Re-Manufacturing the War of 1812
April 30, 2013 § 2 Comments
Over at the National Council of Public History‘s (NCPH) blog, history@work (wherein public historians such as yours truly discuss issues related to history and the public and historical public memory), I have a new piece up on Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s delusional history of the War of 1812, entitled Re-manufacturing 1812: Stephen Harper’s Glorious Vision of Canada’s Past. From the title, you can probably guess my angle on Harper’s attempts to re-brand Canadian History through the War of 1812. Quite frankly, I find it disturbing. Let me know what you think.
Matthew Barlow 
Bravo. I’ve been waiting for someone to call out our military-machismo-obsessed, chest-thumping revisionist PM. His magic eraser attempts at rewriting not only our history, but our present and future will hopefully be just a blip, when future historians look back on the Harper period, as a time when we collectively lost our minds in voting in a PM lost in an abstract, alternate world.
Thanks. Harper’s ahistorical obsession with our military past has been irritating me for sometime. I wrote this: http://ncphoffthewall.blogspot.com/2011/09/ice-wars-rebirth-of-winnipeg-jets.html in 2011 when the Winnipeg Jets were re-born with their martial uniforms and the sucking up to what was then the Canadian Air Force. I read Ian McKay & Jamie Swift’s book, Warrior Nation, a couple of months ago, which is a larger and more sustained (though problematic) critique of Harper’s military obsession.