Review: Love, Hate, and Fear in Canada's Cold War
| Author | Aldona Sendzikas |
| Date | 01 December 2005 |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200506000420 |
| Published date | 01 December 2005 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
| Reviews |
| 1162 | International Journal | Autumn 2005 |
are full of documents from church people who operated Indian schools.
Many of the references on which his version of the 1930s bureaucrats’ view
is constructed are in fact missionaries’, not officials’, writings. There were
subtle, though important, differences in the views of throne and altar about
Indians and their potential.
Such qualifications notwithstanding,
The Red Man’s on the Warpath
is
an important contribution to our understanding of both domestic attitudes
towards First Nations and the impact of external events upon those views.
J. R. Miller/University of Saskatchewan
LOVE, HATE, AND FEAR IN CANADA’S COLD WAR
Edited by Richard Cavell
Toronto:University of Toronto Press, 2004. vi, 216pp, $50.00 cloth (ISBN 0-
8020-3676-7), $24.95 paper (ISBN 0-8020-8500-8)
Any commentary on the excesses of the Cold War period appearing today
naturally invites comparison to post-9/11 society. Unfortunately, this collec-
tion of essays predates the September 2001 terrorist attacks, having origi-
nated as a lecture series held at UBC’s Green College in the 2000-01 aca-
demic year.The similarities between the 1950s war against the “red menace”
and the current “war on terror” are acknowledged briefly in editor Richard
Cavell’s introduction, as well as in a perfunctory footnote accompanying one
of the essays, but for the most part the reader is left to draw his or her own
comparisons.
Cavell’s introduction points to two overarching themes in the essays that
follow. The first of these is that the personal was indeed political during the
Cold War. The theory of containment found applications not only in foreign
policy, but as an instrument of social and cultural control. This “domestic
containment” consisted of attempts to protect the idealized, suburban
nuclear family while simultaneously excluding anyone considered to deviate
from societal norms. Second, this collection tries to distinguish between the
Cold War as it took place in Canada and America’s Cold War. Cavell argues
that rather than just emulating the foreign policy and social trends of the
United States, Canada fought its own uniquely Canadian Cold War,and thus
the Canadian experience must be read differently. A key point in Cavell’s
argument is t hat, for all partici pants, the Cold War was about preserving
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