Posted on 05/14/2004 7:35:59 PM PDT by quidnunc
It is a little odd, after spending 10 days in the wide open spaces of the United States, to look down on them from Canada. I am in Toronto and I feel as if I am listening to the goings-on in the great rooms of the house below, from the slightly cramped spaces of the attic. Canada feels strangely shut in. Canada exists in a sliver laid across the top of the States. It is as if Canada were America's toupée.
Not that you can say that here, of course. In Toronto, the contempt for everything America is and does is palpable. I am on a book tour, and, as one small example, all the elements of the Canadian book trade feel resentful of their role as adjuncts to the great market to the south.
Canadian book sales represent between five and 10 per cent of the North American market as a whole, and that is not a position of great potency. Canadian phone calls to American publishers, distributors and wholesalers tend to be ignored.
This is the predicament, it is often said, of the mouse in bed with the elephant. Not very sexy for either party. And when the elephant is harrumphing and trumpeting as he now is, scratching his armpits and generally spreading his enormous bulk from one side of the bed to the other, the life of the mouse is not to be envied.
But she doesn't squeal. She puts on her tweed waistcoat and half-moon glasses, and draws herself up and says: "Really. This is not the sort of behaviour of which I approve." The American elephant's hearing is drowned out by his own scratching-farting-bed-rustling business. He ignores her. The marriage persists only because of geography. Countries can't move out.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
I have always had a fond spot for the Canadians. I fought beside some of their Common Wealth Division Units in Korea and when they were on my flank, I knew it was secure, not the case with some other units. I hope this chatter of negative nature soon leads to the end of such. Both Nations have too much involved in each other for pettiness.
As a Michigan resident Canadians are close neighbors of mine. They have a vast flyover country with urbanites on the ends who think of themselves as better than the ignernt rednecks in between.
It is kind of refreshing to see an article that suggests to Canadians that they really aren't so different than we are nor are they better.
Quite frankly there is no Canadian patriotic feeling. If NewFoundland and Prince Edwards Island could decide themselves- they would be a part of the US right now- hopefully a part Massachusetts.
Apparently, Canadians also have a big problem with each other, they almost voted twice the past decade to split up their country, and both votes were razor thin.
This is a fact that is no longer even mentioned in their press, but the east French Canadians seem to dislike everybody but their own.
How Canada has changed can be seen in the way they have treated their armed service, who have been reduced from a proud force to an ignoble state.
Some Canadian is going to make a big deal about this phrase. YES AMERICA!! WITHOUT US YOU WOULD BE BALD!!!!!
Thats because theres nothing to be patriotic for. I mean its got to be one of the few countries on the face of the earth with no identifiable traits. There no Canadian food. We dominate and took over hockey. All their stars are in Hollywood, their beer sucks and smack dab in the middle is a population of French speaking Quebeians that. What a nightmare!
I think you might want to click thru and read the whole article before giving a pass to the reporter...
What is it except a ritual humiliation of the person, his body, his sexuality, his whole being? That is exactly what has been going on in the Iraqi prisons, as it did in Somalia and Bosnia. It is what happens when authority is not tempered by notions of individual freedom or dignity. It is pretty well how chimpanzees punish other chimpanzees. And it is surely a form of existence we should all choose to leave behind.
If Nicolson could compare the Abu Ghraib prison abuse to the medieval practice of drawing & quartering (plus several creative flourishes), I wonder what his frame of reference for decapitation with a dull knife might be...
Well they still have a viable and large population of Celts on the Atlantic Seaboard that this Irishman wouldn't mind sharing a country with.
Americans think this is something that just popped up recently, but believe me, it's been building for years. The same with the europeans.
Our media just hides it when a lib is in the WH.
Exactly.
It was pointed out elsewhere that the photos are of one part of one prison with the same ten or dozen perps. If this is true it needs to be stressed over & over again to stop the generalisations/assumptions that it is/was a universal problem in Iraq. I also like the suggestion to raze Abu Ghraib, it feeds too many memories in that country.
Correct. It was one cell block, of twelve.
I also like the suggestion to raze Abu Ghraib, it feeds too many memories in that country.
That decision will be the Iraqis' to make -- sometime after June 30.
Canadians have no right to look down on the US: indeed, none of us has
By Adam Nicolson - May 15 2004
It is a little odd, after spending 10 days in the wide open spaces of the United States, to look down on them from Canada. I am in Toronto and I feel as if I am listening to the goings-on in the great rooms of the house below, from the slightly cramped spaces of the attic. Canada feels strangely shut in. Canada exists in a sliver laid across the top of the States. It is as if Canada were America's toupée.
Not that you can say that here, of course. In Toronto, the contempt for everything America is and does is palpable. I am on a book tour, and, as one small example, all the elements of the Canadian book trade feel resentful of their role as adjuncts to the great market to the south.
