The Good, The Bad & the Ugly

The controversy over the new Canadian War Museum in Ottawa begs the question: "What is a museum for?"  Similar to works of non-fiction it is a selective representation of a past reality.  There would be no way for a museum to capture every single detail of an individual's life, much less that of an entire nation at war.  The curators must select what they consider relevant according to the goals they establish for themselves.  As far as I can tell the curators of the new War Museum seek to "de-glorify war."  Not an original concept given that British, American, French, Canadian and German intellectuals, writers, poets and artistic have been doing that since about 1916. 

The problem comes when an attempt to de-glorify an obvious evil slips into demonizing the men and women who fought it.  There is often little understanding in modern Canada that war is sometimes a necessary evil, and attempts to avoid it only insure greater evils yet to come.  The obsession with peace at all costs helped paralyze Anglo-French resistance to Nazi aggression in the 1930s.  Such attitudes continue to hamper our current efforts to combat Islamic Fascism.

Still, war creates, and / or encourages monsters.  Not all of these monsters exist on the other side.  A free country fighting a just war can engage in atrocities and injustices, though far far fewer than those of its dictatorial opponents.  The method of dictatorship is fear and force, it should not be surprising that such attitudes carry over on to the battlefield.  But what of the good guys?  What of the farm boys from Saskatchewan who disgrace themselves and their country?  What of Master Cpl. Clayton Matchee who killed a Somali boy largely for kicks?  How do you explain to your fellow countrymen that Matchee and Billy Bishop and Arthur Currie all fall into the same category: Canadian solider.

The answer is you can't.  You don't define or exemplify a society by its criminals, unless those criminals happen to govern that society, and even then carefully separating a regime from its people.  Clayton Matchee was not a typical Canadian soldier, yet his picture, that infamous picture that would lead to the Somalia Inquiry and the disbandment of the elite Airborne Regiment, hangs in a place of prominence in the new War Museum in Ottawa.  If a museum is a selective recreation of the past then why was this picture worthy of such attention by the curators?  Why a ten foot painting?  Why something literally larger than life.  If a ten-foot picture of Billy Bishop glorifies war, then does a ten foot picture of a murderer somehow de-glorify it?  Does it provide some kind of balance? 

The issue is not the picture as much as its prominence.  To a student, or a new Canadian, or indeed given the public's lack of knowledge about our military history the average Canadian, this museum is the war.  When a murderer is given pride of place what are they to conclude about our war time efforts.  Showing that war is hell is obligatory for a museum.  Depicting criminals on an equal footing with heroes is not.  It is not that Clayton Matchee should be forgotten, he is part of our military history, but he is a marginal part of it.  Nor am I suggesting that the curators are calling Matchee a typical soldier.  But, what is to be made of the weight given to this one man?  What lessons are visitors to draw from the museum.  "Yeah, we saved Europe, but a few of our people were murderers?"  If you were explaining to a foreigner what it was like to live in Canada and spent, say, five of a fifteen minute conversation talking about the rising crime rate, what impressions of the country would they likely have?  Regardless of how much you praised our virtues.

We can't forget the dark side of our history, nor can we exaggerate it.

HT and a respectful disagreement to Andrew and Pete.