PhilPaine.com

Those Cana­di­ans who imag­ine that Canada’s role in glob­al pol­i­tics is both impor­tant and suc­cess­ful need to have some of their bal­loons punctured.

Our politi­cians are con­stant­ly repeat­ing to us how much the world admires us for our “peace keep­ing tra­di­tion”, and how impor­tant our inter­na­tion­al com­mit­ments are. The truth is that almost nobody out­side of Cana­da has heard about them, and even few­er care. I once checked out a pub­lished his­to­ry of U.N. peace­keep­ing. It con­tained no ref­er­ence to the activ­i­ties of any Cana­di­an forces at all. Out­side of Cana­da, I have nev­er encoun­tered any press or per­son­al dis­cus­sion by any­one about Canada’s sup­pos­ed­ly famous peace-keep­ing activ­i­ties, or of any Cana­di­an mil­i­tary actions or com­mit­ments. Even in coun­tries where we are, in fact, doing peace­keep­ing work, only the blue U.N. uni­forms are rec­og­nized by the local bel­liger­ents, and they don’t care whether we are Cana­di­ans or Mar­tians. Far from car­ing about what Cana­da does on the glob­al mil­i­tary scene, few peo­ple out­side of Cana­da know that we have an army at all. If we are fight­ing any­where near Amer­i­cans, it is tak­en for grant­ed that we are Amer­i­cans, or that, if we are not, the dis­tinc­tion is of no impor­tance. I hate to break it to misty-eyed fans of our glo­ri­ous mil­i­tary, but this is espe­cial­ly true in Afghanistan, where we are engaged in our largest mil­i­tary project since the Kore­an War. Read more »

There is a con­sis­tent pat­tern, among those who describe soci­eties and economies, past and present, to reverse cause and effect in sig­nif­i­cant events. I would like to dub this the Emper­or Josef Wrote Don Gio­van­ni Syn­drome. This is the ten­den­cy to shift atten­tion from those who cre­ate to those who rule, some­times blunt­ly, some­times sub­tly, until one has the vague impres­sion that those who rule are the ones who create.

This, of course, begins at the crud­est lev­el when his­to­ri­ans casu­al­ly assert that some­thing that hap­pened to come into exis­tence dur­ing the reign of a king, or an emper­or, or a pharaoh was “made” by them or “built” by them. The his­to­ri­an may retreat to the excuse that this is a con­ven­tion­al form, under­stood by all to mean its oppo­site, but this leaves unex­plained why there should be any need to have a for­mu­la­ic phras­ing so mis­lead­ing and per­verse. In fact, it is usu­al­ly easy enough to tell from the con­text that the author does not real­ly con­tra­dict or qual­i­fy, in his mind, the con­ven­tion­al phrase, and real­ly does believe that a ruler is the cre­ative force, in every sense, behind what­ev­er admirable achieve­ments hap­pen to be known from his reign. The more dis­tant the events are in time, the more this pre­vails. No his­to­ri­an can get away with claim­ing that the Emper­or Joseph II was the com­pos­er of Don Gio­van­ni, but that is because the events are recent, and approach­ing the time when com­posers were begin­ning to be be per­ceived as impor­tant peo­ple. How­ev­er, those who know Mozart know that it was a close call. He was a celebri­ty as a child, because of his pre­coc­i­ty, but any­one who under­stands the era knows that the aris­toc­ra­cy of the Aus­tro-Hun­gar­i­an empire thought of him as noth­ing more impor­tant than a ser­vant, and when he left their brief atten­tion span, he died in pover­ty. His body van­ished into an anony­mous pauper’s grave. If his rep­u­ta­tion had not been relent­less­ly cham­pi­oned by musi­cians who knew him, his named would have been for­got­ten. Read more »