Who Will Control the ‘World Island’?
Henry Srebrnik [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
In a seminal article, ‘The Geographical Pivot of History', published in 1904, the British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder, one of the prominent theoreticians of geopolitics, wrote that a country that gained control over the Eurasian heartland - what he referred to as the "pivot area" - would eventually gain hegemony over the entire globe.
Mackinder succinctly summarized his theory thus: "Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island controls the world."
At the time, the vast and strategically important central regions of Asia were governed by the Russians in the north and the British further south.
The British had gained control over much of India by the end of the 18th century, and extinguished Muslim rule altogether when in 1857 they eliminated the Mughal Empire, which for more than three centuries had dominated most of the subcontinent.
Meanwhile, the Russian Empire had expanded into the Muslim regions of central Asia, inhabited mainly by Turkic peoples, in the mid-19th century.
Fabled centres of Islamic culture such as Samarkand and Tashkent fell to the Russians as the Emirate of Bukhara and the Khanates of Khiva and Kokand came under Russian suzerainty.
The British, fearful of Russian expansionism and seeking to protect their Indian empire, fought three wars in Afghanistan. The first war, from 1839 to 1842, led to a massive defeat of the British forces by Afghan warriors and a retreat back to India.
The Russians continued their advances in central Asia, prompting a second Anglo-Afghan war from 1878 to 1880, in which Britain gained assurances that the Russians would not be allowed to bring Afghanistan under its control. In 1887 Russia and Great Britain delineated the northern border of Afghanistan.
The final war, in 1919, settled the border between Afghanistan and British India. The British propped up Afghanistan as a buffer state, and the country, with no sense of national consciousness, would retain this role for decades.
But everything began to change after the Second World War.
By 1947, British India was no more, divided between the two new states of India, predominantly Hindu, and Muslim Pakistan, which bordered Afghanistan to its northwest.
Russia, meanwhile, had become a Communist state after the First World War and the new Soviet Union reorganized its central Asian holdings into five ethnically-based socialist republics: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, the last three bordering Afghanistan.
By the late 1970s, though, Moscow's control over its central Asian republics was weakening, as local peoples became more assertive. In Afghanistan, meanwhile, increasing political turmoil led to concerns that a Soviet-friendly regime might collapse, prompting a Soviet invasion of that country in 1979.
It proved to be a disastrous decision. After a decade and more than 15,000 soldiers killed, the Soviets retreated, leaving Afghanistan to the mercy of the Taliban. Soon afterwards, the Soviet Union itself fell apart, giving birth to five new sovereign Muslim states in central Asia in 1991.
The United States became the latest major power to get involved in the region's politics. Afghanistan, which had become a haven and source of support for al-Qaida under the protection of the Taliban, was invaded by American and other NATO forces following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
But after a decade of war, the American public is weary of the blood and treasure that has been spent in Afghanistan, with seemingly little effect. It's doubtful that U.S. forces will remain in the country for much longer.
And Afghanistan will probably devolve into civil war, as it did after 1989, with the Taliban again gaining control of the Pashtun-majority regions of the country.
Three great powers — the Americans, British, and Russians — will have abandoned central Asia. Might some other major state, such as China or India, move into the vacuum? Mackinder's question — who will control the Eurasian heartland? — for the moment remains unanswered.
Professor Henry Srebrnik
Friday, March 30, 2012
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
When Will Afghanistan War End?
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer
The vast majority of Americans are sick and tired of the war in Afghanistan.
A recent New York Times/CBS News survey found that 69 percent of those polled indicated that the United States should end the 11 year old war sooner than the projected 2014 withdrawal of American forces.
This drop in support follows a number of incidents, including the inadvertent burning of Korans by American troops and the killing of 17 Afghan civilians in a village earlier this month by Robert Bales, an American staff sergeant.
The poll also follows a number of killings of American troops by their Afghan partners -- a trend that General John R. Allen, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, told the New York Times was likely to continue.
The same day Allen made his comments, three NATO soldiers were shot to death in two separate confrontations involving Afghan security forces.
As well, Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, has become increasingly erratic and is also suspected of trying to broker a power-sharing deal with the Taliban, behind NATO’s back. He even demanded that NATO troops leave the villages and confine themselves to major bases.
