Toward the end of Fahrenheit 9/11, the movie written and directed by Michael Moore, various U.S. military people and some civilians voice their dismay at finding themselves embroiled in a war that has no meaning. It is this realization that gives the movie its moral complexity: we see people having to change their minds when their ideology is contradicted by experience. The war in Iraq has come for these Americans to have no meaning outside of the meaning of Empire. They are learning that the poor and the marginalized are the ones who fight the wars on which Empire thrives (mainly poor blacks and whites) and who provide the fodder for the great machinery of war (the industry of “support,” including the oil-services giant Halliburton, et al.) that generates enormous profits for every dead American (not a single Congressman has a child in the war in Iraq: another “obvious” fact revealed in the movie). This disillusion strikes those of us sharing colonial traditions as naïve: these Americans seem to have been sequestered from history. Why is it only now that they are coming to these conclusions? But: the U.S. does not have a history of fighting wars of Empire, as we in Canada have been doing since before Confederation. Americans fight ideological wars of the “homeland”: the Revolution, Civil War, wars against Japan and Germany, the Cold War, Vietnam—all are understood as “belonging” to the homeland. Not so with “our” not-so-Canadian War of 1812, or the Boer War, the so-called World Wars, or Korea. These are wars of Empire that Canadians and other colonials (and the British poor) have always died in: at the heart of the Canadian experience is this tradition of dying in meaningless battles. In Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti postulates typical British and German crowds, using metaphors of ships at sea and marching forests: if he had studied Canadian crowds, he would have found their formative metaphor in the cenotaphs in every Canadian city, empty tombs wherein no bodies are laid. At the heart of Empire even the dead are a mere species of the Disappeared. An informative note on Halliburton can be found at the Mother Jones web site. The history of the cenotaph in Canada can be found at the UBC Press web site.