Of Silences and Trenches: A Dissident View of Granatstein’s Meaning

676 The Canadian Historical Review History, revisionism has held sway because of certain larger trends in the profession (the empiricism discussed so eloquently by Fecteau) which were bolstered by local conditions, in this case the need to present Quebecers in the guise of a modem people, acting solely on the basis of 'objective' criteria. This did not make Quebec unique; as I noted earlier there were similar characteristics evident in a country, such as Ireland, whose past had also been marked by such forces as colonialism and Catholicism. There may well be other similar countries that have felt the need to project their modem credentials into the past in order to bolster their credentials in the present. In the end, while Quebec historical writing at the end of the 1990s may not be unique, it is certainly different, if one uses as the basis for comparison such 'nations' as English Canada, the United States, England, or France, the very countries to which Fecteau makes reference in his discussion of the most recent literature on the 'objectivity question.' From the perspective of those lands, there was something different going on in Quebec which was related to questions of national identity. This is not to cut Quebec historians off from larger currents of thought in the profession. It is merely to recognize that all nations do not naturally approach the past in an identical fashion. This comment is not meant as a slur; difference does not connote inferiority. I am most grateful to my colleague Graham Carr, who commented on an early version of this response. Of Silences and Trenches: A Dissident View of Granatstein's Meaning BRYAN D. PALMER To defend the Bible in this year 1798 would cost a man his life. The Beast and the Whore rule without control. I have been commanded from Hell not to print this, as it is what our Enemies wish. William Blake, 1798 As A.B. McKillop's at times fine denunciation of Who Killed Canadian History? makes abundantly clear, J.L. Granatstein's unsubstantiated polemical romp through the fields of Canadian historiography is not an The Canadian Historical Review 80, 4, December 1999, 0008-3755/99/0012-0676 $01.25/0© University ofToronto Press Incorporated CHR Forum: Of Silences and Trenches 677 account in touch with the realities of scholarship. It refuses to see what is before us, insightful advances, even truths (in McKillop's implication ), that have widened our appreciation of what constitutes politics and usefully complicated our understanding of the historical subject. McKillop rightly points to international scholarship and applauds the many and ever-increasing Canadian studies that have ended 'any pretension that a single narrative voice, based on power exercised from above, could tell the one story of Canada's true past, and do so in a palliative manner.' Most of what McKillop says seems sensible and agreeable to many of us, possibly all proper, progressive-thinking practitioners of historical interpretation, even those who question 'reality' and 'truth.' Unlike Granatstein, he is generous and fairminded , eminently pluralistic.' Perhaps to a fault. An echo of one of the epigrams with which McKillop begins his essay might well ring in our ears, if the loud praise accorded across the board of Canadian historiography does not drown out the ironies of its significance. 'Any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences' (269), notes McKillop's quoted authority, the distinguished anthropologist of the Haitian Revolution, MichelRolph Touillot.2 In expertly cataloguing Granatstein's silences, McKillop does indeed quiet the din ofhis opponent's shrill cries of 'murder most foul.' Granatstein, his crude polemic so obvious in what it ignores and slights, is easily reduced to 'the other,' a category of contemporary critical theory that is surely not always merely and simply the aggrieved victim of unjust oppression. And with this 'other' to rail against (however correctly), the righteous resistance to an ideological crusade 1 A.B. McKillop, 'Who Killed Canadian History? A View from the Trenches,' Canadian Historical Review 80, 2 (1999): 269-99, quote from 297; hereafter page citations in parentheses. J.L. Granatstein, Who Killed Canadian History? (Toronto: HarperCollins 1998), especially the twenty-seven-page chapter on academic historians , is...