We have always been at war with Oceania

[sabotabby]

So what's our Fearless Kitten-Eating Leader been up to lately?

Besides losing over $3 billion of Canadians' money (but...but...fiscal conservatism and respect for taxpayers!), attempting to take control of the publicly funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and muzzling freedom of information, he has now slid all the way into outright fascism and is attempting to rewrite Canadian history.

The latter is of particular interest to me as an educator. I mean, why do Canadians fall for someone like Harper in the first place? I find that, by and large, Canadians are intellectually uncurious, bigoted, provincial, and uninterested in critically examining our past. It makes it easy for someone like Harper to ooze in and spend tons of our money trying to retcon Canada into a militaristic America-lite state.

Canadian history is already taught in the dullest possible way to make sure that children aren't interested in knowing more. It by and large glosses over unpleasant incidents where settlers engaged in genocide against the indigenous population, put Japanese-Canadians in internment camps, sent Jews back to Nazi Germany to be slaughtered, bulldozed black communities, briefly flirted with slavery, and so on. It excludes the contributions of marginalized populations; textbooks will drone on about names and dates relating to important white men, then devote about a paragraph per chapter to "The Role of Women." While there are certainly engaging, creative history teachers who make the subject come to life (I was lucky to have quite a few!) the curriculum itself leaves a lot to be desired.

And now Harper's going to make it worse, despite not actually having the legal jurisdiction to do so. We've seen similar efforts in places like Arizona and Texas, where they're determined to erase the contributions of Latinos and blacks. Tomorrow's schoolchildren will learn more about war (in an effort to glorify Canada's role in occupying Afghanistan) and presumably less about, say, universal health care or the Winnipeg General Strike or anything else that prepares them to stand up to their government and demand better.

Harper wants total control. It's not enough to tear this country to shreds; he needs to salt the earth so nothing good can ever grow here again.

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past. Rinse, lather, repeat.

Comments

[seaya.livejournal.com]

I had no idea Canada had internment as well, nor much of the rest of those things. (knew about treatment of First Nations)

[sabotabby]

Yep. (I didn't learn about it in history class beyond more than a mention that it happened and we feel really bad about it now, but in English we read Obasan by Joy Kogawa, who was imprisoned in one.

Slavery in Canada was only abolished in the 1830s, but good luck hearing about it in any history class. The Hanging of Angelique by Afua Cooper should be mandatory reading before graduation, but of course isn't because it makes us look bad.

Africville sometimes gets a teeny sidebar in history books, no mention of other communities that met the same fate.

There's quite a bit of coverage of WWII (two chapters, minimum, in most of the textbooks I've seen) and Canadian involvement. My own high school textbook had a page devoted to the Holocaust, and no mention of the phrase "None is too many. However, the grandfather of one of my classmates was among the few survivors of the St. Louis, so we bloody well learned about that, too.

[smhwpf.livejournal.com]

I think few countries are inclined to critically examine their past. Certainly not the USA or the UK. (We're sometimes told that Britain should "stop apologizing" for the Empire. I missed the bit where we started. Schoolkids are certainly taught little or nothing about the atrocities of Empire.)

The one exception I am aware of is Germany, for obvious reasons.

Still, doesn't make what Harper's doing less ghastly.

[sabotabby]

It's true. But this is the point where denial of the past is suddenly and bizarrely a lesser evil compared to revising the past.

[ironed_orchid]

In Australia for the last 20 years there's been a movement to make history more inclusive and diverse, and to include not only Aboriginal history, but also to be more open about things like the "terra nullus" myth and the stolen generation. This has been reflected not just in what is taught in schools but what is exhibited in museums and which projects get funding.

OF COURSE, under the Howard govt. (Australian Liberal Party, but actually conservative right wing), this was labelled "The black armband approach to history" and there were lots of attempts to discredit it. We're in an election year, and one of the Liberals platforms is that they want to go back to a more traditional version of history which will be all about great white men and yay progress!

The saddest thing is that lots of people probably think that is a good thing. On the day that Kevin Rudd and the Labor govt made a formal apology to the Aboriginal People for the stolen generation, I was on a bus and there was talk back radio on and people were calling in to say they didn't think they needed to apologize, and that it was all in the past (it went until 1969). Or they just don't care.

[ironed_orchid]

Sound exactly like what Cameron wants to do with the history curriculum in the UK, and what Abbott proposes to do here if he is elected.

Motherfucking conservatives really can't tolerate the idea that there are points of view that don't match their own.

[sabotabby]

There are no such things as different points of view. If you disagree, you're a terrorist.

[lienne.livejournal.com]

snarrrrrrrrrrrrrrl

[sabotabby]

I heard they're actually taking volunteers for a one-way trip to Mars now.

Don't be so mean!

[ed-rex.livejournal.com]

Golly gee, aren't you being a little harsh?!? After all, our Dear Leader has promised 82 Million Dollars for clean energy! And you know that's going to knock Mr. Climate Change right out of the picture!

[sabotabby]

I wonder how much of that will go to propaganda efforts to make the tar sands look like clean energy.

At a guess ...

[ed-rex.livejournal.com]

... I'm going to say $102 million. (The extra $20 million is to account for what will go missing.)

[sabotabby]

Hahahaha.

