Montreal refuses memorials to WWI camps
Montreal has repeatedly refused to put up memorial plaques to a chapter of somewhat disreputable history when recent immigrants were sent into camps during World War I. In this case it’s the Ukrainian community that wants to have their troubles remembered.
The city says it was the federal government’s actions and the choice to add a memorial should be theirs. Also, while it was a poor decision on Canada’s part, the people sent to those alien internment camps came back. We’re not talking about Nazi transit camps here. (England also interned Germans and other Europeans living there during the war. I’m not saying this excuses it, but it was not an unusual type of decision at the time, and Canada was much more subservient to Britain at the time too.)
jeather 09:56 on 2012/08/23 Permalink
I don’t know about this specific set of internment camps, but “not as bad as the Nazis” is a bar that is so low it is well underground, and in general internment camps were pretty shitty, in many ways worse than ghettos in cities.
It wasn’t unusual, it wasn’t a municipal decision, but I’ve always been wary of giving too much energy to “Well, think of the time when this happened! We are much better now, but they didn’t know enough to make our better decisions!”, an argument I think is wrong on many levels.
Kate 10:12 on 2012/08/23 Permalink
I’m not saying these events should be whitewashed, they should be remembered as a warning how xenophobia can play out politically. But the locations in Montreal connected with this bit of history seem to me to be neither here nor there and I only mean that I can see why the city doesn’t take up this case.
I agree, we’re not better, although it’s easy to fall into that way of thinking.
jeather 10:30 on 2012/08/23 Permalink
I can see why they don’t take up the cause, either, though if other cities did — this doesn’t seem like a controversial cause to agree with. But maybe there’s more back room stuff.
I was really objecting to the part where you said people came back. As I said, I am not talking about this set of internment camps (which, to be honest, I had not heard about until this morning), but in general: health care was poor at best in internment camps, theft was endemic, crime was bad, and people lost all the property that they were forced to leave behind when they left the cities — and of course when they came back, they were considered suspicious because they had been put in an internment camp. Yes, it’s great that Canada didn’t work people to death, or just kill them, but we don’t want to suggest that only the worst abuses were abusive.
Kate 11:10 on 2012/08/23 Permalink
I agree with you. And I think this should not be forgotten. However, marking the places in Montreal from which people were sent to the internment camps would very much be in imitation of such locations in Paris from which French Jews really were shipped out to certain death. I do not mean it to minimize the suffering of people in Canadian internment camps to say that this is not quite the same thing.