Are they commemorating the soldiers who secured the airport the night US Marines kidnapped Haiti’s elected president? Or do the Red Poppy wearing NDP MPs want us to remember the Canadians who helped recapture Patrice Lumumba before his assassination? Or lest we forget the Torontonians who helped Britian conquer Palestine in 1917?
Is Avi Lewis honouring Royal Canadian Air Force officers who oversaw the 2011 bombing campaign that destroyed Libya’s Great Manmade River aquifer system? Or the sailors who enforced a blockade of Iraq as George W. Bush invaded in 2003?
Maybe leftist Vancouver city councillor Sean Orr prefers to venerate those who administered concentration camps in southern Africa at the turn of the 19th century? Or those who participated in nighttime assassination raids in Afghanistan? Or those who navigated the Nile River in 1884 to defend British control of Khartoum?
Should we honor the Canadians who summarily executed German prisoners during World War I? Or the sailors who pressured Costa Rica to repay an odious 1917 debt to the Royal Bank?
Maybe the leftist politicians are celebrating the sailors who bolstered a dictatorship in El Salvador in 1932 that engaged in one of the worst massacres of peasants in the history of the Americas? Or the fighter pilots who helped destroy large swaths of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure in 1991?
Lest we forget those who called allied South Korean soldiers “ch..ks” as they fought in an early 1950s war that left several million dead? Or the Canadian officer who led numerous expeditions to conquer different parts of west Africa and published an influential British training manual, which noted how “the great thing is to impress savages with the fact that they are the weaker, and… enforce the will of the white man.”
While anti-war sentiment has at different moments in time been part of a day timed to mark the final moment of the dastardly first World War, Remembrance Day now bolsters militarism, nationalism and imperialism. The three-year-old active genocide in Gaza highlights it. As I detailed a month into Israel’s horrors there, proponents of the red poppy and Remembrance Day ignored or even opposed the large numbers then taking to the streets calling for a ceasefire. In recent days, a Facebook friend posted, “It’s almost that time of year when hypocrite MPs wearing poppies the size of side plates, lecture us on respect and remembrance, while they continue to help arm and facilitate a genocide. #freepalestine.”
Leftists shouldn’t wear red poppies that raise funds for the militaristic, imperialistic, Royal Canadian Legion and only commemorate Canadians who have died at war. By focusing exclusively on “our” side, red poppies reinforce a sense that Canada’s cause is righteous. But World War II is the only war Canadian soldiers have fought in that could be deemed morally justifiable war and even major “peacekeeping” missions in Haiti and Congo were imperialist endeavors.
But wearing a red poppy appears to be the price of entry into a political (media) system in which Parliament votes unanimously to bomb Libya, celebrate Irwin Cotler and applauds a former SS soldier (Elizabeth May opposed the second Libya vote and apparently some didn’t stand when Yaroslav Hunka was being praised in Parliament). I wasn’t surprised to see Avi Lewis and every NDP MP at a recent press conference wearing a red poppy but it was disappointing to see far left Vancouver city councillor Sean Orr doing the same while posting that he was “proud to wear a poppy in the memory” of an “uncle who died in the trenches in World War I.” At least Québec Solidaire spokesperson Ruba Ghazal is wearing both a red and white poppy.
In contrast to the Red Poppy, the ninety-year-old white poppy campaign says it promotes: “Remembrance of all victims of war, including both civilians and members of armed forces… Challenging war and militarism, as well as any attempt to glorify or celebrate war…. A commitment to peace and to seeking nonviolent solutions to conflict.”
Canada’s annual veneration of soldiers raises a fundamental moral question few discuss. Are soldiers more valuable to society than teachers? Are they more essential than the people who drive buses or clean our waste? Is what they do more honourable than caring for elders, reporting the news or providing essential social services?
Or, if danger is the primary criteria, how about those who build houses or feed us? Over the past half-century tens of times more Canadian construction workers have been killed on the job than soldiers. While 158 Canadian soldiers died in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2014, there were 843 agriculture-related fatalities in Canada between 2003 and 2012.
The truth is soldiers are “venerated” not because of the danger they face or their heroism, but because fighting wars must be made to appear heroic to motivate anybody to do it. Fighting wars driven by rivalries between rich and powerful people is particularly difficult to sell. Patriotism, nationalism and other forms of “herding the masses” are used to sell militarism and wars that are in the interests of the small few who profit from them.
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