Sob.

[cannibal-x.livejournal.com]

My high school history in small-town Ontario was actually pretty good and covered all those things you've mentioned as being excluded. It's not that the teacher was a crazy radical or anything, either, she taught a textbook that covered all of that stuff. It was before the standardized curriculum was brought in by Harris, however.

[sabotabby]

I'm very much a product of the Harris years. It's my impression that textbooks have actually gotten worse since then, judging by the odd time I sub for a history class.

[cannibal-x.livejournal.com]

Stories like this aren't exactly encouraging.

[sabotabby]

Oh, don't even get me started on Civics. It's one of the most important topics that schools cover, so of course it's crammed into half a semester, ensuring that even the most passionate teacher can't find a way to make it fun while still covering the whole curriculum. (The other half of the semester is Careers; the Careers curriculum can be covered in two weeks. Not to mention the fact that Civics is a Grade 10 course, a year already diluted through the sheer amount of instructional time devoted to preparing kids for the standardized literacy test.)

[lienne.livejournal.com]

My Civics course actually taught us an important political lesson

See, we had a fake election where we divided the class into groups of one to three and everybody made their own political parties, with platforms and stuff

And no one was interested enough to actually look at each other's platforms and judge them on their real or perceived merits, so a lot of people ended up pity-voting for the least popular dude in the class, and a lot of other people I think ended up voting for somebody popular, and for some reason my memory insists that there was a dramatic moment where one guy was the last to vote, possibly because he skipped the class we took the vote in, and everybody else knew Unpopular Dude was tied with Popular Party, but nobody was allowed to tell Truant, so Truant voted Unpopular and Unpopular won the election because of widespread apathy and nobody thinking anybody else would vote for the notorious one.

[sabotabby]

See also: How Ford and Harper got elected.

[sqrt-joy.livejournal.com]

And it's the course they give to newbie teachers who are split across 4 different departments so you know there's some quality time being put into the course.

[sabotabby]

I wish they'd give it to me! I know more about government than most of the teachers who get stuck with it.

[darkwaver.livejournal.com]

OMG, 1984 is tied with Wuthering Heights for my fave book.

You are so awesome!

[sabotabby]

Neither are a How-To manual.

[darkwaver.livejournal.com]

Quite the opposite (tho I sure do love those "Heathcliff" types ;)

[begundan.livejournal.com]

>> I find that, by and large, Canadians are intellectually uncurious, bigoted, provincial, and uninterested in critically examining our past.

I agree with about 50% of that sentence. But I don't think Canadians are particularly bigoted, I don't think singling out "uninterested in critically examining our past" as a special case of "intellectually uncurious" is particularly meaningful, and I don't know who is, by and large, intellectually curious.

[kryss-labryn.livejournal.com]

Oh, for shit's sake... God damn it, I am getting really fucking tired of Conservatives in power. As if all this wasn't bad enough, I get to deal with an extra facet of his nonsense, which is the whole "Let's make everything Christian!! :D" thing. Because acknowledging both Protestants and Catholics is not what "inclusiveness" means. I'm a Heathen, which means I follow my aboriginal gods--Odin, Thor, Frey and Freya, all them. Which was actually illegal until the Fifties, and wasn't a protected right here in Canada until the Charter of Rights and Freedoms added religious freedom it in the mid-Eighties. And because there's so very much ignorance about non-Middle Eastern and pagan religions out there, a lot of people confuse us with Satanists (the "traditional" kind, not the actual kind, who are mainly just nihilists) and/or white supremacists and Nazis (who appropriated a lot of our symbols but who have about the same relationship to actual Heathens as the Klu Klux Klan does to most Christians). So, especially in small communities, we need to be very careful about who we let know our religious orientation, because there can be a backlash. Where we were in BC, it probably wouldn't have gone beyond a certain level of ostracism (hooray for Canadian apathy!), but in the States people have had been investigated by child protective services and some had their children seized solely because of their religion.

So when right-wing Christian Conservatives get into power it's that additional level of scariness for us. Merely following a non-Christian path shouldn't be enough to reap the kind of repercussions we risk. Well, in fact, it really shouldn't be--it's illegal now. But it's also hard to prove.

The main symbol of our faith, the equivalent of a Christian wearing a cross, is the Thor's hammer. Which got listed as a hate symbol on a pretty major list a few years back. We've since managed to get it revised to say that it's a symbol of this religion that may be worn by White Supremacists, but to not take it as proof positive in the absence of any other indications. Which is like saying that the person wearing a cross in public might not actually be a member of the Klan, but which, I suppose, is a step up from saying they are. *pinches nose*

Aargh. I really, really, really dislike the Conservatives. About the only thing I DO agree with them on is the gun registry; on pretty much everything else we're with the NDP.

On a lighter note, there's this.

[sabotabby]

I love me some Hipster Harper.

But ugh, I hear ya on freedom of religion. Many prominent Canadian Jews have made themselves useful idiots to the Harper regime—which is stupid, as he wants to use us to end the world*—so I'm not personally concerned for my safety or anything. But the establishment of the Office of Religious Freedom makes clear his priorities where religious rights are concerned.

* And I feel like I'm in the middle of a Buffy episode just typing that sentence, but he really does!