One hundred years ago saw the declaration of a war that would forever
change our understanding of war. With a staggering loss of life, World
War One was, by all accounts, a brutal and devastating tragedy. And yet,
on the eve of the hundredth anniversary, countries around the world are
preparing to commemorate the Great War not with regret but with
nationalist pride. Conservative forces, already well into a program to
elevate the place of the military in society, are embracing the
opportunity to replace today's apparent cynicism with an unquestioning
patriotism similar to that which existed a century ago. Politicians on
both sides of the Atlantic are imploring their citizens -- especially
their youth -- to revive the sense of duty embodied in the generation
that served in the trenches.
But is the ennobling nature of patriotism the real lesson that people
today should extract from that now-vanished generation's experience?
Through a dialogue with a pop-culture artifact from a lost world -- a
boys' annual called Young Canada -- Noble Illusions examines the use of
propaganda to glorify racist colonial wars and, in the wake of those,
the Great War. A juxtaposition of earnest instruction on the cultivation
of everyday virtues and brutal tales of war masquerading as moral
lessons on valour and righteousness, Young Canada helped to persuade a
generation of young Canadians to head eagerly to the trenches of World
War One. Concerned that the rise of militarism is leading today's youth
in a similar direction, Stephen Dale offers this examination as an
inoculation against the blind patriotism politicians are working so hard
to instill.
