Brent H. Cameron: We must tell our story, or others will for us
Canada should not outsource the telling of our history to foreign productions that defame Canadian heroes.
The last major popular treatment of John Graves Simcoe, the man who oversaw the creation of English-speaking Canada and tried to end the pernicious practice of slavery, occurred in the 2015 AMC television series ‘TURN: Washington’s Spies’.
Purporting to be a historical drama about the American Revolution, the show was reasonably well-received and popular with audiences.
However, AMC’s Simcoe is not the Simcoe of history or fact.
It is not the Simcoe of duty and compassion. It is a Simcoe who acts as a foil in service of the embellishment of the American founding story.
It is a Simcoe who displays a penchant for cruel and sadistic behaviour, and who routinely tortures and murders in service of the Empire with cold calculation.
Simcoe’s portrayal is that of a Waffen-SS officer teleported to the late 18th century, then handed a musket and the kit of a Loyalist regiment. It is bad enough that a British and Canadian hero is maligned with falsehoods that historians have debunked – and that the screenwriter himself admitted were contrived for dramatic effect – but the fact that we cannot be bothered to rebut these lies is worse.
When we discuss what the purpose of history is, we get all the Santayana-themed warnings about avoiding past mistakes or the observation often attributed to Mark Twain that ‘history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes’.
Central to these two perspectives is the idea that we live in a version of ‘Groundhog Day’ and that the lessons of repeated experience allow us to escape the periodic doom loops into which humanity traps itself. But the reason history is such a potent force in helping societies get out of proverbial ditches is that it relies on truth and fact as if they were principles of physics.
Bradley Haley: The language of the United States is English, and only English
Last March, President Donald Trump signed an executive order, ‘Designating English as the Official Language of The United States’. Not many years ago, such an executive order would likely have seemed unneeded, even bizarre. It would be like Mexico declaring Spanish its official language — something Mexico has never actually done.
Lies do not get you out of the mud – they just make you feel better about being stuck. But, like physics, truth cares little about agendas or interests. It exists to call things as they are with a measure of detached sangfroid. It is we, with our jumble of complexities, who invest those events with meaning.
Nations, as the ultimate custodians of their own interests, have long finessed facts to reinforce narratives of unity and noble ends.