A Warning to All Americans.

There are some major changes coming.

Things are going to get unpleasant for you, when you travel outside your own borders. Be forewarned. This is not a threat. This is a description.

Even the annoying little quirks we tolerated for decades from your fellow citizens have suddenly become major irritants now that we have been collectively rejected, denigrated and even humiliated by your elected president. Yes, but we didn’t vote for him. Too bad. He now represents all of you.

And the change in attitude will be a shock to many of you.

First, the America-is-always-the-hero thing which inspired this piece.

A fellow writer, here on Medium was talking about Moscow’s parade on Saturday. She was explaining how Russia uses history to self-glorify, how it cherry-picks the parts that fit its heroic narrative, and conveniently discards the rest, the “other parts” the ones that don’t fit that too-polished narrative.

How, when celebrating the USSR’s glorious win over Nazi Germany, for example, it ignored the thousands upon thousands of Soviet citizens who joined the Wehrmacht or collaborated with its occupying forces. This, in order to sanitize its history. To glorify it to its citizens.

I suppose all countries do the same. Up to a point.

Here’s the quote that hit me like a sledge hammer.

Because modern Russia doesn’t just remember World War II — it simplifies it. It turns it into a clean, heroic narrative where Russia stands alone as the force of good.

Funny that, I was just thinking about this yesterday. Just re-read the above sentence and now replace “Russia” with “USA”.

That rang a bell. It’s how I’ve felt, as a Canadian, since I was a child (I’m 73). My country’s history forgotten, ignored. An also-ran in WW2.

Yet when France was defeated in the summer of 1940, only the UK and its former colonies, among which Canada was the nearest, stood alone against the two fascist giants, Nazi Germany and the USSR, the latter of which had just finished “cleaning out” millions of its own citizens. Ask any Ukrainian about the Holodomor. Ask any historian about Stalin’s great purges of the late thirties.

Here they stood as allies, two of the cruellest and most murderous regimes the world had ever seen (Mao’s China was still in the future), and they split up Europe between them. Yet the USA resolutely stood aside in an America-first, comfortable neutrality. Sound familiar?

Still, the US waited two years to join, and even then, had to be forced in by Japan’s attack and Hitler’s declaration of war. Yet today, the USA, in its folkloric view of itself, won WW2 single-handed. Yup. It really did.

For them, History has to be told in absolutes, I suppose.

Most Americans, during the XXth Century, learned their history through Hollywood movies. I even had a German character state this in a novel set in 1939: Americans believe whatever Hollywood teaches them. Still today.

As a nine-year-old, I remember the excitement in anticipating the movie “The Longest Day,” a Hollywood blockbuster recounting D-Day and its heroics. In 1962, when the movie came out, all the kids in my neighbourhood had veteran fathers. Many of our games were centered around WW2, even seventeen years after its end. “The Longest Day” was going to be big. It was promoted as an international epic with stars from many different countries.

And yet, in that three-hour epic, there is not one scene where Canadians are pictured. If there are any, I don’t remember them.

In the actual D-Day landings the Canadians were assigned what was anticipated to be the toughest beach of the five. Despite this, our men were the fastest ones off that beach. They also were the ones who penetrated the farthest inland from all five landings. On D-Day, Canada, with only 6% of the Western Allies’ population, was entrusted with 20% of the landings.

Talk about punching above your weight.

Surely such heroics would be certain to elicit admiration for the hero-worshiping Hollywood types. But nope. Not even a mention. 20% of the whole battle was eclipsed, even though the French Résistance was given a prominent role in the movie.

Decades later, it was the same with Argo, the depiction of the escape from the US Embassy in Tehran. It was Canadians who did the hiding and the escaping. Yet, once again, Hollywood was unable to tell the story as it happened. I guess the American people are badly in need of seeing how they are the force of good in the world, to the exclusion of anyone else.

Or, as that writer wrote it, talking about Russia, “…stands alone as the force of good.”

I know, because I participated in the repeated flights in and out of Tehran on Canadian Air Force C-130s out of West Germany to evacuate our embassy. Prior to going in we were briefed that we may have US embassy personnel on board on our return flight and that we may be subjected to unpleasant events should the truth be revealed (that we had “illegally” helped US hostages escape) before we left Iranian airspace.

OK. So it goes, we thought, not to quote Mr. Vonnegut.

Of course this is a rant, but I think it’s especially appropriate at a time when the whole “The-US-stands-for-good-in-the-world” concept of morality is rapidly melting away, as that country is now ruled by a tyrant who persecutes anyone who has slighted him, and has now engaged the country in a losing war it cannot win. Just like old Vlad started in ’14 and is now on the verge of losing.

Did you know, you US citizens, that the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers have the right to open anyone wishing to enter the country’s electronic devices to check their social history? Officially this is to check for terrorist activity and such, but some CBP officers apparently are quite serious in their MAGAing. It happened to one of my friends, a veteran. He was detained for hours while they decided what to do with him, and before turning him back.

Remember 9/11?

Despite your president not needing Canada, on 9/11, we were the first country to offer direct assistance when the USA closed their airspace for security reasons. We were also the first to offer military help should the US decide to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Treaty, the one where an attacked country calls for help. Within hours of US invoking said Article 5, our Special Forces guys were participating alongside US forces in ousting the Taliban. We stayed in that country until 2014 to help the US out. In 2005–06, after the US had pulled a lot of its troops out from Afghanistan to invade Iraq, there were, in country, more Canadian troops per capita than US ones. And when the Taliban had re-invaded the South of the country, the US asked NATO for help. It was Canada and the UK who responded and took over the cleaning out of the Taliban-infested Southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand.

This was accomplished with great loss of life (and limb). I know. Once again, I was there. All for our then ally, best friend and neighbour, the USA.

Because the US did stand, once, for good in the world for many years, all those behaviours like the ones described above, and which we, from the other nations, tolerated as simple quirks of the Americans, now, these quirks are not just side-annoyances, they are part of the US image, and because we’ve been rejected by your government, they have become profoundly annoying and we don’t tolerate them anymore.

You guys are in for a rough awakening.