The Books of My Life: The Culture of the Cold War

The history of American culture and the history of American religion can be profitably understood, at least in part, as the product of a series of cultural, ideological, and religious revivals that have occurred in the North American colonies and provinces and the United States over the years. They can be seen, in other words, as the product of a series of religious, cultural, and ideological awakenings characterised by an increase in religious belief or fervour and an increase in religiosity, an increase in those claiming to be religious and in the number of believers attending the services of their religious organisations.

America's revivals weren't simply religious revivals in the narrow sense, however. America's revivalists, including Billy Sunday and Billy Graham, generally saw their revivals not only in religious terms but also in nationalist or Americanist terms. Such a linkage should not be surprising given that nationalism itself is, at the very least like (and actually is) a religion in that it is a meaning system (ideologies) that takes cultural and institutional form (symbols, rituals, icons, stories, bureaucracies) and has its own chosen people, its own chosen land, its own chosen myths, its own chosen mythic heroes, its own chosen economic system, capitalism, and its own chosen political system, "democracy". As a consequence many of America's revivalists saw the revivals not only as divine occurrences that spread the good news of Christ, as they interpreted him, but also as a divine occurrence that strengthened what was for them an inherently Christian nation or, more accurately, an inherently Protestant Christian nation, the United States of America. For many of America's Protestants, Christianity, as they understood it, was thus American Christianity and the United States of America, as they understood it, was a if not the, Christian nation, and both, as they understood them, were inextricably linked to one another since America was god's chosen land and god's chosen religion was their religion, "mainstream" or dominant American Protestantism.

The ties between American "mainstream" or politically and demographically dominant Protestantism and the American political culture have not gone unnoticed by those who have studied and continue to study America. As historians have noted over the years the First Great Awakening, a revival often tied to the efforts of George Whitfield, played a major role in laying the foundations of a common identity among America's colonists, an identity grounded in the distinction between the colonial "us" from them, the colonising "other", Great Britain. The Second Great Awakening, a revitalisation tied to Charles Finney, many historians tell us, helped provide Americans and America itself with a hegemonic or dominant meaning system grounded in "mainstream" Protestantism. Even more Americans came to believe, as a consequence of the second great revival, that the United States was god's nation, at least potentially and that they should help make it so, that the United States was, at least potentially, a chosen land populated, at least potentially, by god's chosen people, and that they should help make them so, and that the American nation was, at its best, a light unto a world in varying degrees of darkness. Many of America's missionaries who conflated American Protestantism and Nationalist Protestant Americanism thus helped spread not only the gospel of Christianity at home and abroad but also, given the links between American Protestantism and American nationalism, the good news of America itself, that promised land of capitalist get rich quick milk and "democratic" honey, across the nation and around the world.

A number of social scientists and historians, including, perhaps most notably William McLoughlin, have taken note of the link between Christian revival and American nationalist revitalisation. Many of America's revivals, after all, occurred around the same time as heightened great power tensions and great power wars.  Revivals in Colonial New England occurred at a time of heightened tensions between France and Great Britain. Some, have argued that the Salem Witch Trials with its denunciations and its torture and execution of "witches", for instance, was a product of these great power tensions. The First Great Awakening occurred in an atmosphere of tensions between Great Britain and the colonials. Some have argued that the new sects of this revival, Baptists and Methodists, helped give birth to a "democratic" current in colonial America. The Second Great Awakening occurred in the context of tensions over who was and who was not an American. This era saw attacks on Masons, Mormons, and Catholics for being "un-American" in their behaviours and for being members of social groups or social groups that were perceived as autocratic or authoritarian. The revival of the Great War era was characterised by the modernist anti-modernist crusade of Billy Sunday, an awakening where evolution and modern biblical criticism were linked to the evil Hun who many believed was the essence of evil in the modern world, who many believed was Hitler before Hitler. This revival era saw the deportation of aliens (particularly political and ideological "aliens") from America's shores, limits on freedom of speech, and the deportation of labouring men and women from Arizona who were crammed into cattle cars and dumped in the deserts of New Mexico simply for having the audacity to organise for wage increases and better working conditions. This early twentieth century revival eventually split American Protestant evangelicalism into "traditionalist" and "modernist' or liberal camps, split American denominations, most notably, the Presbyterian Church, into "traditional" and "liberal variants, split schools of theology into "traditional" and "modernist" variants, most famously Princeton Theological Seminary, and led, at least in part, to the rise of American fundamentalism, a social movement centred on the defence of the literal interpretation of the Bible and of Victorian norms and values. The Cold War anti-modernist revival most associated with Billy Graham painted the evil godless communism of the USSR as a threat not only to American Christianity but to America itself. In response the federal government once again went after "alien" "heretics" within, including members of the Communist Party, Socialists, homosexuals, and New Deal Liberals. During this era the Cold War faithful were able to change the American "Pledge of Allegiance". The Pledge, which had been written by a Christian socialist, was revised during the Cold War (it had been revised before) to include " under God", while "In God We Trust", was added to American paper money. This change in the American Pledge and the addition of the "in God we Trust" mantra on American paper money nicely shows the links between American Christian Protestantism, the American nation, and between American Christianity and American capitalism, the "American faith".

