What Happened to Canada When the Axis Won the War? Reflections on the True North’s Place in Dystopian Visions of the US

 

What Happened to Canada When the Axis Won the War? Reflections on the True North’s Place in Dystopian Visions of the US

                                                                     

   

By Don Curren

About five or six years ago I developed what is likely a unique way of celebrating my birthday: each year around that time, I re-read a novel by Philip K Dick.

Dick’s writing has been part of my life for a long time.

I read my first novel by him, the mesmerizing and frightening Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, when I was 18. In the decades since then I have read all but one of his 40 or so science fiction novels and scores of his short stories.

About 10 or 12 years ago, I started rereading some of them. For whatever reason, it seemed appropriate to do that around the time of my birthday.

It’s a way of giving myself a gift of time spent doing something I almost invariably enjoy.

Perhaps it’s also a way of recognizing that Dick, a troubled but brilliant writer of science fiction, is a touchstone in my life, whatever else changes. (Dick also wrote several “mainstream” novels which he was unable to get published in his lifetime, although most have been posthumously.)

I won’t explore here why his work has a peculiarly addictive quality for myself, and many others.

The fascination of “PKD,” as his fans sometimes call him, is a complex phenomenon. It involves not only his science fiction, which often has remarkable intellectual depth, but also his peculiar, troubled life, which included a period where it resembled something out of one of his own novels, and the strange, digressive body of religious and philosophical thought he left behind in his massive “Exegesis” and other nonfiction writing

Perhaps I’ll look at his work and its various, complex legacies in another blog post, some day.

Of course, I don’t re-read all of Dick’s work. There were definitely a few duds amid the many inventive and insightful novels and stories he penned. (One read of The Crack in Space is sufficient for any given lifetime, in my opinion.)

I focus on 10 or 12 key books, the ones that distill Dick’s vision in the most aesthetically satisfying and compelling ways.

This year, I re-read a book widely regarded as one of his best, The Man in the High Castle, published in 1962.

I usually enjoy my re-readings. I enjoy revisiting Dick’s peculiar universes, and as my perspective on things changes over the years, I often discover new things that pique my interest.

Several things struck me about The Man in the High Castle when I read it this year – the fourth time, if my records are accurate.

Dick’s book, which was adapted into an Amazon Prime series several years ago, is in the “alternative history” subgenre of speculative fiction.

In it, Germany and Japan won World War II.

One of the things that struck me about the book this time around is how important the theme of contingency is.

In a way, that’s true of whole concept of alternative history; implicit in it is a recognition that, if things had happened differently at certain key junctures in time, our entire history would be fundamentally different.

The shape of our world often feels natural and inevitable, the product of a predictable unfolding of underlying realities.

Yes, Nazi Germany was a spectacular military success for a brief period, but the inherent instability of its evil and inhuman economic and political system seems, in retrospect, to have doomed it to collapse, sooner or later.

But that appearance may be deceptive. If one or two sequences of events unfolded differently, the world may have taken an entirely different shape.

In Dick’s book, the pivotal event that sent history in a radically different direction was the assassination of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933. He is replaced by weak, isolationist successors who leave the US incapable of defending itself against Nazi Germany.

Dick fleshes out the consequences of the US collapse in considerable detail.

After the US is defeated by the Axis powers, the East Coast is governed by a Nazi puppet state. The West Coast is ruled by the Pacific States of America, a client state of the Japanese, who govern with a much lighter touch than their German counterparts.

In between, is a buffer zone, the nominally independent but weak Rocky Mountain States.

The Axis powers conquer Africa, where the Nazis perpetrate genocide, but continue to vie for control of Latin America. Japan governs all of Asia.

There is, however, a curious blank spot Dick leaves almost entirely to the reader’s imagination: Canada.

This is where we come to the main part of this post after the perhaps unduly long bit about my peculiar reading habits and the general background on Philip K Dick: an exploration of how Canada figures in some of the dystopian visions that have emerged from or about the US in the last several decades.

There are a handful of passing references to Canada in The Man in the High Castle.

The most significant comes when Juliana Frink, one of the central characters, is musing about the brutal fate of “most of the entertainment field” under the Nazis. They have, it seems, killed “most of the really great comedians” because of their Jewish ethnicity.

