on Imperial wars and alienation
Hugh Williams
As we are on the eve of another Imperialist war, this time with Iran and all the risks that this entails, the problem of a profound and growing psychic alienation that I have personally experienced and expressed with the metaphorical phrase ‘changing my religion’ is really not all that new. At least it is not new for my own generation. It goes all the way back in my own life time to the sixties and the Vietnam war. Our good friend and Canadian philosophical scholar George Grant expressed this profound feeling that he spoke of as ‘alienation’ in an essay he first wrote in 1967, not that long after writing his now famous classic “Lament for a Nation (1965)”.* In that essay he wrote at the time:
(And I suggest that we can powerfully re-experience and update its compelling relevance by simply transposing ‘Vietnam’ with ‘Gaza-Palestine’.)
“ … the present happenings in Vietnam are particularly terrible for Canadians. What is being done there is being done by a society which is in some deep way our own. It is being done by a society that more than any other carries the destiny of the West, and Canadians belong inevitably to that destiny. Canada could only continue to be if we could hold some alternative social vision to that great republic. Yet such an alternative would have had to come out of the same stream – western culture. Indeed, our failure to find such an alternative is bound up with the very homogenizing path of western history. So, we are left with the fact. As the U.S. becomes daily more our own, so does the Vietnam war.
The majority of North Americans do not seem to believe that love of their own and love of the good are exposed to stringent conflict in Vietnam. They assume the structure of our society is essentially good, that it requires to be defended against aggression, and that it is against aggression that the American troops are engaged in Vietnam. They are either not much concerned with the actual history of the conflict, or else have been convinced by propaganda that there is a gallant, South Vietnam, which is defending itself from aggression with American help. When a more explicit ideology is sought, the position becomes divided at one particular point. Are we to fear the Vietnamese and beyond them the Chinese because they are non-western, or because they are communist? Is it the old Europocentric fear of the Asian hordes under Asian tyranny as a threat to the freedom and right which belong essentially to the West? Or is it because the Asians have taken on communism that they are to be feared? It is not easy to hold these two positions together for the reason that Marxism is an advanced product of the West which appealed to British industry, French revolutionary ideas and German philosophy. Of course, many people in North America no longer appeal to any ideology beyond our affluence. They take the line that it is either them or us, and this position is wrapped up in Darwinian packaging which says that any means are permissible that allow us to protect our own.
For a minority, the events in Vietnam must help to push them over that great divide where one can no longer love one’s own – where indeed it almost ceases to be one’s own. Vietnam is a glaring searchlight exposing the very structure of the imperial society. Even if hopefully the violence should ease off, the searchlight has still been cast on the structure. We can never be as we were, because what has been done has been done. Some could see the structure of that society before the last years, but Vietnam has been for many the means to a clearer analysis. It has had this result because here are obvious facts which cannot be accounted for within the usual liberal description by which the society is legitimized to its own members and to the world.”
[*See George Grant, “Canadian Fate and Imperialism” in Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1969) pp.74-75. Also see George Grant, Lament for a Nation (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1965).]