 

The American civil religion, civic faith, or public religion saw perhaps its largest split in the 1960s as an American prophetic civil religion emerged from the margins and challenged, at least in the minds of America's political, economic, and cultural elite, the official priestly civil religion that had dominated the United States almost since it was born. The, what might be called silent majority revival, which had strong ties to political and economic elites, categorised "dissidents", civil rights dissidents and anti-Vietnam War dissidents, as un-American thereby justifying and rationalising attacks, physical and verbal on them by a variety of bullies and thugs, since they were seen as threats to the American way of life and American law and order. The counterculture of the 1960s has been vilified ever since by many on the right, including Gertrude Himmelfarb in her polemic One Nation, Two Cultures, as responsible for a host of America's ills including a rise in the divorce rate, a rise in out of wedlock births, a rise in cohabitation rates, an increase in sexual immorality, an increase in drug use, and a host of other decadences that are putting, many believed, the chosen nation and the chosen people at risk of god's wrath and, as a consequence, decline or devolution. 

 

The latest major nationalist revival of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century was the revitalisation movement that occurred after the 9/11 terror attacks. The War on Terror revival led to attacks on  "heretics" like the Muslims and the Sikhs, the latter a religious group that was attacked because those who attacked them had no comprehension of the historic and cultural differences between the Sikh faith and Islam, something that shows the lowest common denominator nature of many if not most of these nationalist revivals. This latest of American national revitalisation movements would eventually give us the cult of Donald Trump, a cult cobbled together, in the midst of a War on Terror, from right wing Christianity, right wing ultra nationalism, White supremacism, and conspiracy theory fabrications and delusions. This cult was led by and centred on a flim flam salesman turned right wing politician, demagogue, and messiah-prophet. That this bully demagogue learned his demagogic lessons of innuendo and demonisation for economic and political gain from Roy Cohn, the chief counsel of that once celebrated and still celebrated in some quarters, demagogic grand inquisitor of the Cold War himself, former Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, should not be surprising to any historian of the American national faith. 

Stephen Whitfield's The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, second edition, 1999) is a superb exploration of the culture, official and popular, of one of the United States's many nationalist revival and revitalisation movements, the Cold War nationalist revival movement. Whitfield explores the self-righteous, self-satisfied adolescent bully boys reliving their glory days in the school yard as arrested development adults and cynical demagogues who led the crusade against heretics during the Cold War. He explores the impact of a narrowed American nationalism on politics, books, films, television programmes. It was a culture, as Whitfield notes, in which political denunciations that negatively impacted peoples lives, particularly the lives of those "heretics" who were members of the Communist Party, USA, former members of the Communist Party, "fellow travellers of the party from the late 1940s to the 1960s, New Deal liberals, and homosexuals, anyone, in other words, who didn't conform to a selected national myth. That all this became commonplace in the self proclaimed land of free speech and "democracy"but not to those that know the history of ideological inquisitions in the United States. 

 

Whitfield trods a middle path in his interpretation of the Cold War. Whitfield argues that while the Soviet Union and its spies were a threat to the American way of life, so were--perhaps even more--the anti-communist intellectuals, demagogues, and the masses they demagogued, something that makes them akin to the true believers in the cult of Stalin in the USSR with its orthodox cum communist meaning system and its own periodic nationalist revivals such as that aimed at the Old Bolsheviks and symbolically expressed in the show trials of the 1930s and in which denunciation was a central ritual,  and, the Soviet revival in 1950s that led to conspiracy theory in which cosmopolitan intellectuals and professionals (translation Jews) were trying to kill the great cultic leader, Stalin. The national faith of the US was also similar to that of the USSR, for instance, in its emphasis on conformity. That a nation like the US, which claimed that individualism and freedom lay at its doctrinal core, also emphasised conformity to a very narrow catechism of that national faith is one of the fascinating absurdities of human history and American history.

There are a few areas in The Culture of the Cold War which I think Whitfield could have developed more. While recognising, particularly in the 1999 second edition of the book, that America's has a history of follies--I would call them delusions, fantasies, and forms of social and cultural madness--the book is weak on the history of these follies. Whitfield does a good job of putting the culture of the Cold War in its immediate context but is less better at putting the culture of the Cold War in its broader American revival and revitalisation context. 

