Forgetting
Lest we remember.
Remembrance Day disgusts me.
For one day a year, we solemnly gather around our cities’ cenotaphs, and mouth the wods Never Again, and *Lest We Forget. For the balance of the year we return to listening to politicians and pundits debate the relative merits of this military excursion, and that so-called peacekeeping mission.
Peace cannot be forcibly kept with the threat of violence at the point of a gun. That’s not peace. That’s Canadians wandering foreign countries, threatening people.
We are told “If only we had stopped Hitler at Munich,†as a means of justifying aggression against an entire cadre of potential Hitlers.
War is the health of the state. The state is the health of the media, which looks directly to the city halls, the capitals and the parliaments to receive its diurnal dose of readymade news.
No one is as bad or as good as they are made out to be in the media. There are plenty of thugs running countries. (Don’t look, but there’s one in the Whitehouse right now.) We don’t have the means to stop all of them. We don’t have the moral authority to attempt any of them.
What of genocide?
If the first World War had ended when it should have—in 1917, with Germany suing for peace before America entered and turned it into a rout—there would have been no foundations laid for the rise of Hitler, the second World War, and its holocausts chemical, incendiary and nuclear.
This year we have been told the battle of attrition to take the Belgian town of Passchendaele defined Canada as a country. Before Paul Gross’s movie came out, we had been lead to believe the Battle of Vimy Ridge defined us as a country. Frankly, I thought we were defined as a country when the papers of confederation were signed at a weekend barbecue in Prince Edward Island, but I suppose that wasn’t nearly bloody enough to read like a country forged in fire.
What part of Never Again means opening fire on North Koreans? What part of Never Again means clandestine military missions in Vietnam? What part of Never Again means armed patrols in Afghanistan?
In truth, it’s not Remembrance Day that disgusts me, it’s our governments’ repudiation of it for the remaining 364 days of the year.
ev · PDDCCCLXXXVI
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