| This dissertation investigates shifting perceptions towards peace activism in English Canada in the period between 1936 and 1953. Rather than recount the activities and messages of peace activists, the study surveys how key opinion leaders, particularly those working in various media, responded to, and in turn helped shape, both the peace message and responses to it.;The experiences of the Second World War led to a shift in attitudes in the postwar period. Canadians became inured to the use of military power, particularly strategic bombing, to defeat Germany and Japan. Support for previously popular liberal internationalist conceptions of peace diminished significantly as a result of the War experience. Interwar ideals like disarmament and mitigation of conflict through negotiation and treaties were supplanted. Instead, Canadians embraced the notion that weapons did not cause war but were rather a guarantor of the peace, and rejected attempts at reconciliation as merely dangerous flirtations with the failed interwar policy of appeasement.;As a result, postwar peace activists were marginalized. The increasingly tense Cold War confrontation, which in itself was more readily embraced by Canadians due to the wartime habits of gross dichotomization and dehumanization, meant that peace activists were often vilified as communist dupes. State coercion did not dictate this marginalization of Cold War peace activism. Rather, an internalization of the "lessons" of the Second World War led to a rejection of the traditional peace message and to a more ready acceptance of the postwar confrontation with the Soviet union.;During the interwar period, a broad-based peace consensus, embracing a variety of activist groups, received support from numerous influential and respected opinion leaders. However, the fascist challenge of the late 1930s led to splits in this consensus, and eventually to a wholesale abandonment of peace activism in support of a confrontation with fascism. |
