Iterator said:The point being, as an example, a Canadian who joined the US army and fought in Vietnam is an American War veteran who happens to be a Canadian - not a Canadian War veteran.
Being one... +1
Iterator said:The point being, as an example, a Canadian who joined the US army and fought in Vietnam is an American War veteran who happens to be a Canadian - not a Canadian War veteran.
exercist said:48 Highrs - Please re-read my post carefully. If you are talking about the two times I think you are talking about, Canada went to war. Canadians, also and by exception, fought with allied units and formations, with the authority of the Canadian government. That is not fighting in a foreign war; that is fighting in a Canadian war.
Joining the US Armed Forces in order to fight in Vietnam is fighting in a foreign war. Isn't it?
Perhaps I would be a little less cynical if our allies were a little less idiosyncratic about which repugnant regimes they support and which ones they attack.
exercist said:Please review the previous posts. The issue was raised in the context of whether Canada should place its dirty little secrets in museums or quietly forget about them. My Lai was mentioned - and nobody ever claimed that the US was alone in having blots on its historical escutcheon. Let us indeed take a moment to condemn the evil, whether institutionalized or otherwise, that led to Auschwitz, the Katyn Forest, the Burma Railway, My Lai and Belet Huen.
The United States has been, and has an amazing ability to be a force of good in the world, as a result of its many positive attributes. Does anyone see that happening right now?
exercist said:Please review the previous posts. The issue was raised in the context of whether Canada should place its dirty little secrets in museums or quietly forget about them....
exercist said:...On the War Museum, I was interested to see that there was a small display recognizing the Canadians who - for whatever reasons - volunteered to join the US armed forces during Vietnam. There was not however any recognition of the Canadians who served with the MacKenzie-Papineau Battalion in the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. ...
exercist said:The United States has been, and has an amazing ability to be a force of good in the world, as a result of its many positive attributes. Does anyone see that happening right now?
Chop said:What is hapenning is an outrage, there are 2 paintings depicting Clayton Matchee and Kyle Brown beating and torturing and killing that Somalian that will be in the new museum of Cliff Chadderton is livid. He is well known in the veteran community as well as head of War Amps Canada.
http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2005/05/03/war-musuem050503.html
This is just an awful shame, Joe Geurts and Gertrude Kears should be ashamed. for even thinking of putting such a painting in the museum, I will never step foot in that building ever in my life, some 10,000 Canadian Airborne Regiment men have been put to shame because of the disbandment because of the action of two men, it was all political due the fact they had to shrink the budget at the time, but it looks like the shame will continue.
ParaMedTech said:I'll certainly be interested to see what comes out of it, but I'm a little perturbed that DND isn't letting our war artists into theater...isn't that the point of war artists? Park their easels in an FOB, and paint away?
I know we've got our image techs out and about (not enough, we're still seeing Kestersen's (sp?) video as the only CTV TFA video clip) but what about the other mediums? I've been awed by some of Canada's war art, lets make sure Afghanistan is represented in the same body of work.
DF
ParaMedTech said:I had heard of Ms Kearn's work, through members here. I wonder what the shift was between Roto 0 and Roto 3(?). Salary alone?
ParaMedTech said:but I'm a little perturbed that DND isn't letting our war artists into theater...isn't that the point of war artists? Park their easels in an FOB, and paint away?
I know we've got our image techs out and about (not enough, we're still seeing Kestersen's (sp?) video as the only CTV TFA video clip) but what about the other mediums? I've been awed by some of Canada's war art, lets make sure Afghanistan is represented in the same body of work.
DF
The Afghan War, through our eyes
Val Ross visits a riveting new exhibit at the Canadian War Museum that, instead of artifacts, relies on video and photographs to tell its stories
VAL ROSS
From Monday's Globe and Mail
OTTAWA — Like the conflict it chronicles, Afghanistan: A Glimpse of War, which opened this month at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, is unfinished. The exhibition begins very precisely, with the events of Sept. 11, 2001, when al-Qaeda terrorists smashed planes into the World Trade Center in New York City, and of Sept. 20, when Canada officially decided to join the mission against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
But the final rooms of the show dwindle down to blank walls -- because who knows how the story ends?