Bob Hope is still alive, though, and Frink wonders how “gets away” with his irreverent humour.

“Of course, he has to broadcast from Canada,” she thinks to herself, “And it’s a little freer up there.”

That’s all there is. Dick provides no further detail about Canada’s status or how it manages to be a “little freer” than the conquered and/or supine US.

There is another very brief reference, in another context, to the “Canadian Government.”

On that basis Wikipedia concludes in its article on The Man in the High Castle (TMitHC in subsequent references) that Canada remains an “independent country” in Dick’s alternative universe.

But there’s another reference, deeper in the novel, that’s hard to reconcile with an independent Canada.

It crops up during a passage describing a telephone call received by a Nazi diplomat in San Francisco.

It’s described as originating from a Nazi official “in Nova Scotia,” which seems incompatible with an independent Canada.

Later in this piece, I’ll imagine my own version of what happens to Canada in the universe of TMitHC based on these sketchy and conflicting hints.

But first, I’d like to explore how Canada figures in the dystopian worlds imagined by Americans more broadly – and why it occupies the place it does.

Dick’s book provides us with a significant clue as to Canada’s role in those dystopias.

It often plays the part of a refuge, sanctuary or place of exile. A place where people can seek refuge from the problems that are engulfing the US, whether it be Nazi domination, more homegrown forms of tyranny, environmental threats, or whatever other dystopian phenomena it’s contending with.

Of course, for some Americans, Canada did play that role in our actual history: it was the final refuge for slaves fleeing the South before the Civil War. That role was reflected in the fictions of the time, most notably in Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Canada was also a refuge for draft dodgers during the Vietnam War, further cementing its image as a sanctuary for those seeking escape from the US.

That’s likely part of the reason Canada plays the role of sanctuary in the imaginings of US writers constructing dystopian visions of their own future.

I found it playing that part in a more recent American dystopian, Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich.

                                                                    

Erdrich’s prescient 2017 novel is set in a US that spirals into violence, chaos and theocracy after something goes profoundly awry with evolution – and human reproduction.

Pregnant women, including the narrator of the book, are forcibly made wards of a repressive, theocratic state in this stark, near-future scenario.

One place they can go is Canada. This is how the narrator, known as both Cedar Songmaker and Annie Potts, describes it in the journal she writes for her unborn child.

“The borders were sealed off years ago – the border crossings between the United States, or whatever we are now, and Mexico and Canada. Neither of them want us.

“But illegal as we are, Canada still functions as the escape hatch in the roof of this country, through the fence is well guarded and people are constantly hunted down and returned,” she writes.

(Spoiler Alert). Cedar/Annie never makes to Canada, so how Canada reacted to the evolutionary crisis that tears apart the US remains unknown.

Just as it does in TMitHC, Canada remains devoid of detail in Future Home of the Living God.

But the description of Canada as “the escape hatch at the roof of this country” is an extremely apt description of how it functions in a lot of dystopian American fiction.

It provides an escape hatch, but, as in Dick’s novel, there’s no vision of what lies beyond the hatch.

It’s like one of those ancient maps where the cartographer, lacking any real information about an area, substituted a label saying, “Here There Be Dragons,” or something equally fanciful. In the imaginaries of these writers, Canada is a vast, blank space decorated by a scroll that says, “Here There Be Freedom.”

The authors cast Canada in role of refuge for exiles from the Land-of the-No-Longer free, but don’t seem to feel any obligation to provide any details about it beyond that.

That may stem from the simple exigencies of building an alternative history in a novel of reasonable length. Some details are inevitably going to be left out, and an elaborate description of what happened to a place that doesn’t figure in the narrative at all is a likely candidate for omission.

Just exactly what a dystopian writer includes in their world-building is telling, though. Dick provides a pretty detailed vision of how the destinies of all the key regions of the world in his alternative history worked out, but leaves Canada a blank – except as a safe place for Bob Hope.

The lack of detail about in Canada in TMitHC and other American dystopias might also reflect the profound lack of interest about Canada that prevails among many Americans.

The image of Canada as blander, more polite and less interesting version of the United States that many Americans entertain – if they entertain any idea of it at all – may be influencing American writers in the construction of their dystopias.

