While I accord the proper respect to the spirit of
Remembrance Day every year there are certain questions that I always ponder
when I hear the patriotic rhetoric that inevitably surfaces when this day
appears.
"We honour our heroes that sacrificed their lives to
defend our rights, way of life..."
While I cannot dispute that our soldiers went overseas to fight and our
side incurred heavy casualties, they in all honesty were not serving to protect
our rights, way of life, etc. In both World War I and II, Canada
was not under attack from anyone. We may
have had a few remote skirmishes off our waters but our lands were not
threatened. Our way of life, our
government, our day to day lives were not invaded by any opportune enemy
force.
Our reason for partaking in the First World War was a
microcosm of why the Great War started.
It was largely started because the various countries involved gave
blank-check assurances to their respective allies which polarized into two opposing
forces. Canada
and the United States
sided with Great Britain
and her allies. Our veterans from that
era went to war to honour that specific alliance. The conclusion of that war saw the Allies
suppress and humiliate the Germans so much that within twenty years, German
bitterness and resentment for being treated as such transformed into vengeance
that fueled a desire to overwhelm anything and everything in its path.
As bad and destructive as the Great War was, World War II
was even worse. The destruction of
lands and human life was at a level never seen before. Again, Canadian troops went in to fulfill its
alliances to its commonwealth mother Great
Britain.
Our war veterans sacrifices were very real but those sacrifices were
more as a defense for our allies over in Europe and not
for the inhabitants of our own country.
There are two things that strike me every Remembrance Day.
The first is this global day remains confined to exclusively national and
patriotic fervor. Each country takes
time to reflect on its own veterans with little pause to consider the
sacrifices of veterans in other countries.
Americans do little to pause for remembrance of Dieppe
much like Canadians give little pause for British fighting in North
Africa. Secondly, very few
people give any reflection to the innocent civilians - men, women and children
who lost their lives throughout these destructive military conflicts. We strive
to recognize the agents of force (the soldiers) while conveniently forgetting
those murdered, raped, wounded or tortured through no fault of their own. Where is the day to remember their lives
stolen unmercifully from them?
It is within these contexts that we should observe
Remembrance day under a far more encompassing lens. Let Remembrance Day allow us to learn that
precious lesson of just how destructive and heartbreaking war was and can
be. Let the day be more globally
remembered beyond our borders that war was an international and global tragedy
that affected hundreds of millions of people and not just our own
soldiers. Finally, let the day allow us
to move forward that we may never again relive those destructive ways in a
present or future tense.
