- What We Talk About When We Talk About War by Noah Richler. Published by Goose Lane Editions. 376 pages, $24.95.
WHILE discussing warfare and the Canadian conscience for 30 minutes in a crowded Vancouver café, author Noah Richler does not lean back. Not once.
The author of the recently-published polemic, What We Talk About When We Talk About War, has trained his considerable energy and erudition on what he sees as the movement to convince Canadians to be at peace with the idea of war.
"I'm not so naïve as to believe we will never be going to war, though I believe that when we do so, we should with great lament," says Richler, the son of Canadian literary icon Mordecai Richler.
Speaking with an accent that ranges from an English lilt and a Nova Scotia brogue, Richler, once nicknamed Protest Boy, discusses the men and women, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper, National Post reporter Christie Blatchford, and Hockey Night in Canada stalwart Don Cherry, he believes are responsible for attempting to affect a tectonic shift on the Canadian mindset.
"One of the ways in which the bunch I call the epic thinkers, the guys who think in terms of strict good and evil, one of the ways in which they triumph is by convincing people that war is inevitable and we always have to be guarded against it. We're always in a state or orange alert, or whatever it is," Richler says.
"One of the catchphrases which was used in Canada over the past 10 years was 'Support our Troops,'" Richler explains. "Christie Blatchford wrote that it's impossible to support our troops and be against the war. . . . It may sound like a trite analogy, but if I go to a theatre show and I don't like it, it doesn't mean I hate the actors and want to deny them their wages, it just means I don't like the production they're in, and it's the same about wars."
Richler also takes issue with Don Cherry. "I call Don Cherry a professional imbecile, which I can't even pretend is meant to be funny, it's actually what he is. He is professional. He is paid a very large amount of money by the CBC to behave foolishly, which is what he does. He behaves. . ." Richler trails off and considers his point. "I don't need to explain that," he concludes.
For Richler, Don Cherry is symptomatic of a substantial change in the CBC.
"(Cherry) is part of the Bob Hope mechanism of the CBC," he says. "They've just leaped onto the bandwagon of Canada the warrior nation. I would say it's because they're afraid of their funding being cut."
Living in a small Halifax town, Richler is connected to a military veteran who has completed three tours in Afghanistan.
"I wrote this book with her in mind, not expecting her to read it, but knowing that I had to be able to speak to her about this and not be doubtful or embarrassed or hiding anything that I say," he says. "My book is not even a judgment about the war, it's a judgment of how we've talked about it, and how we change the story to suit our aims and to absolve us from having to think more rigorously about how we lie to ourselves."
Those lies are connected to a growing tendency to draw Canadian history as increasingly aggressive and heroic, says Richler.
Richler describes The Battle of Vimy Ridge as a military battle that has become a Canadian creation myth.
"Nothing the country did do, or could have done, was ever going to affect its outcome," Richler writes of Canada's role in the battle.
Richler documents what he calls "The Vimy Effect" extensively.
"Accurate or not, after 9/11, accounts of Canadian excellence in the trenches of the First World War attainted the status of myth," he writes, describing the story's "transformed jingoistic purpose."
Reaching further back into Canadian history, Richler sees other deliberate distortions.
"The current fuss about the war of 1812 is the nearly comic extension of that idea. We're spending tens of millions of dollars to commemorate a war fought between the British and the Americans," he says. "The British don't say the Canadians sacked the White House, they say they did. But it's tremendously useful to this ongoing conservative endeavour to have us regard ourselves as tough guys not to be pushed around."
That loss of critical thinking has resulted in the Canadian government being able to switch justifications for the war in Afghanistan, according to Richler.
"The war became a 'war' to convince people that we were fighting and needed to stay in. Then we wanted to leave. The war became a 'mission,' because you don't have to win or lose a mission, you just participate in it for awhile," he says. "If you said you were building schools for girls before 2006, and that's one of the reasons why we were there, you were laughed out of court. Then building schools for girls became a signature project, and then after that we sort of forgot about the girls and told ourselves what a great job we had done."
Discussing Canada's withdrawal from Afghanistan, Richler says he fears for the country's economy.
"We've been participants in a war that's seen homes leveled, people killed, incredible destruction it will take generations to settle, but now we're also screwing their economy in a fantastically large, bad way."
Besides the damage to Afghanistan, war also has a corrosive effect on democracy, according to Richler.
"The effects of fighting the war, and this has always happened, seep back home," he says. "For me it's currently in a line with the way the war's been fought that our government is constantly demonizing. Demonizing environmental activists as funded by foreign money. Calling Tamil boat migrants, 'terrorists.'"
Richler has been accused of engaging in propaganda, but says that criticism stems from a misunderstanding of the polemic.
"I believe in a country of argument," he says. "I believe in contributing to a debate. I don't believe in stamping out remorselessly the competing views and hating the people who speak them. . . . We have lived in a period of virtually no opposition to the powers that be, which is very unhealthy for a vibrant democracy."
Richler says his first sense of war emerged when he was growing up in London, England.
Wearing army badges and playing with Action Man (popularly known in North America as G.I. Joe) figures, Richler guided his plastic soldiers through a backyard battlefield, occasionally breaking from missions for a little R and R, which sometimes included beating up Barbie.
"I built complicated trenches out in the backyard, I took the broken ones and laid them out in the No Man's Land," Richler recalls of his fantasy world of blood and bullets.
The author's sense of the reality of war was partially formed from his experience as a reporter.
"I worked for the BBC for a long time . . . and I did go to a number of troubled places. I tended to be sent to conflict zones after the conflict had ended or when there was little trickling denouements of violence and had to make sense of the place," he says of his time in Liberia and in Rwanda following genocide. "By in large, it's always struck me as a pretty shitty idea."
An admirer of former Prime Minister and Nobel Peace Prize winner Lester B. Pearson, Richler advocates for a greater emphasis on peacekeeping.
"I think people need to be educated again about what the point of the UN, of its charter, of the vision of Lester Pearson and Eleanor Roosevelt and how that still may have an application," he says.
"Soldiers and police and firefighters get these extraordinary rituals and attention from the press, but three Canadians who died wearing the UN's peacekeeping beret, two in Haiti in 2010, and one in Lebanon in 2006, are pretty well ignored. Even blamed. They don't get the hero treatment," he says.
Richler has come under attack for what some see as his idealism, particularly in regard to his support of Pearson.
Globe and Mail book reviewer Jonathan F. Vance accuses Richler of writing with "wide-eyed adoration of a Pearsonian Golden Age."
Vance describes peacekeeping as superfluous in the midst of people hell-bent on annihilating entire civilizations.
That assessment is inaccurate, according to Richler, who notes cognitive scientist and author Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature.
"He goes to great lengths to prove that violence has actually diminished," Richler says of Pinker. "We're no longer living in Games of Thrones."
Richler has many grievances with Canada's move to a more militaristic international policy, but he says Canada can have a strong influence throughout the world without dropping bombs from very expensive jets.
"There's an international world that is already upon us that demands more and more systems of international governance and we can take a lead that way. We're not America, we can't distinguish ourselves through sheer power, but we can through our imagination, and we can apply that imagination to practical improvements in creating a better tomorrow."