A Glimpse of War fascinates on several levels. Compared to a typical exhibition, it has been created from precious few artifacts. Mostly it is made up of videos by documentary filmmaker Garth Pritchard, who's been over to Afghanistan five times since 2002, and the photos of Stephen Thorne, a Canadian Press photographer who accompanied the Canadian forces on their first helicopter assault in March 2002; he stayed for nine months between 2003-2004. It was because Thorne's son was dating the daughter of a war museum employee that the museum first learned of the trove of visual material available.
After contacting Thorne and Pritchard, staff assembled the show in 18 months -- breakneck by museological standards (last year's Clash of Empires show took more than a decade to organize).
Still, the few artifacts in this show have a powerful impact. Sept. 11, for example, is evoked not only through photos and texts but also $10,000 worth of Canadian $100 bills, crushed into a solid brick by the buildings' collapse (did they belong to one of the doomed Canadians working in the towers?). There's also a crumpled piece from one of the killer planes.
Nearby are the last messages from the doomed people inside the buildings, and newspapers blaring day-of-infamy headlines. But the museum's own low-key curatorial texts avoid editorializing. "We're sensitive that people will say this show is nothing more than propaganda for the government," says Dean Oliver, the War Museum's director of research and exhibitions. "We want the participants to speak more to you than I or the historian."
Indeed, the show is a case study in how to be as apolitical as possible -- a wise decision given the divisions in this country over Canada's involvement. Besides, as Oliver points out, "We don't have Cabinet records, we don't know why key decisions were made." Instead, the exhibition invites the public to editorialize by posting their comments on boards at key junctures.
By the 9/11 portion of the show, a young visitor has posted, "I was five and all I can remember is watching a plane flying into two towers and lots of blak [sic] dust." A more adult hand has written: "I am a firefighter. I lost close personal friends."
Another station poses the question: How should Canada have responded? "Exactly as they did!" responds someone signing herself "Widow of CF member." But another response is: "Le Canada devrait agir comme lui-même, non pas comme les Etats Unis" [in our own way, not the Americans']. In organizing Afghanistan, curators bypassed the region's history; there's only a glancing reference to U.S. funding of rebels in the 1990s, or about insurgents who proved eager to bomb a hand that fed them. However, a tantalizing sense of how some in the region regard al-Qaeda is evidenced by a box of a popular children's candy, which bears the startling label Osama Bin Laden Kulfa Balls.
In this show, Afghans sometimes are shown as rebuilders of their ruined country and its political institutions (my favourite footage shows women at a polling booth lifting their burkas to kiss each other in congratulation after voting). But mostly the locals are depicted as enigmatic allies or implacable adversaries -- in other words, as Canadian soldiers see them. Fundamentally, this is a show about Canadians: what we have done and endured since our troops officially arrived on Feb. 2, 2002.
We have shot -- a MacMillan Tac .50 long-range rifle is displayed under a rather proud reminder of the prowess of Canadian snipers. We have been shot at -- Pritchard's footage shows a U.S. surgeon slicing through the Canadian flag tattoo on a soldier's shoulder, and then removing shrapnel. We have killed and been killed -- a U.S. officer threw Thorne off the Kandahar military base on April 15, 2002 for taking photos of dead U.S. soldiers. Two days later Thorne was allowed back -- to cover the deaths of four Canadians killed by friendly fire.
The final elements of the show are the twisted wreckage of an armoured G-wagon destroyed by a roadside bomb, and the museum's video assemblage of photos sent by the families of 44 Canadian soldiers who have died in the conflict. It takes 15 minutes to see the whole thing. Many visitors stay for the duration, out of respect and because it's difficult to look away.
When I do look away, I discover one extra artifact that has been added to Afghanistan, a family snapshot of a young man taped to the museum wall. A Remembrance Day poppy and a black ribbon are pinned to the photo.
For now the curators are leaving it there. "It's the people's museum," says Oliver.