Armed With National Pride : Is The Fight For Social Justice Canadian?

Does national power flow from the lens of a gun? Watching the weaponized camera of modern warfare – missile-cams, embedded reporters, CNN airstrike animations – one would be hard-pressed to separate the culture of Americanization from the death America spreads. With the Terminator’s rise to power in California, and the worship of dream-factory machismo and sanitized violence it implies, it looks like the line is very blurred.

But is the difference between George W. Bush and Paul Martin, Rudy Giuliani and Gordo Campbell, really the difference between weapon and target? When Chretien strangles a protester, is that more Canadian than Arnold fondling a co-worker? Is Thomas D’Aquino’s Business Council on National Issues un-Canadian and Ralph Nader’s Green Party un-American? Can we even really separate the two identities in any meaningful way, much less along pure social-justice lines?

Certainly, the Americans who own the means of production of identity, in the airstrike camera or the Hollywood-North backlot, are the ones who get to answer this question more frequently, and with more impact, than we as Canadians are able to do ourselves.

I once worked on a film set with Dave Thomas, one half of Bob and Doug MacKenzie. “I charge $10,000 a day now,” he mentioned blithely, “so I don’t work much. The producer of this film is my neighbour in Malibu, though, and I thought, great, I’ll go shoot up in Canada.” It was a film about a monkey that plays Hockey.

Much of our Canada, in fact, is defined by Hollywood, right under our defiant noses: the South Park Movie, which made me proud, depicted Canada’s air force as a rattling collection of biplanes, blowing up Hollywood stars as an efficient defence, spearheaded by a tough-talking “Minister of Movies” with a Trudeau haircut; and Michael Moore’s Canada-worship in Bowling for Columbine is embarrassing, but touches off a debate… do you lock your doors in Toronto? I never locked mine in Ottawa. These debates draw Canadians in, framing our own discussions through the dominant US entertainment apparatus of books, TV and music which we must absorb.

The American ownership of the film and television industry (not to mention publishing), including 98% of all screening outlets, however, makes it difficult for Canadians to even have a discussion at all. Canadian actors must fake accents to be allowed to work; we disguise our cities for US productions. But this is just as much a factor of economies of scale and structural racism as it is of US domination; few of the many US accents or ethnicities get much better treatment on film. Further, listen to the Newfoundland TV news, and you may miss the newfie accents, eroded by education, newscaster’s close contact with the central Ontario powers, and desire for a cheap façade of cosmopolitan authority.

It is with some amazement that I noted, on the day the Iraq war was launched, that an epic coincidence took place. On that day, Ben Mulroney, son of former Prime Minister Brian, and Sacha Trudeau, son of former PM Pierre, were both reporting from faraway cities, and both on the topic of film-making. Trudeau was in Baghdad, producing a documentary about the war. Mulroney was in L.A., covering the Oscars.

The coverage of Trudeau had the warm glow of bourgeois humanism, a white mans’ burden to slum with the victims, capture their triumphs and sorrows like big game… along with the movie-star glamour and leftist nostalgia of his surname. Young Trudeau’s brash recounting of a seemingly dangerous run-in with Iraqi police was reminiscent of Gordon Sinclair’s loutish ballyhooing in his embarrassing, jingoistic 1930’s “Footloose in India” (repeatedly, Sinclair declares “Me for the beef-eating British every time!”). Sacha’s Canada was a smug internationalist benevolence, founded on the security of a return ticket in his pocket.

Mulroney, on the other hand, was simply trying to distract us from the war, with cleavage and other fabulousness. How can that be a more American ignorance than Canadian? Isn’t it a universal human frailty – a frailty which, some months before, let Canada traipse into Afghanistan, a war just as illegal as the one we avoided in Iraq? An illegal war where Canadians are still dying? Is Adrienne Clarkson, poster girl for official Canadian multicultural leftism, less a war criminal because she commanded only one aggressive invasion, rather than two?

The key to understanding a Marxist, anti-nationalist position is that in this view, all conflicts – national, racist, sexist, homophobic, or any other conceivable – stem from economic factors. While it may be satisfying to strike blows on other fronts – and these victories are by no means meaningless – only the economic victories will be long-lasting, because capitalism itself carries the building blocks of all these antagonisms. Marxism says that if an underdog nation wins a victory over another – for instance, forcing out foreign control of an industry – it will be hollow and short-lived, because the momentum that capitalism creates will either lead to new foreign takeover, or simply reproduction of the same oppression by local forces. Moreover, big victories are won in international cooperation – like the battle against MAI, which succeeded, and not on narrow nationalist grounds, like the FTA battle, which failed.

Further, whatever the current political configuration, there’s nothing inherently (or uniquely) Canadian about social justice, equality, feminism, or anti-racism. I could easily point to the somewhat wacky notion, for instance, that there are “patriots” within the Alliance party who could somehow see eye-to-eye with NDP’ers and left-nationalists, simply because the nation of Canada is at stake. But the Canada of a self-declared Alberta redneck is a very separate Canada from that of the B.C. feminist hippy, and all the maple syrup in the world won’t stick them together. I should hope, at least, that no one here echoes the sentiment of the Reform Party’s old foreign affairs policy, that in light of the nation-state’s duty to protect it’s citizens, that “pursuit of the national interest is itself a moral purpose.”

When Kellogg, for instance, argues against Canadian nationalism, he’s speaking specifically of the deviation from the fight for social justice that sometimes happens when nationalism clouds the picture. A free, democratic Canada is a sour prize if we look smugly south to a nation of sick, struggling people and say, “Oh, you Americans!” Much better would be to risk everything, replace the word “Canada” with the word “humanity,” and stand or fall together.

That’s the Marxist view, and it makes me a little queasy. But is it a queasiness of offended national pride, or fear of real change in my worldview? I’m not sure.

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FLICK HARRISON is a filmmaker / writer in Vancouver. His digital feature film “Sex, Drugs, Love, Marx…” is available for screening anywhere! See his trailers, articles, and more at armed rabble.org! His column appears biweekly on Vive le Canada.