Collective Memory

"And there is nothing we can do about that. They are the winners and we are the losers; we are dominated and they are dominant."

It truly is hard to credit that intelligent people can permit themselves to feel the corrosive resentment of history still boiling away wreaking havoc with their sensibilities so they cannot perceive that what they resent is simply not worthy of a second thought. Yet throughout the world there are ethnic, religious, tribal groups whose ancient handed-down memories of assaults on their honour, on their integrity, on their possessions, on their geography, remain resonant to this very day.

How intelligent is it, however, to allow one's every waking thoughts to linger on ancient grievances, never quite moving on from there, simply nursing resentment after resentment? Nothing is ever accomplished by it, those who represented the aggressors, the despoilers, the victors, have little wish to admit to what they are accused of, or they view those historical events in the context of the times, not the present.

There is little satisfaction to be had for the simmering resentment, even if those whom they accuse will express regret long after the fact. For the fact is, it was another world, another time, with far different values. And imperial conquests where one country battled another for hegemonic or settlement rights belong in the distant past, the results of those events expressing the consequences that everyone should have learned to live with.

Which hasn't stopped Quebecois from nursing their aggrievement over a battlefield where their 'side' succumbed to the superior battle strategy of the 'other side' in a struggle for supremacy. And despite that the 'other side' was surprisingly magnanimous in their recognition of the merits of permitting the vanquished to have their culture and their language protected with the enactment of new laws, this has never been accepted as satisfactory.

The 18th Century Conquest of New France bridles and infuriates pure laine Quebecois. Imagine, a history teacher bitterly admitting "I am very much aware, even today in 2008, that they won and we lost the war". Imagine another teacher of impressionable young French students admitting that he discusses the situation as a signal case study of the historical message that to the victor go the spoils.

As though Quebec and its population of still-resentful francophones cannot yet bring themselves to feel any kind of meaningful relationship with Canada because they have been blinded by a rage that will not dwindle; that of a conquered people having to submit to the superior might of an alien culture, language and politics. Let alone religion, even though said religion has long since been relegated to heritage status.

These are insecure, immature and juvenile maunderings of a people wilfully allowing themselves to be traumatized by events they had no part in, the memory of which is sufficient to send them into lugubrious doldrums upon recall. The indulgence in the bathos of having been cheated of their rightful place in history, their resentment of the reality that the province of Quebec is but one of many provinces to make a coherent nation is pathetic.

Quebec was not built solely by the French. There were many other ethnic, religious and cultural groups who invested generations of lives in its formation to present as what it is today. Those 'other' provincial occupants of the province saw it as theirs, too, though they never thought to wrest it from the French. Quebec's response to all of this is continued anger over the unfairness of it all.

The enactment of draconian language laws, the rejection of overtures by the rest of Canada, a deliberate need to cut themselves off culturally and linguistically from the rest of Canada has been the result. A nation unto itself, it struggles to proudly present itself as coherently other than what obtains elsewhere in the country. When it teaches its young their proud history it is as a long-suffering population ill done by.

The English-speaking component, the ethnic minorities who immigrated to the province to help it become itself, are seen as no legitimate and deserving part of that history. They remain incidental, ignored and despised. In part that is understandable because of the traditional Anglo superiority over the ignorant, church-obsessed 19th and early 20th Century French fact.

But since the Quiet Revolution and the rejection and overturning of Anglo manipulation and tamping down of francophone rights, there has been no excuse for the French fact not to accommodate itself in a far more mature manner toward the rest of the country.