Canadian book sales represent between five and 10 per cent of the North American market as a whole, and that is not a position of great potency. Canadian phone calls to American publishers, distributors and wholesalers tend to be ignored.
This is the predicament, it is often said, of the mouse in bed with the elephant. Not very sexy for either party. And when the elephant is harrumphing and trumpeting as he now is, scratching his armpits and generally spreading his enormous bulk from one side of the bed to the other, the life of the mouse is not to be envied.
But she doesn't squeal. She puts on her tweed waistcoat and half-moon glasses, and draws herself up and says: "Really. This is not the sort of behaviour of which I approve." The American elephant's hearing is drowned out by his own scratching-farting-bed-rustling business. He ignores her. The marriage persists only because of geography. Countries can't move out.
Canadian liberal disgust at American neo-colonialism, heightened by the ever-unrolling Abu Ghraib scandal, seems widespread here. Not quite universal, because Michael Ignatieff, Harvard professor and Canada's most public intellectual, is making repeated claims for a kind of humanitarian colonialism, by which the West should regularly intervene to save people from despotic governments. He is loved in Canada, more though because "he's one of ours" than for what he says.
Most people are revolted and disturbed by what they see as systematic abuse within the Iraqi jails. But there is a slight problem in Canadians climbing on too high a horse. Canada, too, has its own record of military abuse. In Bosnia, 47 Canadian UN soldiers and officers had been told to guard a mental hospital at Bakovici until the hospital staff returned. The hospital instead became the setting for heavy drinking; sex between soldiers, nurses and interpreters that violated regulations; black-market sales; and harassment of the patients.
In Somalia, in the early 1990s, members of the Canadian Airborne Regiment killed three Somalian teenagers suspected of looting their compound in Belet Huen, torturing at least one of the boys. They beat, tied and bound many others, and made videotapes of themselves boasting that they "ain't killed enough niggers yet". When the photos and video surfaced, Maj Gen Herbert Pitts said: "Men will be men, and in stressful circumstances that should be accepted." Perhaps men will be men. Belgian and Italian UN soldiers have done the same sort of thing. And it remains unclear, notwithstanding the ridiculous Daily Mirror pictures, whether British soldiers have not entered the same territory.
A Canadian history professor said something interesting to me about this. "It's not merely sadism," he said. "Not just a releasing of the wicked aspects of men. You can see it all as the resurfacing of an earlier form of justice."
We had been talking about 17th-century England. I had mentioned the monstrous forms of punishment meted out, among others, to those suspected, often wrongly, of being involved in the Gunpowder Plot. "Hanged, drawn and quartered" does not even begin to describe it.
This is the 1606 sentence on one (provably innocent) Catholic priest: he was to be dragged backwards through the streets of London on a hurdle "with his Head declining downward, and laying so near the Ground as may be, being thought unfit to take benefit of the common Air". Then he was to "be strangled, being hanged up by the Neck between Heaven and Earth, as deemed unworthy of both, or either. Then he is to be cut down alive, and to have his Privy Parts cut off and burnt before his Face, as being unworthily begotten, and unfit to leave any Generation after him. His Bowels and inlay'd Parts taken out and burnt, who inwardly had conceived and harboured in his heart such horrible Treason. After, to have his Head cut off, which had imagined the Mischief. And lastly, his Body to be quartered, and the Quarters set up in some high and eminent Place, to the View and Detestation of Men, and to become a Prey for the Fowls of the Air."
We think of this as disgustingly and pedantically elaborate cruelty, done to a man who was still half-alive, or meant to be. What is it except a ritual humiliation of the person, his body, his sexuality, his whole being? That is exactly what has been going on in the Iraqi prisons, as it did in Somalia and Bosnia. It is what happens when authority is not tempered by notions of individual freedom or dignity. It is pretty well how chimpanzees punish other chimpanzees. And it is surely a form of existence we should all choose to leave behind.
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004.
I'm just asking because I've heard about this before-in fact, one of my history professors was Canadian and discussed this when we covered that era-but I have never been able to get any specifics on the matter.
I know that there were individuals from many countries, including Mexico, The Phillipines, Australia, etc., that fought on our side during the Vietnam War, but I don't know of any non-Vietnamese units that fought with us in the South during the course of the war.
CANUCKS BLOW
I can honestly say that the only 2 I met and really ever liked were transplants from elsewhere. But then, most of the Canadians I've met were from the Toronto area. It's a big country, so I can't really judge them all, but it doesn't seem like all that fun a place.
By and large, I know alot of Canadians who are fond of America, most of them tend to live in "fly over country" of Canada. It's the Socialist, Liberal element that has a complete disdain for America, just your usual run of the mill "Hate-America" crowd. That crowd exists here in America in the Liberal enclaves and everywhere else Socialism thrives.
There were some. I knew of one, who went to Vietnam, and stayed in the US Army 20 years. When he retired from the US Army, he stayed in Colorado, however, and did not go back to Canada.
That was a different Canada. It is long gone now.
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