Warrior nation?

That's the image our current Prime Minister is promoting for Canada. More realistic is John Moore's take, the same guy who took on "entitlement" in Quebec politics recently. Again from the National Post, with thanks to Phil Paine:

But is Vimy really the best of Canada? Does our modern identity and national purpose hinge on the harrowing slaughter of our citizens on a foreign field of mud in a pointless war? It’s easy to romanticize war and reverse engineer its purpose. The Second World War — one of the most unambiguously moral wars in history — has fooled us into thinking there is honour in war itself. The Americans celebrate a conflict in which 600,000 died over a man’s right to own another man as evidence of romantic nationalism, when the Civil War should really be regarded as a five-year period of epic madness. The Great War was a needless enterprise. Launched like a negative billing option by a series of reciprocal agreements between inbred, tottering royal families, the war consumed nine million souls and accomplished absolutely nothing, save laying the pretext for an even bloodier future conflict. Canada was roped into the enterprise by virtue of our colonial status. Canadian men descended from those who had fled the stifling working class slavery of Europe to build new and free lives in a country without horizon, were sucked into the vortex of internecine conflict between the crowned heads they had left behind. It’s worth noting many enlisted only under relentless pressure from former warriors and dilettantes who presented dissenters with white feathers as the ultimate public gesture of emasculation. If anything, modern Canada should reflect on Vimy and our total First World War sacrifice as a national tragedy. Sixty-thousand Canadian men died in a war in which we had no real casus belli and which was largely administered by damnable incompetents. A generation of teachers, milkmen, farm hands, labourers, students and artists died on the field of battle, so hollowing out the population that many of the women they left behind would never marry. One hundred and seventy-three thousand returned home suffering from burns, chemical poisoning, amputations and traumatic stress disorder that would leave them depressed and spastic for the remainder of their lives. So why, 95 years later, do we venerate Vimy? Perhaps because it’s far easier to stir emotions where military matters are concerned. You can’t erect a heroic statue to the civility for which Canada is renowned. Social justice has never been able to muster an inspiring flypast. The national understanding that in Canada we look after each other doesn’t have a solemn bugle call to draw a tear. In place of the notion that our national identity might rise from something as unremarkable as compassion, hard work and character, we prefer to imbue the solitary terror of a prairie farm boy calling for his mother as he bleeds out into the soil of a French field with a purpose and nobility it does not deserve.

Lest we forget.

Share this

My Website