07 Jun Now here’s a real war memorial
In a June 5 op-ed piece in the Halifax Chronicle Herald, four Mount Saint Vincent University history profs, David Campbell, Jonathan Roberts, Corey Slumkoski and Martha Walls, offered a critique of the Never Forgotten colossus that differs from others I have read.
They faulted the 10-storey statue proposed for Green Bay in the Cape Breton Highlands National Park for homogenizing history under a guise of blind patriotism—”lauding only the sacrifices made by our soldiers, sailors, aircrew, nurses, and auxiliary service personnel during the war.”
Such a memorial distills history into simplistic ‘heritage’ that reduces the men and women who served… into a homogenous group….
[T]he story of the First World War is more than just those who served abroad — it is also the tale of thousands of volunteers who were rejected for military service, of conscientious and religious objectors protesting the senselessness of the conflict, of sacrifice and scarcity on the home front, of a colour bar that limited the wartime participation of minorities, of divisions between English and French Canadians.
As much as the First World War instilled a heightened sense of national unity in the hearts of some Canadians, it brought a terrible sense of discord and division for others….
We believe that the construction of a colossa, as a private initiative on public land, is the worst sort of heritage project—the drive-by variety that projects an image of a country without complexity, free of the divisions of ethnicity, language, class, and gender. That does little to help people understand the gravity of global military conflict.
Last month, data visualization artist Neil Halloran produced a meticulous video account of the military and civilian deaths during World War II—contrasting it with the much lower death tolls from the smaller wars that have characterized “The Long Peace” since 1945. Halloran’s visualization doesn’t parse the individual distinctions advocated by the Mount historians, but does illuminate the experience of World War II on a country-by-county* basis that may surprise you.
[Video link.] In short, Halloran has produced a real memorial, not a feel-good exercise in sentimentality and blind nationalism.
[H/T: Gus Reed]
By the way, today, Sunday, June 7, is the last day for public comments on the environmental assessment of the proposed colossus. Go here, and scroll down to “How to Provide Comments.”
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* Halloran is a Yank, so not surprisingly, he pays little notice to the Canadian contribution, although details of Canada war deaths can be found in the Google fusion table that forms part of his presentation, and on Wikipedia’s excellent World War II casualties article, which is the source for much of Halloran’s data. Canada suffered 45,500 military deaths in WWII, constituting about 0.4 percent of the country’s 1939 population. This compares with 420,000 US military deaths, about 0.32 percent of its 1939 population.