A related weakness of The Culture of the Cold War is Whitfield's failure to put Cold War great power politics, that between the US and USSR, within broader great power politics. Great power politics, of course, have been around since the rise of large scale agricultural civilisations in the Near East, the Mediterranean, and China. Both the US and the USSR were the dominant great powers in the Cold War era and as such, they behaved somewhat similar to the great powers of the past and they behaved somewhat similar to each other in the present. I have already mentioned their heretic hunting similarities between the two powers chosen by god or history to remake the world in its image. Both the US and USSR were also, like the imperial powers of the past, ethnocentric (us versus them). They were messianic. They were manichean. They were utopian. They were bureaucratic (meaning that they were not democratic but rather oligarchic). And they were, in the end, Smith's and Jones's caught in an ever spiralling and never ending cycle of trying to keep up with each other, something that is characteristic of great power struggles, cold or hot.

Finally, Whitfield's use of the term "totalitarian", a term laden with negative and normative ideological meaning, is problematic. That term, given its cultural history, arose in a particular context and implies, that humans were simply puppets of the Fu Manchuy leader, and that the masses, all the masses, the totality of the masses, can be easily manipulated by their puppet masters. While this may be generally true--advertisers and demagogues in the US, for instance, have been able to manipulate the masses into supporting wars such as the Spanish American War on the basis of fabrications and Trump has made a career out of spewing delusions (facts that raise questions about the selective use of the term totalitarian)--there was dissent, countercultures. There was and is, for example, dissent in the authoritarian Mormon Church, in the autocratic Soviet Union, and in the oligarchic United States. Any of those terms--authoritarian, autocratic, and oligarchic--are, I would argue, better descriptors than the inherently normative totalitarian when talking about modern bureaucratic oligarchies. We should also remember that modern societies, which are dominated by bureaucracies with intherent hierarchical variations in power and authority, are quite similar cross culturally like those in the US and USSR, pointing up the fairy tale that is the manichean us "democratic", them "totalitarian" binary.

Despite these slight concerns, which may or may not be entirely fair given the focus and short compass of The Culture of the Cold War, Whitfield's book is an excellent brief guide through the noirish main streets and back alleys of one variant of American nationalist culture, the Cold War nationalist revival of the 1950s. Everyone or everyone who can and is able, should read this brief book for it is a reflective mirror for what is happening today in an even more fragmented and equally as rageoholic and deluded America, an America that is experiencing yet another in the cycle of American theocratic and near fascist revivals it has since at least the late 19th century. 

 

I want to end this essay by returning to a quote from John Updike that Whitfield's references in The Culture of the Cold War: Is there a reason for being an American if there isn't a war, cold or hot? In the end this question really isn't relevant for a couple of reasons. Identities are socially and culturally constructed around the us versus them binary. Sometimes these binary distinctions are hard, sometimes they are soft, sometimes they are somewhere in between and oftentimes they vary, in complex societies, within countercultures and subcultures. During wars and rumours of war, the us versus them binaries that are at the heart of identity construction and civil religions, tend to harden into a sacred versus profane manichean dualism. And since there will always be wars and rumours of wars coming to a theatre, television screen, or internet page near you, there will always be a reason for those living in powerful nation-states like the US, Russia, or Chima to identity with great megapower America, great power Russian, great power Chinese, or even a non-great power nation-state like Finland where a Finnish citizen is the citizen of a state with economic, political, and cultural ties to the US, a nation-state that is ultimately a junior partner of Imperial America and a nation that has a traumatic past with Imperial Russia. And so it goes...

 

Life as Crisis Management: The Anthem Blue Cross Kiada or, how Blue Cross Made Me Want to Scream

It all began innocently enough though I should have known that little is easy in brave new utopian digital world given my age and experience. I retired recently and instead of signing up for the vision insurance I already had through my union, I decided to go with a vision insurance offered by Anthem/Blue Cross/Blue View Vision Value Plan (or whatever else they call themselves; these corporations love to be called by various monikers) to citizens of New York state.

That was a mistake I should not have made since I  knew that I never had any trouble with my union insurance but I experienced  all sorts of hair pulling trials and tribulations when I signed up for New York state retirement. Of course, I had no problem with this corporation for two years while never using it. When I wanted to use it, however, and went to my webpage to look for providers they offered me providers in California. That would have been helpful if I lived in California instead of New York, the place where Empire sent my bills. Surreal. I asked them to fix this problem and stopped recurring automatic payment until they did because I no longer trusted the competence of this corporation. Whether they did fix it or not I do not know since I found a provider by going to the websites of optometrists in the New York city in which I live.