Those of us old enough to remember the Vietnam War sense a déjà vu quality to all this. Indeed, it brings to mind the satirical song, “Talking Vietnam Blues,” penned by the late anti-war activist Phil Ochs in 1964:
Well they put me in a barracks house
Just across the way from Laos.
They said you’re pretty safe when the troops deploy
But don’t turn your back on your house boy
When they ring the gong, watch out for the Viet Cong.
The Afghanistan war has not seen the same groundswell of anti-war activism that was a hallmark of the 1960s, for two reasons:
Americans considered ridding the country of the Taliban, whose leaders had offered Al-Qaeda a base of operations, justified, in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the world Trade Center and Pentagon.
And the U.S. military is today a volunteer force, so most Americans do not feel any personal loss from the war; their sons and daughters have not been drafted to fight in a far-off land, as was the case with Vietnam.
Even so, Americans sense that by this point, there’s nothing more to be done in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda is long gone and Osama bin Laden is dead. And the attempts at democratization and nation-building have been abandoned as utopian dreams.
The war in Vietnam went on far too long, after it was clear that there would be no clear-cut victory over the Communists. President Obama should heed this lesson in regards to Afghanistan. Realpolitik dictates that it’s time to leave.
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer
The vast majority of Americans are sick and tired of the war in Afghanistan.
A recent New York Times/CBS News survey found that 69 percent of those polled indicated that the United States should end the 11 year old war sooner than the projected 2014 withdrawal of American forces.
This drop in support follows a number of incidents, including the inadvertent burning of Korans by American troops and the killing of 17 Afghan civilians in a village earlier this month by Robert Bales, an American staff sergeant.
The poll also follows a number of killings of American troops by their Afghan partners -- a trend that General John R. Allen, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, told the New York Times was likely to continue.
The same day Allen made his comments, three NATO soldiers were shot to death in two separate confrontations involving Afghan security forces.
As well, Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, has become increasingly erratic and is also suspected of trying to broker a power-sharing deal with the Taliban, behind NATO’s back. He even demanded that NATO troops leave the villages and confine themselves to major bases.
Those of us old enough to remember the Vietnam War sense a déjà vu quality to all this. Indeed, it brings to mind the satirical song, “Talking Vietnam Blues,” penned by the late anti-war activist Phil Ochs in 1964:
Well they put me in a barracks house
Just across the way from Laos.
They said you’re pretty safe when the troops deploy
But don’t turn your back on your house boy
When they ring the gong, watch out for the Viet Cong.
The Afghanistan war has not seen the same groundswell of anti-war activism that was a hallmark of the 1960s, for two reasons:
Americans considered ridding the country of the Taliban, whose leaders had offered Al-Qaeda a base of operations, justified, in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the world Trade Center and Pentagon.
And the U.S. military is today a volunteer force, so most Americans do not feel any personal loss from the war; their sons and daughters have not been drafted to fight in a far-off land, as was the case with Vietnam.
Even so, Americans sense that by this point, there’s nothing more to be done in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda is long gone and Osama bin Laden is dead. And the attempts at democratization and nation-building have been abandoned as utopian dreams.
The war in Vietnam went on far too long, after it was clear that there would be no clear-cut victory over the Communists. President Obama should heed this lesson in regards to Afghanistan. Realpolitik dictates that it’s time to leave.
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Were We Once the Stepchildren in the Canadian Family?
Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune
Jewish immigration to Canada is the story, not only of the arrival and settlement of Jews in this country, but also of the way they were treated while attempting to adapt to their new home.
Negative attitudes towards Jews and Judaism, ranging from mild distaste to intense and pathological antisemitism, have shaped the contours of Canadian Jewish life, particularly in the periods of mass Jewish immigration and extending through the end of World War II and even into the 1950s.
Most Jewish immigration to this country occurred after 1881, and consisted, until the 1950s, primarily of east European Ashkenazim. In 1881, there were just 2,443 Jews in Canada; 40 years later Canada's Jews numbered 126,196.
Clearly, such a large influx of Jews elicited a variety of responses. While many welcomed Jews as hard-working immigrants, for others this immigration had created a "Jewish problem" on Canadian soil.
