Love, Hate and Fear in Canada's Cold War (review)

Thanks to this short but engaging collection of essays, originally a lecture series at the University of British Columbia's Green College, the extent and complexity of Canada's participation in the Cold War are less of a mystery. The Cold War, or any important category of historical experience, hardly lends itself to tidy resolution in the way Agatha Christie novels do. Rather, the contributors show us ways that Cold War-era uncertainty could alter or, occasionally, entirely remake the lives of those unfortunate enough to exist (or want to exist) outside established norms. We see more clearly how an anxious state could commit resources and time to monitoring and suppressing political, sexual, and social identities it knew very little about. For ardent cold warriors, Communists were often the most convenient target, but anxiety also enabled the persecution of - to cite a frequently explored example in this volume - gays and lesbians. We see also that it is worthwhile to contest what Gary Kinsman calls 'the hegemonic view of the Cold War ... that it represented a conflict between the American and Soviet Empires' (113). Especially in a country like Canada, one not considered to be on the front lines of the Cold War, the domestic fallout from it was at least the equal of its implications for foreign policy, chiefly because the Cold War threat was constructed or 'produced,' as this collection suggests, as a cultural one.

Editor Richard Cavell's introduction is concise, yet he makes his own contribution (a well-contextualized discussion of some Cold War themes in Canadian literature) before stepping aside to let contributors' works fill the canvas he defines. The works are divided into three categories - fear, hate, and love - all of which struggle to contain the histories that unfold. Part 1, 'Fear,' includes Reg Whitaker's take on the shifting definition of enemy, both during the Cold War and since its end, in which he emphasizes the uncomfortable relationship Canada has had with the United States, its chief Cold War ally. Steve Hewitt ably shows us how fear of subversion could give the apparatus of surveillance a momentum that opened a multitude of files and contributed, ultimately, to the RCMP's exit from the field of national security. In part 2, 'Hate,' Franca Iacovetta's look at how refugees from the Communist bloc were sexualized in the media or labelled as 'DP degenerates' highlights the role of uncertainty in establishing notions of citizenship and normalcy. Gary Kinsman's theoretically ambitious attempt to queer the Cold War presents clear evidence of conditions in which hate flourished - the hyper-cautious ignorance that linked homosexuality with Communism. Even part 3, 'Love,' is about the difficulty of love (or even lust) outside norms of the Cold War era. Mary Louise Adams examines the case against a book containing lesbian content, and demonstrates how the printed word could raise the spectre of subversion for those conditioned to mount reflexive defences of home and family. Valerie Korinek notes Chatelaine's approach toward anxiety-ridden issues (atomic weapons, Cold War politics), an approach that seemed antithetical to the themes of love, marriage, and children that were the magazine's usual stock in trade. Thomas Waugh's guided tour through the first post-war decade of Canadian cinema points to an awkward discomfort with homosexuality, a discomfort exhibited most conspicuously through silence, or, at best, via cryptic treatments. In his coda to the volume, Robert Martin reinforces the link that Waugh makes by observing that the Cold War was a time when 'friends and colleagues betrayed each other, accusing them of deviant sexuality or deviant politics - the two were one in those painful days' (208). We already knew about the betrayals, but the histories featured in this volume make it plain that very little evidence would be needed to make these betrayals effective, and that the personal and the political could be elided in troubling ways. We should not...