What Are We Remembering?

Rememberance Day always leaves me with mixed feelings. One the one hand, I think it's very important to remember what it means to fight in a war, and what it means to die in a war. But its effectiveness on that score is undercut by the nationalistic/militaristic sentimentalism by which it seems that our soldiers who died in wars are the only casulties of war worth remembering, and that they all died for noble principles, died so that we could be free, etc. etc. It is said that they "fell" in battle; that they "laid down their lives", sacrificing themselves so that future generations might enjoy freedom and democracy, etc., etc.

I'm not a strict pacifist. I don't say that there can never be any violence, anywhere, under any circumstances. I would like to be able to say that, but I feel that it would be wrong of me to say that people are not to defend themselves from attack or from heavy oppression, especially since I'm not in a position of being attacked or oppressed. That said, the reality of war is not that it is a noble sacrifice in which people willingly lay down their lives for their country and for freedom. The reality is that war is a horrendous atrocity, which is at best a necessary evil, and most of the time isn't even necessary. The reality is that people have their lives torn from them- they rarely give them up willingly. There is a differance between risking one's life (willingly or unwillingly) and giving it up willingly for a sacrifice.

Even the Second World War, of which it can convincingly be said that Allied soldiers did preserve freedom in some parts of the world, was a catastrophe in human terms. Tens of millions of people were killed. Many others were made refugees. Most of Europe lay in ruins by the end of it. Parts of Asia were also devastated, and the war also featured the first (and so far only) nuclear bombings, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Fighting the war may have been a necessary evil, but it was a great evil all the same.

As for the war from which Rememberance Day originates, World War One, it is difficult to see that those who fought in it preserved freedom and democracy in Canada. Had we sat out that particular war, how would Canadian democracy have been imperilled? Would the German Kaiser have sent his troops across the Atlantic? No, the only reason why Canadians fought in that war was because we were still part of the British Empire.

This is not mere academic quibbling about history, for the same justifications for that war are now being used to support the idea of our sending troops abroad to "promote freedom", thus securing our own freedom. You would think, then, that if we were not in Afghanistan, hordes of "jihadis" would even now be attempting to conquer western Europe and North America in order to take away our freedoms. Not so. The reason why many Muslims support "holy war" against the "West" is not because they want to rule the "West", but because they've had enough of being ruled by the "West", either directly through military occupation or indirectly through "pro-Western" tyrannies. As Robert Fisk puts it, they want to be free- of us.

Memory is important, but memory can be selective. How we choose to remember has a bearing on the choices we make that will determine our future. So let us remember, but let us also think about what we are remembering, and about what we might be forgetting.