In the Anglo-Canadian world, Canada was seen as an outpost of British civility; for French Canadians, the upholding of the Catholic faith was a religious imperative. For both, therefore, Jewish immigrants threatened the very fabric of society. Jews were perceived as ethnic and religious undesirables with little economic utility and stood in direct conflict with the social and economic assumptions on which Canadian immigration policy was built.
Wrote Henri Bourassa, the French Canadian intellectual and journalist, in 1906: "The experience of every civilized country is that the Jews are the most undesirable class of people any country can have."
In 1923, the Canadian government closed the door to all unsponsored immigrants from central and eastern Europe except farmers. And then it moved to control those described as belonging "to races that cannot be assimilated without social or economic loss to Canada."
Jews were lumped into a Special Permit group. The only ones permitted into Canada would be those who could obtain special permits exempting them from the new regulations - and this required formal cabinet approval in each individual case.
Not surprisingly, only a trickle of individual Jews entered Canada annually during the next quarter-century. Immigration officials such as F.C. Blair, assistant deputy minister of immigration after 1924 and deputy minister after 1936, would see to that. Even German Jewish doctors willing to serve in Newfoundland's outports were refused admission.
The opposition to Jewish immigration in the '30s and '40s included Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King himself; he worried in private that letting in too many Jews would cause riots and undermine Canadian unity. And in this he reflected prevailing public opinion in this country: polls taken in the years before 1945 showed that, along with Asians, Jews were the least-wanted immigrants.
Quebec had a long and dishonourable tradition of antisemitism, which intensified with the rise of fascism in the 1930s. In June 1934, Samuel Rabinovitch, a Jewish medical student who had graduated first in his class at the Université de Montréal, was offered an internship at Notre Dame Hospital. All 14 other interns there walked out in protest, supported by interns from five other Montreal-area Catholic hospitals.
Who could blame them, asked the French-language Le Devoir? It would be repugnant to be treated - even touched - by a Jewish physician.
In the Laurentians, Jews were harassed, taunted and assaulted; hotels and other establishment proudly sported 'Gentiles Only' signs. The Achat chez Nous movement urged French Canadians to buy only from co-religionists and stay away from Jewish shopkeepers who, noted Le Devoir, "have cheating and corruption in their bloodstream."
Not surprisingly, Québécois politicians and clergy led the agitation against further Jewish immigration to Canada. As one Toronto rabbi, Maurice Eisendrath, said in June 1938: "In Quebec antisemitism is a way of life."
Maurice Duplessis, premier of Quebec after 1936, vigorously opposed the admission of Jewish refugees to Canada. During the 1944 provincial election, he spread stories about a supposed "international Zionist" plot to spirit 100,000 Jews into the province at the end of the war if the provincial Liberals would be returned to power.
Though Quebec was particularly bad, the rest of Canada was not free of anti-Jewish prejudice either.
Social Credit, the Orange Order, the Ku Klux Klan - these and many other groups were rife with antisemitic feeling. Three weeks after winning power in Alberta in 1935, new Social Credit Premier William Aberhart travelled to Detroit to discuss economics with Father Charles Coughlin, an antisemitic Catholic priest whose weekly radio broadcasts attracted millions of listeners.
Other Social Crediters spouted nonsense about "Jewish High Finance." Especially notorious was Norman Jaques, federal MP for Wetaskiwin from 1935 to 1949. He propounded Jewish conspiracy theories and in 1943 attempted to read from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the House of Commons.
Throughout Canada, quotas and restrictions were a way of life, and anti-Jewish bigotry sanctioned in press and pulpit. A Canadian Jewish Congress study commissioned in the late 1930s showed few Jewish teachers, and no principals, in Canadian schools. There was not a single Jewish university professor in the country.
Banks, insurance companies, and large industrial and commercial enterprises excluded Jews from employment. Jews were refused work even as salespeople in department stores. Restrictive covenants kept Jews out of "desirable" neighbourhoods as either tenants or homeowners.
And unlike today, the legal system provided little in the way of redress. There were few laws against discrimination, hatemongering or the like.
Redress had to await more enlightened times. Only in the 1960s could Canadian Jews consider themselves, and be considered by others, to be part of the Canadian family.
Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune
Jewish immigration to Canada is the story, not only of the arrival and settlement of Jews in this country, but also of the way they were treated while attempting to adapt to their new home.
Negative attitudes towards Jews and Judaism, ranging from mild distaste to intense and pathological antisemitism, have shaped the contours of Canadian Jewish life, particularly in the periods of mass Jewish immigration and extending through the end of World War II and even into the 1950s.
Most Jewish immigration to this country occurred after 1881, and consisted, until the 1950s, primarily of east European Ashkenazim. In 1881, there were just 2,443 Jews in Canada; 40 years later Canada's Jews numbered 126,196.
Clearly, such a large influx of Jews elicited a variety of responses. While many welcomed Jews as hard-working immigrants, for others this immigration had created a "Jewish problem" on Canadian soil.
In the Anglo-Canadian world, Canada was seen as an outpost of British civility; for French Canadians, the upholding of the Catholic faith was a religious imperative. For both, therefore, Jewish immigrants threatened the very fabric of society. Jews were perceived as ethnic and religious undesirables with little economic utility and stood in direct conflict with the social and economic assumptions on which Canadian immigration policy was built.
Wrote Henri Bourassa, the French Canadian intellectual and journalist, in 1906: "The experience of every civilized country is that the Jews are the most undesirable class of people any country can have."
In 1923, the Canadian government closed the door to all unsponsored immigrants from central and eastern Europe except farmers. And then it moved to control those described as belonging "to races that cannot be assimilated without social or economic loss to Canada."
Jews were lumped into a Special Permit group. The only ones permitted into Canada would be those who could obtain special permits exempting them from the new regulations - and this required formal cabinet approval in each individual case.
Not surprisingly, only a trickle of individual Jews entered Canada annually during the next quarter-century. Immigration officials such as F.C. Blair, assistant deputy minister of immigration after 1924 and deputy minister after 1936, would see to that. Even German Jewish doctors willing to serve in Newfoundland's outports were refused admission.
The opposition to Jewish immigration in the '30s and '40s included Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King himself; he worried in private that letting in too many Jews would cause riots and undermine Canadian unity. And in this he reflected prevailing public opinion in this country: polls taken in the years before 1945 showed that, along with Asians, Jews were the least-wanted immigrants.
Quebec had a long and dishonourable tradition of antisemitism, which intensified with the rise of fascism in the 1930s. In June 1934, Samuel Rabinovitch, a Jewish medical student who had graduated first in his class at the Université de Montréal, was offered an internship at Notre Dame Hospital. All 14 other interns there walked out in protest, supported by interns from five other Montreal-area Catholic hospitals.
Who could blame them, asked the French-language Le Devoir? It would be repugnant to be treated - even touched - by a Jewish physician.
In the Laurentians, Jews were harassed, taunted and assaulted; hotels and other establishment proudly sported 'Gentiles Only' signs. The Achat chez Nous movement urged French Canadians to buy only from co-religionists and stay away from Jewish shopkeepers who, noted Le Devoir, "have cheating and corruption in their bloodstream."
Not surprisingly, Québécois politicians and clergy led the agitation against further Jewish immigration to Canada. As one Toronto rabbi, Maurice Eisendrath, said in June 1938: "In Quebec antisemitism is a way of life."
Maurice Duplessis, premier of Quebec after 1936, vigorously opposed the admission of Jewish refugees to Canada. During the 1944 provincial election, he spread stories about a supposed "international Zionist" plot to spirit 100,000 Jews into the province at the end of the war if the provincial Liberals would be returned to power.
Though Quebec was particularly bad, the rest of Canada was not free of anti-Jewish prejudice either.
Social Credit, the Orange Order, the Ku Klux Klan - these and many other groups were rife with antisemitic feeling. Three weeks after winning power in Alberta in 1935, new Social Credit Premier William Aberhart travelled to Detroit to discuss economics with Father Charles Coughlin, an antisemitic Catholic priest whose weekly radio broadcasts attracted millions of listeners.
Other Social Crediters spouted nonsense about "Jewish High Finance." Especially notorious was Norman Jaques, federal MP for Wetaskiwin from 1935 to 1949. He propounded Jewish conspiracy theories and in 1943 attempted to read from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the House of Commons.
