Today is Remembrance Day in Canada and Armistice Day in much of the rest of the world. It was initiated in reaction to the horrific slaughter of the Great War to commemorate the fallen.
Today it is often used as an excuse to, if not glorify war, at least excuse its frequency. We are told they died protecting our freedom.
This is largely propaganda. Let’s take a look at Canada’s participation in wars since Confederation.
There was the Boer War, fought in South Africa to take control of the region from the Dutch for the benefit of the British Empire. Certainly no one gained any freedom there. In fact, the one thing that war is noted for was the invention of the concentration camp.
The Great War was again a struggle between imperial powers for European domination. Not only was the horror of modern warfare made obvious but the movements of large numbers of soldiers around the world spread influenza among the civilian populations. In the end, more people died of that plague than died in the war.
The atrociously unfair Treaty of Versailles that ended the war made the next war inevitable.
In between however Canadian troops fought in Russia to try to restore the Czar then stayed home rather than aid Spanish citizens against the fascists. Those are two significant losses for freedom. The former bolstered hardline attitudes in Soviet leadership while the latter showed Hitler and Mussolini that the allies weren’t going to stand up to them.
Finally in WWII, Canadian troops were sent in to fight for freedom, but only after being forced into the war.
The Korean conflict may have been about freedom for South Korea but it also led to the ongoing partitioning of the country. The problem was that the American military under McArthur didn’t know when to stop and ended up goading China into the war on the side of the North. This turned victory into the ongoing stalemate.
After that the Canadian military thankfully switched roles to become a major supporter of U.N. peacekeeping missions. This dangerous and generally thankless work is something we as nation were deservedly proud of.
Unfortunately with the rise of neoliberalism over the last three decades, our military role has become increasingly that of an adjunct to the U.S.. A return to fighting unjust wars for the benefit of imperial powers sets us back a hundred years in terms of our development as an independent and caring nation.
We should never forget that war is hell. Every soldier comes back with scars, whether physical or psychological, that take time to heal – if healing is even possible. And that’s assuming they come back at all. Even worse is the damage done to civilian populations and infrastructure in the war zones.
War is rarely necessary and never glorious. We need to appreciate the job our soldiers do at the request of our governments but more importantly we need to ensure that we never unnecessarily put them in harms way.
We need to return to our role as a nation of peacekeepers. At least then we can face our soldiers and tell them the job they are doing in our name is worth it.
Gary Dale's Blog 