Canada And The United States: Culture And Identity (Part Two)

As I said in an earlier column, Dr. Morrison has read them all and has taken their pronouncements as gospel. Illustration of the danger of such “faith” is demonstrated in the section of her book called “The Launching of National Myths.” For here, her adherence to her “expert” authorities leads her to repeat the massive mangling of real history in order to set up the U.S. as a shining beacon in the darkness of human affairs. To begin, Morrison accepts without question gigantic over-simplifications. Of the aftermath of the long and bloody U.S. Civil War she remarks calmly that the U.S. moved west “not bothering to capture the northern area“ [that is to say, Canada]. (p.2) In fact the U.S. was still deeply divided, deeply in debt; Canada was ready to defend itself; Canada had Britain as a protector; and Canada was moving quickly to Confederation. “Not bothering to capture” Canada was a little more complicated than Dr. Morrison allows. Like bad U.S. historians on the subject (the majority), Dr. Morrison reports that “the U.S. embraced Manifest Destiny in the nineteenth century.” That belief stems from the argument that the U.S. began as an innocent, freedom-loving and pure entity before (and continuing after) 1776, only falling into expansionist nastiness in the nineteenth century. The contrary is true. Settlers in the U.S. were pushing Britain to help them grab the whole continent at least as early as 1700. The rapacious expansion of the U.S. settlers involved genocide against the Indians well before 1776, and the U.S. slave trade was a major activity in the 1600s and 1700s. Anthony Hall, in The American Empire and the Fourth World ( McGill Queen’s Press, 2003), traces U.S. Manifest Destiny to the Puritans in New England in the early 1600s. (p.307) The U.S. Declaration of Independence writes of the Indian people as less than human, naming them “merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare is, undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” The constitutional formation of the U.S.A. was undertaken, at least in part, to formalize slavery, Indian genocide, and unimpeded U.S. expansion in North America and the world. The U.S. Civil War (1861-65) was undertaken to weld divided parts together in order to assure the program of expansion. Dr. Morrison repeats the old nonsense that in the U.S. Civil War "the fundamental issue was slavery." (p. 21) But Abraham Lincoln didn’t add the slavery question to his platform until the second year of the Civil War. And in a letter to a newspaper man, Lincoln said that if he could save the Union by keeping slavery, he’d do it. And if he could save the Union by ending slavery, he’d do that. Clearly, the fundamental issue was NOT slavery. What difference does it make? If the long and bloody U.S. Civil War was fought to make the U.S. a more powerful imperial and expansionist country, we must think very different things about it than if that war was fought for the liberation of an enslaved portion of humanity. So lies are necessary to people wanting to fake a U.S. purity that never existed. And the lie is perpetrated so continuously--is so perpetuated still--that Dr. Morrison picks it up from her sources like the common cold. In a quick run she reports the War for Independence as a cry for rights that turned into a cry for independence. In fact, the big businessmen of the U.S. were furious at English supremacy. For decades they invoked and used every kind of mob activity and criminal behaviour they could to best the English. The U.S. wealthy entrepreneurs wanted all the profits of enterprise in the U.S. for themselves. They wanted no special lands set aside for the Indians. They were furious when the Quebec Act (1774) guaranteed the freedom of the Roman Catholic French whom the U.S. settlers had always wanted erased. And so they went to war, NOT in a revolution – which is normally an overthrow of power in order to try to increase the numbers possessing freedom. (In that regard we think of the French, the Chinese, the Russian, and the Cuban Revolutions.) The U.S. War for Independence was fought to displace English corporate wealth from power and to replace it with U.S. corporate wealth. Better than “the American Revolution,” the “U.S. War for Independence” is a truer name for the 1776 conflict. To call it “the U.S. corporate coup d’etat,” even, would not be wrong. Unlike a “revolution,” a “coup d’etat” is usually undertaken by reactionary forces to decrease the numbers possessing freedom. But surely, some will say, the 1776 War for Independence increased freedom in the U.S.A. and opened a whole new dawn of liberty. It did not. Slavery in the U.S.A. increased after 1776. Indian genocide became more vicious. A great many of the people who had remained loyal to England were robbed, hanged, named by law as void of civil rights and could be “libeled, slandered, insulted, blackmailed or assaulted.” (p.6) Many travelled to Canada. Many were mercilessly hounded to Canada. “Well,” you say again, “all that was in the passion of the moment,” except African slavery and Indian genocide were not the passion of the moment. And then there was the very small but enormously significant “rebellion” in Massachusetts, perhaps the biggest symbolic moment of all as an indication of the narrowing of freedom in the U.S.A. after the War for Independence. For two years after the peace treaty of 1783 things went well. Then the Boston capitalists wanted debts owed to them by the normally comfortable yeoman farmers paid in gold or silver which were genuinely unavailable because of the war and its aftermath. The farmers – most of whom fought for the U.S. in the war – called upon their government to provide kinds of promissory notes or scrip (a paper money to be honoured with real money later). They wanted to pay their debts as soon as conditions would allow. All governments refused, and the Boston capitalists began seizing farms and produce and throwing farmers off their land. That began what is known as “Shay’s Rebellion.” The farmers surrounded and occupied court houses so judges couldn’t hand away their property. Still no action was taken by government. The loyal men who had fought for U.S. independence just a few years before couldn’t believe the injustice. Courts and government alike did not seek a just way to regulate the dispute, preserving the farmers' holdings and securing the debts owed the Boston