Now, of course, I had to pay by going into the website around the due date every month. And so I did. However, this immediately proved to be a Sisyphean task. I did not receive a paper bill for June though I had received one every month previously. When I tried to pay on the website on two occasions the bill came up as $0.00. I paid but, surprise surprise, I paid nothing. Eventually, I got a you are late in your memo from the company. I paid the two month charge they wanted but it was refunded and so no payment. Finally, I put the bill on my credit card and shocked, shocked, it worked.

I did, of course, make use of customer service during this nightmare but this proved to be a waste of my time. I called the 800 number on the back of my Empire card only to be told to call the number on the back of my card which I did three times with the same response. Monty Python meets Franz Kafka. Then I went online to customer service. The chat was a waste of time as I was chatting to a bot and bots are typically more unhelpful than helpful. The message centre proved to be largely a waste of my time. Most customer service operatives cloned the standard corporate bullshte about we are sorry and go here, the good old run around in circles chasing ones own tail and never getting anywhere experience. The one who actually responded was only somewhat helpful. Next, I contacted the Attorney General of New York but nothing has happened here as yet. Later, I contacted New York Civil service (I tried to contact them initially by phone but despite leaving a call back number I was never called back) only to be sent into a labyrinth of encrypted messages that require access to Microsoft and yet more passwords which I am simply not up for.

Hopefully, the credit card payment will go though and take my coverage up to August. Then I am off to my old vision insurance company so I don't have to fuck around with this bureaucratic takes you an eternity go get anywhere and get anything done bullshite. 

An update: I called Anthem Blue Cross and upgraded to a Basic Vision Plan. I had the operator set up and automatic payment deduction from my credit card to pay for this. I innocently and stupidly thought everything would work this time. Silly me. No automatic deduction payment was taken and now I am once again doing the phone rag with this corporation, the most incompetent kafkaesque corporation I have ever encountered. Caveat emptor. I suppose it is time to think about getting vision insurance from another source that will be awful but not as awful as Anthem. Oh and by the way, despite promises that I would receive a bill by snail mail from this incompetent corporation, I have not.

A postscript: Here at Empire Blue Vision we are proud of how stoopid and how stoopidly fundamentalist and literalist we are. If you want to upgrade your vision plan online well you can and you can't. We will enroll you but we won't recognise that you are already enrolled in a plan and already have an online account with us because we are stoopid (and we don't ask questions). If you want to call us and try to straighten out things well we can and we can't. We can eliminate your redundant account but we can't charge you for the new upgrade and simultaneously arrange for direct payment at the same time because we are stoopid and we have one of the stoopdist online and telephone centre customer service centres in the nation, hell in the world. Empire Blue Vision, proud to bea stoopid and so is our fundamentalist online and telephone customer service. Call us at 1.800.BMorons to sign up now.

Kill Not Really a Thrill: Musings on Kill Bill

 

Last week I spent nearly four hours of my life watching Quentin Tarantino's 2003 and 2004 Kill Bill, a hybrid action-adventure film, spaghetti western, dumb adolescent smart-arse snarky comedy film, reflexivity a plenty film, Italian Giallo cinema, Hong Kong martial arts film, Samurai film, and comic book film, to note a few of its borrowings. After watching it I came to the conclusion that Kill Bill proves once again that in post-Bonnie and Clyde Hollywood revenge oriented cinema is a dish served with oodles and oodles of hot rich spurting red blood revenge sauce, the plot such as it is of the film.

Kill Bill pointed up something else to to me once again. In the world of post-Jaws and Star Wars hybrid Hollywood reflexive cinema, form has triumphed over content. Tarantino, who became a star in the firmament of reflexive Hollywood cinema in the wake of 1994's Pulp Fiction, has long made a living by sampling other films just as Uncle Walt Disney made a living out sampling public domain fairy tales and disneyfornicating  or pollyannaising them in the process so he could sell them to the sentimental masses. Tarantino, you see, is another one of those reflexive post film brat film brats whose university was television, the cinema, and video store work, all in a reflexive key. The complex time structure of  Pulp Fiction and the references to Swiss art house innovative cinema darling Jean-Luc Godard, made Tarantino the latest hero-saint of those who actually did know something about the history of cinema and even more for those who liked their action-adventure snarky and bloody but who had little idea that European art films like L'annee derniere a Marienbad (1961), a film that played with time long before Tarantino did, had already done it, it being the playing with time bit. History and understanding, you see, have never been human strengths.

