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  • Living with War: Twentieth-Century Conflict in Canadian and American History and Memory by Robert Teigrob
  • Alexander W. G. Herd
Robert Teigrob, Living with War: Twentieth-Century Conflict in Canadian and American History and Memory. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. 471 pp. $85.00.

In Living with War, Robert Teigrob challenges predominant English Canadian viewpoints on Canada's military history and memory. These perspectives postulate that the national military past has been a unifying force in the country's history, that Canada is a more peaceable nation than the United States of America, and (paradoxically) that Canada's war efforts have been more noble than those of its southern neighbor, where the glorification of war goes hand-in-hand with being American. Teigrob uses a transnational, comparative approach to Canada-U.S. relations, war and memory, and the nature of international conflict to argue that although Canada and the United States share a "synchronicity of twentieth-century experiences" that contribute "to national cultures which are given to celebrate rather than regret war" (p. 16), English Canadians have had the greater inclination to venerate rather than critique military actions. By contrast, in the United States there is "a powerful current of self-censure" in assessments of international relations and foreign war (p. 3), with many U.S. citizens consistently and openly criticizing their country's military ventures and thereafter significantly influencing their conduct. An equivalent element has moved more slowly and cautiously in English Canadian academic and popular perspectives of warfare.

Teigrob aims to substantiate his argument by drawing on select academic sources and an array of popular cultural productions—war memorials and commemorations, political speech, museum exhibitions, opinion polls, journalistic accounts, film, literature, and music. In the first section of the book, he shows how twentieth-century war has been represented and remembered in the dominant Canadian and U.S. narratives. Teigrob demonstrates that early jingoistic accounts of U.S. participation in the War of 1898, the First and Second World Wars, and the Korean War were met by contemporary and historical criticism of the morality, official justifications, overall purpose, conduct, and aftermath of U.S. involvement. The treatises on U.S. efforts in Korea offer plenty of "caustic interpretations" (p. 81), with writers exposing problematic dimensions such as the use of napalm and the alliance with the autocratic Syngman Rhee. Negative U.S. views flourished in the context of the Vietnam War, but Teigrob makes the sound observation that they represented "the culmination rather than origin of a cultural shift toward a more pessimistic appraisal of soldiering and militarism" (p. 82).

Teigrob's analysis of perspectives on Canada's effort in the Boer wars, in both World Wars, and in the Korean War overwhelmingly demonstrates the comparatively small amount of critique within English Canadian academia and popular culture and the significant backlash against—if not outright silencing of—that critique. The oft-cited illustrations were the reactions against the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's 1992 documentary series The Valour and the Horror and the Canadian War Museum's exhibit on the air bombing campaign against Germany, both of which presented [End Page 273] elements countering the conventional notions of Canadian heroism in the Second World War. Moreover, Canadian historians writing about the negative aspects of their country's military history have avoided the repudiation of war principles, purposes, methods, and consequences as demonstrated in the United States. Instead, they have focused on, for example, the underfunding and underequipping of Canadian troops in Korea, blaming larger structural issues such as higher command or deficient government budgets. Teigrob's explication of the widespread interpretation of the Second World War as the last "good war" bolsters his contention that subsequent Canadian military efforts, beginning with Korea, "are largely absent from public remembrance—as they are, though to a lesser extent, in the United States—and vastly underrepresented in Canada's historical literature" (p. 88).

In the second section of the book, Teigrob addresses the "why" of U.S. and Canadian war representation and remembrance. For English Canada, warfare was the vehicle for the building, reinvigorating, and defining of a mature, internationally recognized nation, an attitude largely maintained by a combination...

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