[This review was first published in University of Toronto Quarterly 83.2 (Spring 2014).

[Index: Canadian politics]

[Date: April 2014]

Talking About War

Michael Keefer

Review of Noah Richler,

What We Talk About When We Talk About War (Fredericton: Goose Lane Editions 2012)

Nations, Benedict Anderson wrote, are imagined communities; their social

imaginaries persuade people separated by class, dialect, ethnicity, occupation, and gender
that they have common characteristics, and are moving with shared purpose from a
largely agreed-on past into a future about which there is a similar degree of common
feeling.
But the myths that induce us to participate in the rituals of citizenship, even to the
point of self-sacrifice, are repeatedly contested and re-shaped. From this perspective,
Canadian history offers a rich variety of national re-imaginings. Are we two nations
warring in the bosom of a single state (slumping, in moments of respite, into Hugh
Maclennan's two solitudes)? A transcontinental nation shaped by the geography of the St.
Laurence and the political-technological will memorialized in E. J. Pratt's Towards the
Last Spike? Or a people who have grown beyond the garrison-culture coloniality
diagnosed by Northrop Frye, moving, as A. R. M. Lower asserted, from colony to
nationor perhaps, as Harold Innis sardonically proposed, following a parabolic
trajectory from colony to nation to colony?
Are we, in different terms, a nation devoted, in opposition to the utopian
republicanism of the United States, to a vision of peace, order and good government

expressed in Tommy Douglas's social programs, Pierre Trudeau's slogan of a Just Society,
and the ideology of multiculturalism? Or are we a nation forged in warin the resistance
to American invasion in the War of 1812, and, a century later, in the victories won by the
Canadian Corps at Vimy and Amiens? English Canadian history has recently been
reconfigured by right-wing scholars and ideologues, who in mustering support for
military interventions in Afghanistan and elsewhere re-define Canada as a warrior nation,
contemptuous of past investments in peacekeeping missions, multilateralism, and soft
power.
Noah Richler intervenes vigorously against the fantasy of a political lobby that,
unchecked over the course of the last decade, has seen the country's ability to fight wars
as the truest indicator of its maturity. As he lucidly recognizes, this re-imagining of our
collective narrative is linked to Canada's abandonment of multilateralism in foreign
affairs and our lock-step alignment with the policies of the United States and Israel, as
well as to the wider orientation of a government that reflexively relies on enmities and
the cultivation of disputes resolved through the vilification of dissenters, the
circumvention of Parliament and an imposition of solutions rather than any reconciliation
achieved through 'discussion, negotiation and compromise'.
Commenting astutely on the Manichaean self-deceptions involved in an epic
reinterpretation of Canadian history, Richler highlights the sentimental brutality of a
discourse that, through the writings of journalists like Rosie DiManno and Christie
Blatchford, trivially sexualize[s] the soldiers in Afghanistan, forgetting those whose
traumatic disfigurements remove them from the categories of the heroically eroticized
and the safely memorialized. Richler also exposes the serial dishonesty of ideologues
whose early praise of aggression against scumbags and disparagement of humanitarian
politics modulated into an apologetics based on defending those same humanitarian
values against Taliban monsters, then into a redefinition of the war as a mission, whose
effective failure could be blamed on the Karzai regime (belatedly recognized as including
scumbags as well), and finally into a willingness to contemplate negotiations (for which
former NDP leader Jack Layton had been excoriated as Taliban Jack).
Richler underlines the central irony that Despite the argument that a stronger
military allows Canada to 'lead,' the country follows in the steps of more powerful
allies, and having abandoned Pearsonian ambitions has no notion of how to wield its
own, perfectly credible and effective version of power. As the title borrowed from a

famous Raymond Carver story makes clear, Richler wants to make us feel ashamed
when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about [war].
At times the same stricture applies to himself: Richler is unaware of Canada's role
in the overthrow of democracy in Haiti; his treatment of diplomat Richard Colvin's
revelations of high complicity in the torture of Afghan prisoners of war is inadequate; and
his description of Iranian president Ahmadinejad as one of [the] great allies of Al
Qaeda might have been copied from the war-hawks he criticizes. But despite such lapses,
this important book deserves a wide readership.
MICHAEL KEEFER
Professor Emeritus, School of English and Theatre Studies
University of Guelph