I thought Kill Bill was OK. As I said Kill Bill, like the films of another neo-film brat David Lynch, a filmmaker whose film work, for me, pales beside the films of Luis Bunuel and Dusan Makavejev, and his film's surrealism and absurdity for surrealisms and absurdities sake. How postmodern. Kill Bill seems to me all content, an emotional orgasmic inducing roller coaster ride from brutal murder to brutal murder, something that I am sure, pleased the I love buckets of blood crowd in the cinema going audience. Its character development is almost nil. "The Bride's" motivation is revenge pure and simple with the ultimate goal to kill Bill (David Carradine doing a kind of updated and somewhat inverted version of his character on the TV show Kung Fu), her former paramour. In this Kill Bill is quite different from Joss Whedon's television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), a show I much prefer to the simulations of Quentin Tarantino. Whedon is another one of those post-Star Wars comic book reflexive neo-film brats though with a healthy dose of existentialism and Shakespeare, one of the fathers of multi-tonality thrown into the mix. Whedon's Buffy is cinematic and reflects Whedon's hours of film viewing. Buffy also, however, and this is critical for me, has a complex narrative, structure, complex characters and complex development, and intellectual heft, particularly when it explores the complex existentialist moral issues that are at the heart of the show (life as hell). Unlike Kill Bill, Buffy has both form and content. It reflects classical novelistic narrative storytelling and this, for me, makes Buffy vastly superior to Kill Bill, a film which seems to me all surface form and little in the way of narrative structure, complex characters, complex character development, and complex dealings with moral issues. The moral centre of Kill Bill, if it has one, after all, seems to be that payback, as the modern proverb tells us, is a bitch. Wow, heavy.

Looking Back at 1978 from 2023: Musings on Rewatching NBC's Holocaust

It was the best of American TV times. It was the worst of American TV times. It was 1978 and I was getting ready to go to college later that year at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. I don't  recall now how I heard about the TV show Holocaust--promos perhaps--but I somehow heard about it and I made the decision that I had to watch it because I liked what I had seen of 1970s short form American television. I found it more akin to British television and I was a devotee of British television. I suspect I also, probably foolishly and naively, thought that I might learn a little bit about the Shoah by watching the miniseries. And then there is the fact that some of my family are Jewish. 

Holocaust debuted on the NBC network and ran for five episodes from 16 April to 19 April. I watched every episode of the five part series and was mesmerised by it. I had rarely seen something that good on American television.

In retrospect and from the vantage point of several university degrees including in history, a much more critical attitude, and fifty years in the rear view mirror it is apparent that Holocaust, like so many American films and television shows of the era and still today, was and is, I would argue, simplistically manichean, overly sentimental, hyper romantic, uber melodramatic and only somewhat successful at being literate. But at least it tried and despite all its limitations it works. 

It also gets a lot of Holocaust history right (a history many Ukrainians, Poles, and Lithuanians prefer to cancel) thanks to its telescoping of so much of the history of the Shoah into the saga of one family, the Weiss family. As I have been rewatching Holocaust it has dawned on me how similar it is to another truly masterful TV series about World War II, a show that likewise looks at how the war impacts a family, the World on Fire (BBC 1, 2019-). By the time I finished my Holocaust rewatch it had become quite clear to me that the show was and remains an impressive achievement in its own right and a historic landmark in American commercial television.

On another matter, the CBS DVD is a cut version of the show. Apparently the blu ray, while containing more minutes of the show, is also abridged. One, of course, can't help but wonder why.  It is not the music of the show since it was written exclusively for Holocaust. Regardless of why this was released in such an incompetent manner by CBS Paramount is does point up something common in the US today: the incompetence of American business. As with the disastrous Buffy remaster by Fox it is clear that many American corporations no longer take pride in the quality of their workmanship. They only seem to care about pigging out at the all you can eat pig sty bar at the cafe Mammon.

Musings on Critical Responses to Joe Wright's and Tom Stoppard's Anna Karenina

I spent several hours today watching Joe Wright's 2012 film adaptation of Lev Tolstoy's great novel Anna Karenina (1875-1877, 1878). Critics at the time of the film's release, as they tend to do in general, disagreed about the quality of the film when it came out. Some liked it. Some were lukewarm towards it. Some did not like it at all. Many, I suspect, even ignored it. Needless to say, such disparate views point up the empirical fact that beauty and value are in the socialised eyes of the beholder.

I found the response of one particularly "critic", the "critic" who wrote the capsule "review" for Leonard Maltin's 2014 Movie Guide, particularly interesting since it was so bizarre. This critic was at a loss as to why Wright set some of the scenes in a decaying theatre. He apparently did not notice, as those who have read and studied Anna Karenina and Tolstoy likely did, that Wright metaphorically and allegorically counterpoints the scenes in the film set in a decaying and decrepit theatres in Moscow and Petersburg, scenes dominated by the mannered, ritualistic, self-righteous, hypocritical and Westernising Russian elite, to the naturalistic rural scenes focusing on Levin and eventually Kitty, the space and the characters that were for Tolstoy metaphors for the "authentic" Russia, the "real" Russia. It would be, of course, this holier than thou Russian elite who, because of their ostracisation of Anna, would drive Anna to commit suicide by falling on tracks as a train passed, something that should also tell us something about Tolstoy's sense of morality and ethics.  

