Killing Canadians (II)

Abstract

On April 18, 2002 (still April 17 in Canada), four Canadian soldiers were killed and eight wounded when two F-16 fighter pilots mistakenly dropped a 500-pound bomb on a nighttime live-ammunition training exercise near Kandahar in Afghanistan. Considered as the first Canadian combat deaths since the Korean War, the “friendly fire incident” sparked both sorrow and outrage across the entire country and an almost unprecedented media frenzy such that Canadian journalists subsequently voted it as the top news story of the year. Journalists, as news media scholar Stuart Allan discusses, “are among the pre-eminent story-tellers of modern society. Their news accounts shape in decisive ways our perceptions of the ‘world out there’ beyond our immediate experience.” Indeed, news discourses serve to help naturalize a cultural politics of legitimacy that justify the distribution of modern society’s practices of power and influence.⁴ This is not to suggest that journalists implant a “false consciousness” upon their readership, but rather that news texts demarcate the limits of “common sense” working to “reaffirm a hegemonic network of conventionalized rules by which social life is to be interpreted.”⁵ For Benedict Anderson, the emergence of daily newspaper reading was a prime example of how print-capitalism worked in the formation of nations as “imagined communities,” with newspapers thus playing a key role in how the nation is understood in terms of time and space.

Meanwhile, the Athenians were trying to find each other and were taking everyone who was going the other way as an enemy, including friends who were already running back for safety… The final result of all this was that men from various parts of the army kept running into each other, once they were in total confusion—friends against friends and citizens against fellow citizens. They not only terrified each other but even came to hand-to-hand fighting and could scarcely be parted without difficulty.¹

With friends like the Americans, who needs enemies?²

You can’t sue another sovereign nation over something like this.³