In one of the most-famous American dystopias, It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis, Canada figures as the place where opponents of the corporatist/Fascist regime of populist “Buzz” Windrip escape to, and then plot Windrip’s overthrow from exile.

                                                                    

After the Trump-like Windrip wins the 1936 election and begins to curtail the rights of Americans, his opponents begin to flee to Canada en masse.

Here is how Lewis describes it: “And increasingly, the bourgeois counter revolutionists begin to escape to Canada; just as once, by the ‘underground railroad’ the Negro (sic) slaves had escaped into the free Northern air.”

The next page describes how Walt Trowbridge, the Windrip’s defeated Republican adversary in the 1936 election, is increasingly menaced by the thugs of the regime’s paramilitary “Minute Men” organization at his ranch in South Dakota.

On July 4, Trowbridge invites the Minute Men keeping him under surveillance to an Independence Day celebration where he plies them with alcohol.

While they’re thus engaged, a large airplane “with a Canadian license,” but without visible markings, lands at the ranch. A squad of disguised men round up the Minute Men, and a “military-looking man” escorts Trowbridge and four cartons of documents on board.

“High and swift and alone, the plane few toward the premature Northern Lights,” Lewis writes.

“Next morning, still in overalls, Trowbridge breakfasted at the Fort Garry Hotel with the Mayor of Winnipeg,” he continues.

He then moves on to Toronto where he begins a publication that details the corrupt practices of Windrip – notably accepting personal gifts from “financiers” – and begins an organization known as the New Underground to help opponents of the Fascist regime escape to Canada.

The clear suggestion is that the government of Canada covertly aided the cause of democracy in the US by spiriting away one of its key defenders. Canada’s place in Lewis’s dystopian vision is thus highly positive, and rendered more completely than in the other books, but still a little sketchy.

Lewis was clearly fond of Canada. But he also fails develop any vision of how Canada would adapt to a Fascist and isolationist regime in the US and change in the process; his Canada remains a benign, blank refuge as it does in our other two dystopias.

There’s one, more recent dystopia vision of America where there is a fleshed-out version of what Canada would like it the US took a dystopian turn – The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s 2019 sequel to her 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale.

                                                                    

Atwood is, of course, Canadian.

That may explain why she takes the time to flesh out a vision of Canada that’s more complete than her American counterparts.

Another reason is that some of the action takes place in Canada, mostly Toronto, with a tiny bit occurring in Nova Scotia.

The broad outlines of Atwood’s dystopian vision – a theocratic takeover of parts of the US by an entity called “Gilead” – is well known.

Canada is prominent in the action of The Testaments because it is a hotbed of opposition to Gilead, the theocracy that’s based in New England but appears to govern much of what used to be the US, with the notable exceptions of California and the “Republic of Texas.”

Canada is officially “neutral” toward Gilead, but its neutrality is “sloppy” compared to the Republic of Texas’s rigorous stance, one character tells another.

Unlike Texas, where actions against Gilead are illegal, Canada tolerates the resistance organization that works for the overthrow of Gilead, allowing it to bring fugitives from the repressive theocracy to take refuge in Canada.

 It also allows Gilead’s missionaries – the Pearl Girls – to operate recruitment activities within its borders.

The incidental details revealed during the parts of the narrative set in Canada suggest a rather shambolic place, with a passing allusion to a failing public school system, and a lot of references to homeless people - perhaps not that far removed from current, real-life conditions.

But more importantly, Canada remains a realm of personal freedom, unlike the repressive and misogynistic Gilead.

That’s reflected in how adherents of Gilead refer to Canada and Canadians: references to it include words like “Sodom” and ‘pagan.”

But it’s also demonstrated in the character of Jade (aka Nicole), a teenage girl taken from Gilead to Canada as an infant and raised in Toronto, unaware of her Gilead-ian lineage.

Unlike the mostly docile, constrained young women of Gilead, Jade is a spiky, irreverent teenager who rapidly develops an indomitable sense of self and responds well to challenges.

She’s a vivid testament to a society that enables women to develop their individuality, rather than repressing them and constraining them to socially pre-determined roles, as Gilead does.

