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Historians Seek to Set the Record Straight on Second World War Internment of Italian Canadians
In Enemies Within: Italian and Other Internees in Canada and Abroad (University of Toronto Press, 2000), Italian-Canadian historians and co-editors York University Prof. Roberto Perin, University of Toronto Prof. Franca Iacovetta and Angelo Principe present a collection of essays that paint a complex picture of internment policy and its uneven application, and call for a more balanced assessment of this episode in Canadian history. They say current campaigns for wartime redress by Italian and Ukrainian Canadians present a distorted version of this period, raising questions about selective memory and how history is manipulated to suit political agendas.
"Current debates on internment generate much emotion but are woefully uninformed by history," state the editors in their introduction to the book. They say former prime minister Brian Mulroney's apology to Italian Canadians in 1990 publicly validated a version of history that has been "laundered" to stoke the politics of multiculturalism. "This simple history -- drawing on selective evidence, ignoring contrary views, and glossing over the fascist history of the Italian immigrant communities -- has become the orthodox position." They say the 1997 National Film Board documentary on Italian internment, Barbed Wires and Mandolins, also legitimates this erroneous depiction of the past.
While the authors are critical of state repression and the internment of innocent civilians, Perin says it is disturbing that groups now lobbying for wartime compensation compare their treatment to that of Japanese Canadians, and illegitimately invoke Holocaust imagery to describe their internment experiences. The book does not deal directly with the internment experience of Japanese Canadians, which the editors say is widely acknowledged to be a clear case of racial bias against an entire community. "It is a fact that less than one per cent of the Italian-Canadian population was interned during the war," says Perin.
In a chapter about the most famous Italian internee, Montreal-based journalist and dramatist Mario Duliani, Perin writes that efforts to rehabilitate Duliani as a hero and patriarch for Italian-Canadian literature simply ignore evidence of Duliani's fascist leanings. Perin analyses Duliani's wartime novel about internment, City Without Women, and concludes that it represents "a whitewashing of a painfully ugly chapter in Italian-Canadian history" that continues today with the Italian national campaign for redress. He points to photographic evidence in the book of internees wearing fascist insignia in flagrant defiance of camp regulations. "This obviously gives the lie to the assertion made by the National Congress of Italian Canadians that all internees were political innocents," says Perin.
The editors say their intention is not to close the debate on internment by offering a countering view, but to inform public discussion. They say the book is an attempt to address a crucial issue confronting modern liberal democracies today: how to achieve a balance between the civil liberties of minorities and the needs of majorities and the state, particularly in times of war and other occasions of social and economic breakdown. Perin says the issue has poignancy for Canadians of Slavic and Middle-Eastern origin who recently have felt the brunt of public fear and anger over conflicts with Iraq and in the former Yugoslavia.
"What we remember and why is a key question in contemporary debates about the prosecution of wartime criminals in Nazi Germany, in the former Yugoslavia, and eventually, perhaps, in Chechnya and the Middle East," says Perin. "Should we not be wary when confronted with participants in these events who claim they were unaware of what was going on, that they were simply following orders, or that they have since acknowledged the errors of their ways?" In Canada this issue is central to the way in which some ethnic groups use the past to promote their ethnic agendas, says Perin. He condemns competition among ethnic groups for recognition on the basis of the wrongs that have been done to them, and the invocation of multiculturalism to affirm that discrimination has taken place equally against all groups.
The book points out that Canada's RCMP and certain key government officials, unlike those in other countries, did distinguished between ordinary Italians who joined fascist organizations for innocuous reasons and the mostly middle-class Italian-Canadian leaders who displayed a commitment to Italian fascism. A separate chapter examines the experience of Ukrainian Canadians. Chapters on groups of internees -- women, Jews, and Communists -- who have not been studied in detail by historians underscore the diversity of internment experiences.
"The essays taken together tell us a great deal about the political machinations behind internment and its social consequences for the inmates and for their wives, children, kinfolk, and community," the editors note. "We would like readers to draw lessons regarding the state's obligation not only to protect its citizenry in times of crisis, but also the rights of vulnerable groups in society, no matter how different from the mainstream they may be."
For further information, please contact:
Roberto Perin
Susan Bigelow
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