Throughout Canada, quotas and restrictions were a way of life, and anti-Jewish bigotry sanctioned in press and pulpit. A Canadian Jewish Congress study commissioned in the late 1930s showed few Jewish teachers, and no principals, in Canadian schools. There was not a single Jewish university professor in the country.
Banks, insurance companies, and large industrial and commercial enterprises excluded Jews from employment. Jews were refused work even as salespeople in department stores. Restrictive covenants kept Jews out of "desirable" neighbourhoods as either tenants or homeowners.
And unlike today, the legal system provided little in the way of redress. There were few laws against discrimination, hatemongering or the like.
Redress had to await more enlightened times. Only in the 1960s could Canadian Jews consider themselves, and be considered by others, to be part of the Canadian family.
Monday, March 19, 2012
A Cautionary Tale of Ethnic Nationalism
By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer
Sometimes you shouldn’t give in to someone who might, according to the political zeitgeist of the time, be technically in the right – because you know they have evil motives and aggressive intentions and this will only make them stronger.
I’m referring to one of the tragedies that led up to the Second World War – Hitler’s dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, the only democratic state in eastern Europe between the two world wars.
It’s been twenty years since Czechoslovakia peacefully dissolved into two states, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, a few years after the end of Communist rule. The Czechs and Slovaks went their separate ways following the decision in July 1992 to disband the country; their “velvet divorce” was easy.
But things were very different in 1938-1939, the first time the country disintegrated .
When the multi-national Austro-Hungarian Empire or “Dual Monarchy” collapsed at the end of the First World War, most of the German areas became part of the new republic of Austria.
However, many Germans were incorporated into a newly formed country, Czechoslovakia, which comprised the lands of the former Habsburg-ruled Bohemian Crown -- Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia-- and the Slovak and Ruthenian parts of the old Kingdom of Hungary.
The population consisted of Czechs (51 per cent), Germans (23 per cent), Slovaks (16 per cent), Hungarians (5 per cent), Ruthenians (4 per cent), and Jews (1 per cent).
These Germans, living in the border regions of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, were included in the new country against their will by the victorious Allies who carved up the old Habsburg Empire.
Some had lived in these areas – which became known as the Sudetenland -- since the 12th century and they even set up a short-lived entity known as German Bohemia.
This became a recipe for disaster once Adolf Hitler took power in Germany in 1933 and created his “Third Reich.”
Using the nationalist argument that people with a common language and ethnicity should belong to the same political state, Hitler, who paraded as the champion of pan-German nationalism and a “Greater Reich,” had already grabbed Austria in March of 1938, in an enforced union known as the “Anschluss.”
Now he turned his sights on the Sudetenland. At the infamous Munich conference of September 1938, Hitler got his way and incorporated the region into Nazi Germany. And indeed, the vast majority of Sudeten Germans welcomed Hitler’s takeover.
In March of 1939, Hitler grabbed the rest of the old Crown lands of Bohemia and Moravia, turning it into a Nazi-ruled “protectorate,” while Slovakia became a German puppet state.
Czechoslovakia, reconstituted after Germany’s defeat in 1945, “solved” the problem of its Sudeten German minority through “ethnic cleansing.” About three million Germans were expelled, thousands more were killed or died, and the Czech lands became ethnically homogeneous.
The Slovaks, though, still have a restive minority to deal with to this day – the ethnic Hungarians, 8.5% of Slovakia’s population, and concentrated mostly in the southern part of the country, next to the border with Hungary.
Will this become a future Sudetenland-style crisis? Only time will tell.
By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer
Sometimes you shouldn’t give in to someone who might, according to the political zeitgeist of the time, be technically in the right – because you know they have evil motives and aggressive intentions and this will only make them stronger.
I’m referring to one of the tragedies that led up to the Second World War – Hitler’s dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, the only democratic state in eastern Europe between the two world wars.
It’s been twenty years since Czechoslovakia peacefully dissolved into two states, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, a few years after the end of Communist rule. The Czechs and Slovaks went their separate ways following the decision in July 1992 to disband the country; their “velvet divorce” was easy.
But things were very different in 1938-1939, the first time the country disintegrated .
When the multi-national Austro-Hungarian Empire or “Dual Monarchy” collapsed at the end of the First World War, most of the German areas became part of the new republic of Austria.
