The Canadian War Museum is designed like a bunker because it must defend Canada’s varying memories of war from being forgotten amongst those of that cultural behemoth to our south. The wisdom Canadians have derived from their experience of conflict has been paid for with the blood of forefathers.

For that reason, it is our obligation to understand war through the memories of Canadians and not as the victims of the American media. History, our new war museum declares, is not that place to which unwilling children are dragged by glassy-eyed parents, and certainly not the moth eaten-realm of scholars with British accents.

For history is not a recollection, rather it is a coming to understand who we are now, what has made us this way and how we should relate as a people to the terrible beauty of our world. The act of history is that of a people laying their hands upon the wisdom so dearly bought by their forefathers and becoming fuller human beings for having done so.

The war museum beckons us to watch, often for the first time, the conflicts between French, British and Native Canadians as competing examples of how life should be lived and understood by the people who live here. Early wars among our forefathers are shown as an experience which formed our belief that Canadians share something which makes us different from others, something which became worth defending.

This is why francophones, anglophones and Natives united to tenaciously defend Canada from being claimed by the Americans in the War of 1812. It is why we beat them and then burned down the White House as a warning that they not come back again. As you walk the museum’s winding path of Canadian conflict, you see our disillusionment with war fostering until Lester Pearson invented peacekeeping, a conflict resolution technique which could only have been invented by Canadians.

Our experience as a peacekeeping nation, in which our soldiers have encountered countless parties bringing God down on both sides of every argument, has taught us to denounce absolutist terms such as good and evil. This is revolutionary, for when in history has a nation not labelled themselves as good and those who oppose them as evil.

The Prime Minister has never publicly referred to either Muslim fundamentalists or North Koreans as evil because of what our memories have taught us. We would do best not to forget it and could start by going to the museum.