dead soldiers, sailors and airmen to
testify to our commitment to freedom and democracy. But Canada is a
small, relatively weak country and the United States is a superpower.
However much Canada contributed, none of it would have mattered without
the support of allies. And the most powerful ally, the indispensable
ally, was and remains the United States.
Read the rest on your own.
(Hat tip to reader)
11 Comments
They want to make the world’s peoples more like them, with a McDonald’s in every town and Coke in every grocery store.
How many Americans stay up at nights thinking about how to sell more French fries in China?
Coke a Cola is found in cities around the world, because the company wants to sell it, and geewilkers, tons of people want to drink it
That is the nasty thing about capitalism. Consumers have a bleeping choice .
….But, this is our world….especially what the educated want to pretend to make of it…
Applaud South Korea for its soap operas becoming big in Vietnam and China and parts of the US.
Really. They must be making stuff people want to watch ..
Personally, I prefer the title “US Peacekeepers and Canadian whoremongers.”
I guess there is an element of ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ here.
Invading Iraq might have been a good thing, if only the US had waited a bit; the government could have found a reason based on facts to invade. The US was hasty.
On the other hand, the US was slow in WW1 and WW2. I think the article said the US entered WW1 in 1917. Europe and other supporters were there from 1914. For most of the world, WW2 started in 1939; for the US, 1941.
I guess the rest of the world needs to make up it’s mind when they want US intervention.
I’m starting to worry about going back to Canada. How blatantly obvious is the anti-Americanism there these days? The anti-US crap I hear about here irritates me, so I’m not so keen on having to put up with possibly more in your face attitudes back home when it comes to America-bashing.
As it is, whenever I point out to my leftist friends that their arguments are either touching on nutty, tin-hat conspiracy theory territory or are just basically an extreme exaggeration, I get expressions of consternation that I’ve become some kind of right wing fanatic, when I usually just point out what seems to me to be a middle ground between left and right.
As a Canadian who finds himself in the unpopular position of more often than not defending the U.S. in arguments with his own countrymen, I have an open-ended question for you all to ponder:
Where is the line between acceptable criticism of the United States and slobbering anti-Americanism?
Or to put it another way:
As a non U.S. citizen, is being critical of the United States and being ungrateful for its good deeds in effect the same thing?
I would love to hear opinions.
Where is the line between acceptable criticism of the United States and slobbering anti-Americanism?
There is no acceptable criticism. You’re either for us or against us.
Waygugin–
Isn’t anti-American just another word for prejudice? There are degrees of anti-Americanism, I’d say. And by anti-Americanism I mean a general (often emotional) disposition to disparage the US at any opportunity. Most Canadians and Koreans are mildly anti-American, and I find that acceptable and perhaps even thought-provoking at times. The ’slobbering anti-americans’…well, having lived in both Canada and Korea I learned long ago not to argue with these people.
I think the country of Canada could be substituted for a number of other countries around the world that have been riding the American defense shield to cut their own militaries to fund their own social programs that are currently failing (ie-Western Europe) and then turn around and blame the US for all the world’s wrongs.
When you look at it closer the US has just been cleaning up messes Europeans created. Iraq was created by Europeans who drew bad borders. The Balkans we cleaned up another European mess. The Vietnam conflict was started by the French. You can go on to World War I & II for more examples of European failings.
Yet the US is the warmongers and the countries that created these messes are the peacekeepers.
“The only question is how much longer the United States will wait before it declares that its own national security makes it necessary for Washington to openly assume responsibility for Canadian defence. Can we still call ourselves a sovereign state if that occurs?”
This possibility boggles my mind. Who may attack Canada? Japan? Russia? China? England? Spain? Who? For what? The US?
Who knows, twenty years later the US and EU may lock horns over MiddleEastern oil and Canada may join on the side of EU. And, the US may have to seal the border and drop bombs on Toronto. Stranger things have happened before.
Who knows, twenty years later the US and EU may lock horns over MiddleEastern oil and Canada may join on the side of EU. And, the US may have to seal the border and drop bombs on Toronto. Stranger things have happened before.
You forget to take your meds again, Baduk?
“As a non U.S. citizen, is being critical of the United States and being ungrateful for its good deeds in effect the same thing?”
I try not to think about the “good deeds” part of it or the need for being “grateful” for the past. When anti-US thought starts to bother me enough to consider is when the current situation and the near future of the US is damaged by what I might consider an unreasonable widespread social tactic of anti-US cultivation.
What I mean is, what bothers me enough to complain openly about anti-US thought in a society is when it denies the reality of current benefits or realities between that society and the US, and this denial in favor of promoting a strong negative view of the US hurts America in some significant fashion.
Besides South Korea, France in the 1960s is perhaps the best historical example. De Gualle kicking US (NATO) troops out of the country, and the very rude kiss good-bye the French society threw at the soldiers as they left, was a kick in the balls of a very selfish nature - and I don’t primarily mean because the US HAD saved France just some 20 years earlier. I mean because even without GIs in country, the US WAS savING France even while having its ball sack crushed by the French boot. Was France under threat of having the Soviets go around Germany and all the other nations of Western Europe to attack France alone while the US sat back and did nothing?
So, France was playing what cards it could. It knew it would enjoy the ultimate protection of the US, could use the security blanket for its own benefit, and make points with other nations around the world by becoming the biggest non-communist, Soviet ally to rally other nations against “American power”.
That is the type of anti-Americanism that bothers me enough to gripe about. And especially because of how much it also hurts the US position. France today does damage because it still wants to rally other nations into making “counter-weights” to American power in favor of a “multipolar” world order — and French-led intellectual discourse has been AMAZINGLY successful at dumping the anger of the post-colonial world onto the United States, deflecting it from the largest colonial era powers (Western European) and this has done damage to the US today — it has made a more effective war on terrorism much harder or impossible — but compared to the Cold War threat, France’s anti-US discourse doesn’t bother me nearly as much.
And the nature of the threat or damage done to the US by using but abusing a relationship with it is what makes me fixate on South Korea’s anti-US culture. We have too much at stake with troops on the ground facing the terminally ill North Korean state to deal with the distortions that are the hallmark of real anti-Americanism while allowing the very same society to whore us out.
An Argentina or a Chile or a Gabon that likes to exaggerate the real ills of the US and American power or likes to downright lie about it doesn’t register much with me. It makes some difference, but it is minor compared to other places — places that want to enjoy an active mind-set of “bad America” while they enjoy the CURRENT benefits of a relationship with the very same bastard nation.
The level of whether something is criticism or anti-Americanism also depends, to me, on how much the person or group or society can back it up. How much is exaggeration? How much unreasonable? How much too unsuppported? How much of it can I effectively argue against?
And again, part of the thing at play here is how much the person or society likes to use the US. The more they enjoy the benefits but put forward weak arguments to justify a net negative attitude word the US as a nation, the more it bothers me.
And to close, another example. One of the more individual based anti-American thoughts you run across frequently in Korea but elsewhere as well is — how US cultural imperialism is destorying his or her society. How coke a cola and mcdonalds and blue jeans are such evil, usually when I’m talking to the person in the restaurant over a McNugget set and a coke after having just bought a new pair of ripped Guess jeans.
I can handle such arguments if the person is in hanbok and refuses to watch a Hollywood movie. But, when it comes from an individual who has or had as one of his or her biggest desires - to go to the US to study and who has no problem helping the degradation of his or her culture by buying American products (or imitatation American products), begin to feel the person has crossed the line from criticism to anti-Americanism.
I guess this is where it starts to become irrational.