However, many Germans were incorporated into a newly formed country, Czechoslovakia, which comprised the lands of the former Habsburg-ruled Bohemian Crown -- Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia-- and the Slovak and Ruthenian parts of the old Kingdom of Hungary.
The population consisted of Czechs (51 per cent), Germans (23 per cent), Slovaks (16 per cent), Hungarians (5 per cent), Ruthenians (4 per cent), and Jews (1 per cent).
These Germans, living in the border regions of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, were included in the new country against their will by the victorious Allies who carved up the old Habsburg Empire.
Some had lived in these areas – which became known as the Sudetenland -- since the 12th century and they even set up a short-lived entity known as German Bohemia.
This became a recipe for disaster once Adolf Hitler took power in Germany in 1933 and created his “Third Reich.”
Using the nationalist argument that people with a common language and ethnicity should belong to the same political state, Hitler, who paraded as the champion of pan-German nationalism and a “Greater Reich,” had already grabbed Austria in March of 1938, in an enforced union known as the “Anschluss.”
Now he turned his sights on the Sudetenland. At the infamous Munich conference of September 1938, Hitler got his way and incorporated the region into Nazi Germany. And indeed, the vast majority of Sudeten Germans welcomed Hitler’s takeover.
In March of 1939, Hitler grabbed the rest of the old Crown lands of Bohemia and Moravia, turning it into a Nazi-ruled “protectorate,” while Slovakia became a German puppet state.
Czechoslovakia, reconstituted after Germany’s defeat in 1945, “solved” the problem of its Sudeten German minority through “ethnic cleansing.” About three million Germans were expelled, thousands more were killed or died, and the Czech lands became ethnically homogeneous.
The Slovaks, though, still have a restive minority to deal with to this day – the ethnic Hungarians, 8.5% of Slovakia’s population, and concentrated mostly in the southern part of the country, next to the border with Hungary.
Will this become a future Sudetenland-style crisis? Only time will tell.
Saturday, March 03, 2012
A Tale of Two Capitals
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer
Ottawa is a fairly nice city, but as a national capital, does it really express, through its public buildings and monuments, the historical, social and cultural values that make up Canada?
Yes, there are the National Gallery of Canada, the Canadian War Museum and, across the Ottawa River in Gatineau, the Canadian Museum of Civilization.
Confederation Square is the site of Canada’s National War Memorial. And nearby, of course, is Parliament Hill, the home of our federal legislative branch. There is also Rideau Hall, home of the governor general.
Yet the parts remain greater than the sum. These discrete landmarks don’t form a cohesive whole.
The Unimagined Canadian Capital: Challenges for the Federal Capital Region is the title of a collection of essays about the National Capital Region that grew from a conference in 2011.
Editors Rupak Chattopadhyay and Gilles Paquet, along with the various authors, maintain that too many stakeholders have neglected their duty of imagining an inspiring federal capital region.
Many of the essays blame the fragmented governance of the area. There are too many cooks spoiling the broth: two cities, Ottawa and Gatineau; two provinces, Ontario and Quebec; and the National Capital Commission, which administers the federally owned lands and buildings, all have a say in how our capital should look.
As Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson recently wrote, “various federal governments have done little, being fearful of acting lest they be accused by Canadians elsewhere of ‘squandering taxpayers’ money’ or favouring a city already grown rich on taxpayers’ largesse.” Do Canadians, he wonders, really care about their capital?
Compare this to the grandeur of the National Mall in Washington. While Ottawa, then known as Bytown, already existed when it became Canada’s capital in 1867, Washington was a planned city. President George Washington appointed the French architect Pierre L’Enfant in 1791 to design the new capital city in the square of federal territory between Maryland and Virginia that would later become the District of Columbia.
The Mall spans three kilometres between the U.S. Capitol in the east to the Lincoln Memorial at the other end. Bisecting the area vertically are the White House to the north and the Jefferson Memorial to the south. The center of the Mall is marked by the towering Washington Monument.
The National Park Service states that the purposes of the National Mall are to “provide a monumental, dignified, and symbolic setting for the governmental structures, museums and national memorials; maintain and provide for the use of the National Mall with its public promenades as a completed work of civic art, a designed historic landscape providing extraordinary vistas to symbols of the nation; and maintain the National Mall in the heart of the nation’s capital as a stage for national events and a preeminent national civic space for public gatherings.” (One notable example is the 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.)