The Books of My Life: Our Lives

 

Canada, as Alvin Finkel shows in his superb political, economic, demographic, and cultural history of Canada since 1945 entitled Our Lives: Canada after 1945 (Toronto: Lorimer, 1997), changed dramatically after World War II, a war Canada entered eight days after the British declaration of war against Germany in 1939, flexing, if somewhat weakly, its political independence from the "mother" country. 

Between 1945 and 1997 (a second edition of Our Lives takes the story of post-war Canada up to 2012 and the prime ministership of Tory Stephen Harper) Canada, as Finkel nicely shows, briefly emerged from behind England's colonial shadow only to become an American economic, political, and cultural colony. He examines how Canada moved from a modified Keynesian economy to a neoliberal bah humbug one, though never one as bah humbugee as that of the United States. He explores the important role the New Democratic Party played in making Canada more of a welfare state and less bah humbugee than the US particularly during years of Liberal minority governments on the federal level. He investigates how English Canada developed a national literature that was read by many, at least in English Canada. There had been, of course, given the close relationship between Quebec nationalism and Quebec culture, a distinct culture in that province for some time.

He delves into how Canada cultivated an image as a kindler and gentler, compared to Imperial America, nation, an image of Canada as a peacekeeper nation, a nation that was perceived, at least by some polemicists, as a golden mean between the US and Europe. He explores increasing tensions between Ottawa, the various provincial premiers, and the provinces. He examines the silent revolution in Quebec and its impacts on Quebec nationalism. He investigates the increasing power of economic elites after the oil crisis of the early 1970s, though the power of economic elites was never absent even during the Keynesian years when Keynesianism dominated mainstream economic thinking among American, Canadian, and European economic "managers" before the oil crisis. He focuses on the demographics of post-World War II Canada. Perhaps more than anything else, however, Finkel does a superb job of showing the realities of poverty and inequality--class based, gender based, ethnic based--lurking beneath Canada's carefully curated and ultimately gilded public relations image the nation presented to the world, something that makes Canada very much like other core nations around the globe unexceptional. Canadian deceptionalism in the end is no more nor less deceptional and delusional than that of the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark...

Highly recommended for anyone looking for a readable, reliable, and wide ranging if selective history of post-World War II Canada. 

The Books of My Life: Warrior Nation

I came of intellectual age during the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, and Watergate. I came of age, in other words, in an era in which reasonable and rational skepticism about what "authorities" said became more common and prominent than it had been in the 1950s, an era, at least on the surface, of enforced conformity. It was my friend John Cirillo (sic) who taught me of the need to be skeptical of what politicians said about things such as civil rights, about the war in Vietnam, and about the Watergate burglary. It was thanks to John that I came to realise that a lot of what demagogues, be they politicians or capitalist flim flam men, said, at least in public, was, empirically speaking, little more than--pardon my English--mythhistorical bullshite. 

I wasn't until I went to university that I learned that any analysis worth its salt had to be both critical and skeptical and grounded in the empirical record. At university I was treated to a more empirically and fact based history of the United States, Canada, Australia, and the world than I got in junior and senior high school. It was also at university I realised that much of what I was taught about American history and geography in junior and senior high, such, as, for instance, that it was evil Spain that forced America to go to war in the late nineteenth century to protect American honour and Cuban womanhood, was in large measure myth and, in large measure, bullshite propagated and perpetrated by demagogues allied with imperialist politicians and associated with the yellow journalism of the Hearst newspaper conglomerate. 

As a consequence of my university education it became apparent to me that while many believed that it was, for example, the economy or money that made the world go around, it was really ideology, ways of seeing or perceiving, ways of seeing, that underlay and undergirded notions that it was money made the world go around that really made the world go around. I learned, in other words, that it was socially and and culturally constructed ideologies that mediated "realities" for most humans and which created "reality" for most humans. 

At first, as I recall, I thought higher education might be the much needed cure for mythhistorical bulllshite. It soon became clear to me, however, that the bullshite people are socialised into and enculturated into and indoctrinated with makes the human world go around and that it was difficult if not impossible to counter what humans take on faith because they generally don't recognise that what they have faith in is created through a process of fetishisation, a process in which the parochial and particular are transformed into the universal. 

It is, of course, through socialisation and enculturation that common identities, including a common national identity, and a common culture, including a common national culture, are manufactured and continually remanufactured. As Emile Durkheim noted in his Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), culture creates and recreates, with the help of notions of fictive kinship and a common set of myths, symbol, icons, rituals, a common identity and a common sense of community whether on the tribal, clan, or national level. 