While vivid and compelling, Atwood’s vision of Canada is also incomplete. There is a passing reference to trade between Canada and the US stopping almost completely, but nowhere does she expand on how Canada would react to such a devastating blow.

I don’t mean to condemn in their totality the books I have considered here for their sketchy, elusive visions of Canada’s fate in the event of an American dystopia.

The four books I’ve cited are all worth reading, and perhaps more, now than ever, as a post-democratic dystopian turn in the US looms as a distinct possibility in the real world.

I would suggest though, that the minimal or limited representations of Canada in these and other dystopian works reflect a fundamental culture fact: Canada is a lacuna, a vast, vacant space in the imagination of many Americans, and that’s reflected in many of dystopian visions created there.

To return to Philip K Dick, I propose to end this essay by providing him with a little posthumous help.

Here’s my vision of what happened to Canada when the Axis won WWII in The Man in the High Castle.

Dick’s passing reference to a Nazi official in Nova Scotia suggests the Nazis recognized the strategic importance of Atlantic Canada and either attacked and conquered it directly, or more likely, left that task to its puppet state on the US East Coast.

Quebec would represent more of challenge. In my version of Dick’s alternate history, the authoritarian-leaning Union Nationale regime of Maurice Duplessis aligns itself with the Nazis while more-or-less retaining its autonomy.

The Duplessis government declares independence from the rest of Canada, strikes extensive trade deals with the US accomplices of the Nazis in return for the territorial integrity of Quebec.

That uneasy status-quo stays in place if we stick with the original 1940s to 1960s period of Dick’s novel.

If we continue the timeline into the ‘60s and ‘70s and beyond, the situation in Quebec changes dramatically.

The same forces of liberalization and modernization that resulted in the Quiet Revolution and assertive separatism in Quebec in our universe would manifest themselves in Dick’s, leading to a civil war in Quebec, with the Union Nationale, armed and backed by the Nazis, engaging in violent conflict with the forces of change.

The rebels would easily seize control of a sympathetic Montreal, which would declare itself a free city, but the Union Nationale would remain in control in Quebec City and much of the rest of the province, resulting in a fragile and potentially volatile stalemate. The Nazis would remain on the sidelines, waiting for an opportunity to intervene and assert greater-control over the resource-rich but fractious province.

British Columbia would become a northern territory of the Japanese-controlled Pacific States of America, and Alberta, governed by the Social Credit movement of “Bible Bill” Aberhart, would declare itself an independent, theocratically inclined nation.

That would leave Canada itself sharply reduced in territory and resources, consisting only of the industrial heartland of Ontario and the Prairie provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan, as well as the northern territories.

Satisfied with conquering or effectively controlling much of the North American continent, the Nazis would opt to leave Canada alone.

But that would prove to be a strategic blunder of the first order.

Already on a war-footing because of its declaration of war on Germany alongside Great Britain, Canada’s military and economic capabilities would be significantly bolstered by the absorption of military personnel from the UK, and elsewhere in Europe seeking to escape the Nazis and continue fighting against them.

In addition to comedians like Bob Hope, Canada provides a haven for many of the scientists, intellectuals and artists that sought refuge in the US in our timeline. As the US falls under the Nazi umbrella, American scientists seeking freedom and those who had previously fled there from the Nazis in Europe find their way to Canada, among them Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein.

With its newly acquired depth of scientific talent, Canada launches the “Manitoulin Project” to develop nuclear weaponry, keeping it abreast of Nazi progress in that direction.

Alan Turing migrates to Canada and lives to a ripe old age, working as a special scientific advisor to Ottawa.

That helps puts Canada at the forefront of developments in computer science and related technologies, making it a potentially formidable opponent for the Nazis and anyone else who threatens its autonomy.

An overly utopian vision for Canada’s place in Dick’s dystopian universe? Sure, but why not – if prophets of dark futures are going to leave us out of their visions, I feel every right to imagine my own vision of our place in their dystopian worlds.

Besides, we may actually need to start thinking about how Canada would handle an American dystopia in the real world.

I personally doubt that the odious person who is the presumptive candidate for the Republican Party will be able to return to the White House.

But in our universe, as in all the others, improbable contigencies have been known to occur.