The Mall does all these things. Along its perimeters there are more than 15 museums and galleries, including the National Museum of American History, the National Gallery of Art; the National Air and Space Museum; the National Museum of the American Indian; the Smithsonian Institution; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
Structures bordering the Mall include the Library of Congress and the United States Supreme Court Building; the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial; the Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial; the Vietnam Veterans Memorial; and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The Mall is the place where the nation conserves its past, simultaneously recollecting it, honouring it, and practicing it (in the White House and Capitol), observed Charles L. Griswold and Stephen S. Griswold in their article “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Washington Mall,” published in the journal Critical Inquiry in 1986.
“The area possesses an extraordinary cohesiveness from the standpoint of its symbolism,” they concluded. Through its iconography, it is a concrete and living lesson in American history.
It certainly makes Ottawa pale by comparison.
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer
Ottawa is a fairly nice city, but as a national capital, does it really express, through its public buildings and monuments, the historical, social and cultural values that make up Canada?
Yes, there are the National Gallery of Canada, the Canadian War Museum and, across the Ottawa River in Gatineau, the Canadian Museum of Civilization.
Confederation Square is the site of Canada’s National War Memorial. And nearby, of course, is Parliament Hill, the home of our federal legislative branch. There is also Rideau Hall, home of the governor general.
Yet the parts remain greater than the sum. These discrete landmarks don’t form a cohesive whole.
The Unimagined Canadian Capital: Challenges for the Federal Capital Region is the title of a collection of essays about the National Capital Region that grew from a conference in 2011.
Editors Rupak Chattopadhyay and Gilles Paquet, along with the various authors, maintain that too many stakeholders have neglected their duty of imagining an inspiring federal capital region.
Many of the essays blame the fragmented governance of the area. There are too many cooks spoiling the broth: two cities, Ottawa and Gatineau; two provinces, Ontario and Quebec; and the National Capital Commission, which administers the federally owned lands and buildings, all have a say in how our capital should look.
As Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson recently wrote, “various federal governments have done little, being fearful of acting lest they be accused by Canadians elsewhere of ‘squandering taxpayers’ money’ or favouring a city already grown rich on taxpayers’ largesse.” Do Canadians, he wonders, really care about their capital?
Compare this to the grandeur of the National Mall in Washington. While Ottawa, then known as Bytown, already existed when it became Canada’s capital in 1867, Washington was a planned city. President George Washington appointed the French architect Pierre L’Enfant in 1791 to design the new capital city in the square of federal territory between Maryland and Virginia that would later become the District of Columbia.
The Mall spans three kilometres between the U.S. Capitol in the east to the Lincoln Memorial at the other end. Bisecting the area vertically are the White House to the north and the Jefferson Memorial to the south. The center of the Mall is marked by the towering Washington Monument.
The National Park Service states that the purposes of the National Mall are to “provide a monumental, dignified, and symbolic setting for the governmental structures, museums and national memorials; maintain and provide for the use of the National Mall with its public promenades as a completed work of civic art, a designed historic landscape providing extraordinary vistas to symbols of the nation; and maintain the National Mall in the heart of the nation’s capital as a stage for national events and a preeminent national civic space for public gatherings.” (One notable example is the 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.)
The Mall does all these things. Along its perimeters there are more than 15 museums and galleries, including the National Museum of American History, the National Gallery of Art; the National Air and Space Museum; the National Museum of the American Indian; the Smithsonian Institution; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
Structures bordering the Mall include the Library of Congress and the United States Supreme Court Building; the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial; the Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial; the Vietnam Veterans Memorial; and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The Mall is the place where the nation conserves its past, simultaneously recollecting it, honouring it, and practicing it (in the White House and Capitol), observed Charles L. Griswold and Stephen S. Griswold in their article “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Washington Mall,” published in the journal Critical Inquiry in 1986.
“The area possesses an extraordinary cohesiveness from the standpoint of its symbolism,” they concluded. Through its iconography, it is a concrete and living lesson in American history.
It certainly makes Ottawa pale by comparison.
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