businessmen. As one force, courts and government worked for the wealthy Boston men. The conflict on both sides increased. Very clearly, independence had not done anything to increase the freedom and justice extended even to white people who had fought for independence if they happened not to be capitalists. Fearing that the people participating in Shay’s Rebellion believed the propaganda of the War for Independence, Congress decided to put down the rebellion, not to solve the problems that caused it, for that would have required the Boston capitalists to practice patience for a few years on behalf of the men who fought for “liberty.” Against the prevalent rhetoric that there should be no national standing army, no federal force, Congress – with wonderful irony – sent an organized force against the “rebels,” a force that quickly defeated what was more a protest for justice than a rebellion. That, some observers say, was the beginning of a U.S. federal standing army – which all the rhetoric around the Declaration of Independence said should never be formed. The first step to form such an army was not, notice, taken to discipline African slaves, to eradicate Indians, or to fight foreign foes. It was to put down a growing protest by “free and enlightened” U.S. white people who had fought for the U.S. and were seeking a measure of justice in the face of burgeoning, expansionist U.S. Capitalism. That happened just a few years after the peace treaty. It happened to men who fought for U.S. independence. It was the first step in construction of the enormous military force that now operates around the world against any country or people that resists the domination of U.S. Capitalism. U.S. expansionism increased and exploded in the War of 1812. U.S. propaganda has it that the Napoleonic Wars interfered with the U.S.'s right(?) to trade, and that the British search for deserters on U.S. ships (where many were found) was a huge insult. That was nonsense in wartime, but the U.S. politicians and historians have repeated the nonsense tirelessly. Dr. Morrison follows both the U.S. and Canadian ”experts,” accepting, and repeating perfectly, this ancient Sunday-school lesson. The War of 1812 happened, in fact, because Britain was stretched to the limit in the Napoleonic Wars in Europe. U.S. president James Madison saw his chance to grab Canada while the British could do nothing about it. That is the reason for the War of 1812. To U.S. surprise, the great Indian statesman and strategist, Tecumseh, was victorious against them until he was killed. The white Canadians fought in a way the U.S. believed impossible. U.S. generals were mostly very bad, being “free men” whose soldiers (and indeed, who themselves) frequently walked away when the going got tough. Since then, of course, the U.S. experts argue that a war the U.S. started, that was begun and fought to gain territory, planned and conducted to gain territory, out of which the U.S. received abundant casualties, embarrassing losses, humiliation, and not a square inch of territory, was a huge U.S. victory. U.S. propaganda never ends. Believing the propaganda and indoctrination of the “experts,” Dr. Morrison repeats, blindly, their nonsense. And so “…it was inevitable,” she writes (p. 13), “that the United States and Canada would develop along different lines – one revolutionary, the other evolutionary….” But there has never been a significant revolutionary moment or ideology in U.S. history, and, throughout history, the U.S. – wherever it could – has suppressed revolutions in the world that have sought greater equality and freedom for peoples. Dr. Morrison writes gibberish. She should have written – in the light of history as it has really occurred – something different: “It was inevitable that the United States and Canada would develop along different lines – one in an imperialist, totalitarian direction, the other in a defensive, democratic, evolutionary direction.” Morrison’s book is easy to read and is another installment in the fake history of North America, assuring U.S. domination. Though the book is an extended mistreatment of history, myth, and culture, it is important as a mirror image of North American “expertise” on those matters. As if to underscore the mistreatment, Dr. Morrison refers to John A. Macdonald’s famous statement in the 1891 election, about which I wrote in a recent column. Having fought U.S. and British diplomats on behalf of Canada since the critical 1871 negotiations in Washington, John A. proved himself brilliantly and consistently loyal to the idea of Canada. When the U.S. was doing all in its power to unseat him as prime minister and replace him with a Liberal who would take the preliminary steps towards annexation, Macdonald fought with great cunning. Since at that time there was no Canadian citizenship, Macdonald couldn’t say in his famous 1891 election speech: “A Canadian citizen I was born. A Canadian citizen I will die.” His choice was either to be a British subject building the Canadian nation in a democratic constitutional monarchy, or it was to give that up, integrate with the U.S.A., and become a U.S. citizen. And so, as Dr. Morrison writes, John A. “won that election with the ringing cry, ‘A British subject I was born. A British subject I will die.” But he made the cry, she writes, as a demonstration of “English Canada’s continued identification with the empire.” (p.22) A greater demonstration of misunderstanding could not be written. Misreading North American history, misreading myth, literature, culture, and the Canadian character built since the beginning, Dr. Morrison accepts every false reading by every half-witted, third rate “expert.” But as I wrote in Part One of “Canada and the United States: Culture and Identity”, it is mostly third-rate people that are accepted as “officially” expert in Canada on those subjects. And U.S. “experts” are, for the most part, so indoctrinated by the lies of U.S. disguise, they can only misrepresent both Canadian and U.S. realities. Reading such a book as Canadians Are Not Americans is a sobering experience. It reveals the extent to which a wholly false picture of North America has become “conventional wisdom,” and it makes one say that with friends like Dr. Catherine L. Morrison, Canadians have little need of enemies. [For part one: Dr.C] http://www.vivelecanada.ca/article.php/20050206115424303 [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on February 13, 2005]