Support our Troops (except for the Mac-Paps)
Members of the Mackenzie Papineau Battalion in Spain
A blog post in the Canadian Media Co-op by professor Steven Martin notes the dark insinuation made by “Support our Troops” bumper stickers–that not everyone ‘supports’ their armed forces. Indeed, during the Spanish Civil War, many Canadians traveled across Canada to join the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion in the face of harassment by the RCMP and discrimination by their own government. Yet over 1200 still volunteered to fight fascism in Spain. Sadly, the Mac-Paps are becoming all but forgotten in Canada, haunted by their connection with the far left.
These are a few illustrations to give some sense of the heroism of their efforts, as great as that of the veterans of Vimy or Passchendaele or Normandy, in service of a cause in which hope was in much shorter supply. […] Even worse, there was not much in the way of documentation, given the Canadian government’s disinterest at the time and given the illegality of volunteering to fight in Spain, and many of the volunteers’ names and deeds are nowhere recorded. They not only died, but have vanished from memory, recognized only as an absence.
To see the original article, click here. To read more coverage of the Mac Paps, click here and here.
