Ah, Remembrance Day

A few days ago, Wonderdog wrote a good piece about Remembrance Day that sums up some of what I feel:

The most obnoxious day of the calendar will soon be upon us.
...

Remembrance Day is sacred, but the rest of this goddamn horseshit I will not brook.

I will not fall for clichéd horseshit about the price of freedom. No aggressor has ever threatened the freedom of Canadians. Whatever the lies believed and repeated by credulous children, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of expression and our constitution are the products of civil progress, not military action.

This seems to have been provoked by this little turd floating around the Internet:

It’s the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press.
It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech.
It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, who has given us freedom to demonstrate.
It is the soldier, not the lawyer, who has given us the right to a fair trial.
It is the soldier who salutes the flag, who serves under the flag and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protester to burn the flag.

Holy hell that's noxious. The last thing Canada needs is a military fetish like the US. But I suppose such masturbatory writing makes certain sectors feel better than the reality - Canada inherited its freedoms from a colonial power, without significant bloodshed or a decent war. And that colonial power (England) got it's freedoms only as a result of a centuries-long process of occasional unrest, revolution, and civil war. Oh, and the Glorious Revolution. Of course, in all of these cases, it was wealthy elites, not soldiers, who drove the process. I guess the facts just aren't sexy enough for fans of Tom Clancy.

Canada's own history post-1867 is even less inspiring for the necrophiliacs. Our rights have been extended by - gasp! - constitutional negotiation, and wise jurisprudence. In short, nowhere in Canada's history is there any evidence that our freedoms have been won by military conflict. The funny thing is, this isn't even true of the United States. Americans were enjoying all sorts of civil freedoms long before the revolution. The US secession from Great Britain didn't really "win" these rights, it just made them subject to domestic interference, not overseas.

All of this neglects the wealth of writing by the US founding fathers, who said quite explicitly that wars in general, and standing armies in particular, were inimical to the preservation of liberty.

I don't expect any of this matters to the kind of people who jerk off to the passage quoted above. But you've got to wonder about the mental health of people who would apparently prefer to believe that we had fought our way to freedom. To me, getting freedom without fighting is the ultimate bargain - especially when you consider that some people fight and still don't get freedom (see Tiananmen, 1989.)

But the point of Remembrance Day isn't just to get in a pissing match with some right-wing blogger. The point is obvious. Let me hazard a piece of advice: While there can be glory in war, and bravery, and even real victories over real evils, don't dwell on these things, because none of those things justify wars. When we talk about America's wars today, or our own wars in the past, present, and future, we all too often forget that war represents a fundamental failure of human intelligence. Wars are in the modern context simply too destructive to be allowed to happen. This has been true for at least a century - nobody, not even the victors, "wins" anymore. (See World War I, World War II [Eastern Front], Korea, Vietnam [either side], Iraq 1991, Iraq 2002.) Despite the fundamental irrationality of war, we have not been intelligent enough to escape the old game.

Originally, Remembrance Day was supposed to be a time to reflect on the staggering, senseless cost of the First World War. Rather than take that lesson and apply it to all wars, we've instead turned the day in to something like hero-worship for the veterans. Do I begrudge them their acclaims? Not at all. But we've lost something in that translation. I can't help but feel that we're worse off, and in more danger because of it.