It is collective national identity that is the focus of Ian McKay's and Jamie Swift's superb Warrior Nation: Rebranding Canada in an Age of Anxiety (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2012), McKay and Swift take an ideal type approach to the history of Canadian identity and the culture wars over Canadian identity ever since Canada achieved "independence" from Great Britain in 1867. Despite dominion status and Canadian confederation in 1867, English Canadian culture, English Canadian identity, and English Canadian nationhood, McKay and Swift argue, remained closely tied to imperial British identity and culture. Nicely utilising an approach that melds biography with broader historical and cultural contexts McKay and Swift note that the British imperialist, writer, politician, and Governor-General of Canada John Buchan and the Canadian born adventurer William Stairs, who thought of himself as British and Canadian even when in the employ of the genocidal Leopold II of Belgium, were, embedded in an ethnocentric Victorian and Edwardian British imperial culture that celebrated adventure, exploration, British imperialism and the British White man's burden. This Victorian and Edwardian British culture socialised youth into a Victorian and Edwardian culture of imperialism, adventure, and exploration through material culture like the The Boy's Own Annual. It enculturated Canadians into a Victorian and Edwardian White or Northern European sense of racial superiority. It socialised Canadians into a Victorian and Edwardian culture of Christian superiority. It enculturated Canadians into a Victorian and Edwardian culture that preached the superiority of British civilisation. It socialised Canadians into a Victorian and Edwardian culture of manhood tied to gentlemanly sports and gentlemanly explorations of the world's various dark continents. Sports, adventuring, colonisation, and war, many were taught and came to believe, made the man, made the real man. 

This British imperial Canadian culture, as McKay and Swift point out, continues to be significant in English Canada, particularly among Canada's Anglo-Saxons. It was not the only Canadian identity culture, however. In the wake of World War II, a war during which Canadians became more conscious of their own identity and their own culture, an identity and culture that was distinct, at least ideologically, from that of Great Britain. As a result a somewhat new Canadian culture arose and became dominant. This new Canadian culture, McKay and Swift argue, was intimately tied to multiculturalism, to pluralism, to peacekeeping, to diplomacy, and to war, the last, at, least rhetorically, as a final option. This new Canadian identity and culture was homologous with the replacement of Great Britain as the dominant global great power by the United States, by increasing economic and cultural ties between Canada and United States, and by Canada's increasing ties to an increasingly interconnected world. 

McKay and Swift explore this Canadian peacekeeper cosmopolitan culture, one which, as McKay and Swift note, was similar to the Canadian British imperial identity in a number of ways, by exploring the careers of two famous post-World War Two Canadians, soldier Tommy Burns and, who imbibed both the imperial and the more cosmopolitan culture, and Lester Pearson, prime minister of Canada from 1963 to 1968. Pearson actually embodies, as McKay and Swift point up, the contradictions of Canadian post-World War II foreign policy. On the one hand, he was a partisan of Team Imperial America and played an important if ultimately limited and junior role in the birth of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation or NATO, an adjunct of American imperial power. On the other hand, he was a cosmopolitan mediator and peacemaker who played a significant role in the birth of the United Nations or the UN. Pearson's peacemaking credentials stemmed from his role in ending the Suez Crisis, for which he won the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize. That "crisis" saw Great Britain, France, and Israel attack Egypt in 1956 in order to take control of the Suez Canal. Pearson's mediation played a major role in the British, French, and Israeli withdrawal from Egypt and from the canal. It would be Pearson's mediation of this conflict that would turn him into saintly hero number one in the pantheon associated with the image of Canada as a peacekeeper nation, an image that would also gain some traction abroad. Despite this saintly image, however, Pearson was no Olof Palme, who was clearly far more non-partisan and non-aligned in the Cold War world than Pearson.

A third Canadian identity culture, according to McKay and Swift, arose around the same time as a revived liberalism with its fetishisation of the Market and the increasing dominance of neoliberalism in the English speaking world in the 1980s. This identity, according to McKay and Swift, is actually a latter day and technologically updated version, with a few new wrinkles thrown in for good measure, of the British Imperial identity culture. In Team Warrior Canada the United States has replaced Great Britain as the dominant power in the Anglosphere alliance of the US and its junior varsity partners the UK, Canada, and, increasingly, I might add, Australia, which recently agreed to allow an expansion of American military bases established in the 1960s and 1990s and the expansion of the number of American military bases on Australian soil.

