This, an
episode of the summer session of The Agenda with summer replacement host Piya Chattopadhyay, features polemicist (masquerading as historian) Jamie Swift (Queens University) who has some strange but mostly childish ideas about the military, history and Canada,
The short form is: Jamie Swift is either deeply troubled or terminally stupid.
The long form is that Swift's new book,
Warrior Nation: Rebranding Canada in an Age of Anxiety, is Yves Engler's
diatribe (which leads this thread) taken to excruciating lengths.
One valid point Swift almost manages to make: most modern military historians, folks like Jack Granatstein and David Bercuson, are
not writing history, they are not even trying to write history - they too, like Swift, are little better than pamphleteers.
In his famous exchange with Zhou Enlai, Henry Kissinger, hoping to find a bit of uncontroversial small talk said something like, "What do you think are the long term results of the French Revolution?"* Zhou replied, "It is too soon to tell." That's what historian must think about e.g. World War II, Korea and everything after them - the results are still unclear, they are too close to us, we cannot, yet, separate fact from fiction. What we have, in the forms or e.g. Jack Granatstein and Jamie Swift are dueling polemicists pretending that what they say has even modest significance.
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* It may be that Kissinger actually asked Zhou about he Paris student protests of 1968 - but the French Revolution makes for a better anecdote. Kissinger needed an entrée to make up for the notoriously rude snub administered to Zhou in Geneva (in 1954) by US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.