Tribute to Canada

Received this from a friend and it's well worth passing along! Not sure on the original date of publication - too lazy to google it, lol!

Sunday Telegraph Article
From today's UK wires: Salute to a brave and modest nation
Kevin Myers, The Sunday Telegraph

LONDON - Until the deaths last week of four Canadian soldiers
accidentally killed by a U.S. warplane in Afghanistan, probably almost no
one outside their home country had been aware that Canadian troops were
deployed in the region. And as always, Canada will now bury its dead, just
as the rest of the world as always will forget its sacrifice, just as it
always forgets nearly everything Canada ever does.

It seems that Canada's historic mission is to come to the selfless
aid both of its friends and of complete strangers, and then, once the crisis
is over, to be well and truly ignored. Canada is the perpetual wallflower
that stands on the edge of the hall, waiting for someone to come and ask her
for a dance. A fire breaks out, she risks life and limb to rescue her fellow
dance-goers, and suffers serious injuries. But when the hall is repaired
and the dancing resumes, there is Canada, the wallflower still, while those
she once helped glamorously cavort across the floor, blithely neglecting her
yet again.

That is the price Canada pays for sharing the North American
continent with the United States, and for being a selfless friend of Britain
in two global conflicts. For much of the 20th century, Canada was torn in
two different directions: It seemed to be a part of the old world, yet had
an address in the new one, and that divided identity ensured that it never
fully got the gratitude it deserved.

Yet its purely voluntary contribution to the cause of freedom in two
world wars was perhaps the greatest of any democracy. Almost 10% of Canada's
entire population of seven million people served in the armed forces during
the First World War, and nearly 60,000 died. The great Allied victories of
1918 were spearheaded by Canadian troops, perhaps the most capable soldiers
in the entire British order of battle.

Canada was repaid for its enormous sacrifice by downright neglect,
its unique contribution to victory being absorbed into the popular Memory as
somehow or other the work of the "British." The Second World War provided a
re-run. The Canadian navy began the war with a half dozen vessels, and ended
up policing nearly half of the Atlantic against U-boat attack. More than 120
Canadian warships participated in the Normandy landings, during which 15,000
Canadian soldiers went ashore on D-Day alone. Canada finished the war with
the third-largest navy and the fourth-largest air force in the world.

The world thanked Canada with the same sublime indifference as it
had the previous time. Canadian participation in the war was acknowledged in
film only if it was necessary to give an American actor a part in a campaign
in which the United States had clearly not participated - a touching
scrupulousness which, of ourse, Hollywood has since abandoned, as it has any
notion of a separate Canadian identity.

So it is a general rule that actors and filmmakers arriving in
Hollywood keep their nationality - unless, that is, they are Canadian. Thus
Mary Pickford, Walter Huston, Donald Sutherland, Michael J. Fox, William
Shatner, Norman Jewison, David Cronenberg, Alex Trebek, Art Linkletter and
Dan Aykroyd have in the popular perception become American, and Christopher
Plummer, British. It is as if, in the very act of becoming famous, a
Canadian ceases to be Canadian, unless she is Margaret Atwood, who is as
unshakably Canadian as a moose, or Celine Dion, for whom Canada has proved
quite unable to find any takers.

Moreover, Canada is every bit as querulously alert to the
achievements of its sons and daughters as the rest of the world is
completely unaware of them. The Canadians proudly say of themselves - and
are unheard by anyone else - that 1% of the world's population has provided
10% of the world's peacekeeping forces. Canadian soldiers in the past half
century have been the greatest peacekeepers on Earth - in 39 missions on UN
mandates, and six on non-UN peacekeeping duties, from Vietnam to East Timor,
from Sinai to Bosnia.

Yet the only foreign engagement that has entered the popular
on-Canadian imagination was the sorry affair in Somalia, in which
out-of-control paratroopers murdered two Somali infiltrators. Their regiment
was then disbanded in disgrace - a uniquely Canadian act of self-abasement
for which, naturally, the Canadians received no international credit.

So who today in the United States knows about the stoic and selfless
friendship its northern neighbour has given it in Afghanistan? Rather like
Cyrano de Bergerac, Canada repeatedly does honourable things for honourable
motives, but instead of being thanked for it, it remains something of a
figure of fun.

It is the Canadian way, for which Canadians should be proud, yet such
honour comes at a high cost. This week, four more grieving Canadian families
knew that cost all too tragically well.