There is currently, McKay and Swift argue, a culture war between these last two ideal identity types. Since the 1980s and particularly during the prime ministership of Stephen Harper between 2006 and 2015, team warrior nation Canada, with its polemical and apologetic politicians, economic elites, and allied academics, has attempted to rebrand Canada from the peacekeeper nation of a partly imagined Pearson to the warrior nation of Harper. Using strategies similar to those of the Tories in England, the Republicans in the United States, and the Coalition in Australia, warrior nation Canada has attempted to transform Canada from a peacekeeper nation, a nation engaged in UN peacekeeping missions in places like the Middle East, to a Canada that is a warrior nation with strong ties to an increasingly Anglified  and American led NATO whose mission has increasingly become that of preserving and protecting the Anglosphere global order with its unstated mandate of making sure that petroleum flows from the peripheral and semi-peripheral world into the core nation world. They have done this using the tried and true methods right wing demagogues have long used to expand their power and authority; they have played on the fears and anxieties of the masses by emphasising the need for law and order in an increasingly dangerous world both at home and abroad. To combat domestic and foreign dangers team warrior nation Canada has promoted, through their partially government funded think tanks, their partially publicly funded military science programmes in Canadian universities, particularly at the University of Calgary (where Harper took degrees), their academic allies, their veterans sent into schools, and by increasing the links between the Canadian military and Canadian sports, particularly the national sport of Canada, a sport that is central to the Canadian civic faith, hockey, to promote increases in Canadian defence spending and increases in the number of Canadian military personnel. 

The strategies team warrior Canada have used in their attempts to rebrand Canada from a peacekeeper nation to a warrior are, of course, right out of the anti-Communist, anti-socialist, and anti-anarchist playbook that helped make America a conformist imperial warrior nation. They have demonised domestic critics. They have demonised enemy others. They have sacralised the Canadian military culture. They have marginalised critics by making it impossible for them to condemn military actions by claiming that any such criticism profanes the sacred service Canadian soldiers do. They have condemned and marginalised critics by claiming that they are utopians who don't understand that we live in a dog eat dog social darwinist world. They have claimed that Canada was made by war and by its warriors, starting at places like Vimy Ridge in France where Canadian troops, or so say the warrior historians, fought as Canadians for the first time. They have claimed that it was and is Canada's warriors who protect the true north's proud and free liberties and freedoms. They have claimed that Canada's warriors are chilvalrous white knights whose much needed mission is to protect the rights of all and particularly the rights of put upon women all across the globe, save in places, of course, like Saudi Arabia, a nation that violates civil and human rights, and particularly the rights of women regularly, because the Saudis are Canada's and America's oil buds and central to Canadian and American Middle Eastern policies and strategies.

As was the case with the similar strategies used in the US by people like A. Mitchell Palmer and Joseph McCarthy, the ideologies of team warrior Canada are, as McKay and Swift note, rent through with contradictions, some of which reek with the stench of the newspeak of George Orwell's 1984 and the surrealistic absurdities of Doctor Strangelove and Monty Python's Flying Circus. The government and its military, for instance, which is supposed to preserve and protect human rights, violates them en masse during wartime though you wouldn't know it given their governmental and media newspeak about humanitarian surgical strikes, smart bombs, and collateral damage. The government and its military, which claims to be promoting human rights and stabilising and improving the lives of those who it invades, seems to be more the destroyer of worlds than the builder of "civilised" little neo-West simulations all across the globe. What it does make the world safe for, of course, is American style exploitative corporate capitalism. The government and its military wax romantically about protecting women from misogynist fundamentalist sects, assuming, of course, that their presence in places like Afghanistan actually did improve the position of women before they cut and ran leaving women to their  fates in a post war Afghanistan run by the Taliban, the very enemy they fought and claimed victory over in a seeming repeat of what happened when the US cut and ran in South Vietnam in the 1970s. The government, its military, and its increasingly militarised police forces that are supposed to be preserving and protecting freedoms and liberties at home, has created a 1984 like surveillance state that violates civil liberties on a regular basis both at home and abroad. The government and military that whinges and whines about the welfare state actually eats at the teat of the big welfare state wanting even further redistribution of taxpayers monies from the civilian population to the military (all wrapped up, of course, in a bow of tax cuts for the rich). The government and the peace is our profession military claims that the only way to bring about peace is through never ending wars against an evil abstract enemy. It is hard not to notice that this imagined Canada of warrior princes fighting for Western truth, Western justice, Western manliness, and thimbleberry pie seems to comes right out of a fictive manichean comic book world that is not that different from the tall tales in The Boy's Own Annual. Plus good doubleplus good.

Who will triumph in this identity war between the two identity groups? Stay tuned. In the meantime those of you interested in cultural history, the history of identity, and the militarisation of Canadian, America, and, by extension, Australia society should check out this superb book.