Enemies Within: Italian and Other Internees in Canada and Abroad ed. by Franca Iacovetta, Roberto Perin, Angelo Principe (review)

490 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Vancouver B whether Sit Down and Drink Your Beer would have made a larger statement about British Columbia if it had taken the whole province, rather than just its largest city, as its locus of study. Since Campbell=s argument about moral regulation emphasizes the regulatory power of broadly based discourses, I also wondered whether the beliefs, values, and outlook of British Columbians in the 1940s and 1950s could have been explored more fully, and their impact on the regulation of drinking behaviour further discussed. For instance, what was the religious character of the province, and did the religious outlook of key segments of British Columbia society, such as the Social Credit members of the provincial legislature, affect moral regulation? Finally, is it possible to compare moral regulation at this time in British Columbia with other English-speaking parts of the country, such as Ontario? Such questions aside, this well written book broadens our understanding of the history of liquor in British Columbia and illustrates how cultural theory can enrich historical inquiry. Now that the provincial government is about to restructure the province=s liquor distribution system, its appearance is also timely. (ROBERT A.J. MC DONALD) Franca Iacovetta, Roberto Perin, and Angelo Principe, editors. Enemies Within: Italian and Other Internees in Canada and Abroad University of Toronto Press 2000. viii, 430. $65.00, $29.95 The ways in which historical memory is manipulated have been a concern of much recent Canadian historical writing. This collection tackles a central question of historical memory for many Italian Canadians: the extent to which the internment in prison camps of six hundred Italian Canadians during the Second World War was justified. Ethnic community leaders in the post-war period portrayed the internments as uniformly unjust, suggesting that Italophobia, rather than valid concerns for national security, motivated state actors. The internees, they proclaimed, were almost uniformly apolitical ordinary folk with little knowledge and certainly no organizational affiliations with the Fascists who ran Italy after 1922. Their campaign was effective enough to win an unreserved apology from Brian Mulroney for the internments in 1988. But, although the majority of the authors of articles for this book are Italian Canadian, they reject this artificially created community consensus as a manipulation of the historical record. Collectively these articles reveal that earlier accounts of the incarcerations allowed long-time fascists with close connections to the Italian Fascist movement to hide behind Canadians of Italian descent who were indeed unjustly imprisoned. Take, for example, Mario Duliani, whose >internment narrative,= as Roberto Perin suggests, helped to create the mythology of random arrests and internments of Italian humanities 491 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Canadians. Duliani, it turns out, was a very active fascist, whom the Canadian authorities had every reason to believe might collaborate with the enemy. This journalist had certainly worked with home-grown French Canadian fascists as well as Italian Canadian fascists in the 1930s to promote fascism and anti-Semitism, and acted, in effect, as a propagandist for the Italian government. The evidence in this book establishes convincingly that the small percentage of Canada=s Italian community who were interned included some of the most active and obnoxious Fascist collaborators in that community. Despite their protestations to be ordinary and non-political folk, the majority were middle-class and community leaders, with few members of the working class among them. Even in the camps, they continued surreptitiously to flaunt their identity with fascism. As Gabriele Scardellato reveals in his article, >Images of Internment,= the very pictures taken in the camps that have been used to demonstrate the >just folks= view of internees are filled with Fascist insignia on clothing. The successful, if fraudulent, Italian Canadian campaign for full exoneration of the internees is hardly a singular event in Canadian history. As Frances Swyripa makes plain in her assessment of the far more just campaign for exoneration of the Ukrainians interned during the First World War (because they were nominally citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was one of the enemy countries), this campaign has...