More on December 6th

More--much more--on December sixth and Marc Lepine showed up on the League of Canadian Poets' email list after I put up my last post here. In response, I made some of the same points I made here. And the discussion has continued from there.

So I post my further thoughts verbatum from that list:

A portmanteau response on the Dec. 6 memorials:

Robert Priest (and Anne Simpson says something similar) says that the Ecole Polytechnique is more worthy of remembrance than the Halifax explosion because
1. the Halifax explosion was an accident;
2. at the EP, it was women who were killed, because they were women; and
3. Ecole Polytechnique was more recent.


In response:


1. The Halifax explosion was an accident.

The Halifax explosion was an accident in one sense, but not in another. It was an act of war as well: these were munitions ships waiting for convoy, and the purpose of those munitions was to kill people. Men, specifically. They merely killed the wrong people. Indeed, we would no doubt remember it even less if it had killed its intended targets, all men, instead of taking a civilian toll of women and children.

Conversely, you can argue that the Ecole Polytechnique was, in a sense, an accident: one lone madman, who might as easily have gotten any other random notion into his head. He might as easily have gone after people with long brown hair, as Son of Sam apparently did.

Certainly, there is something very wrong—and sexist--with blaming all men for what Marc Lepine did, or suggesting Marc Lepine’s act says something about all men. Would you feel comfortable blaming all Arabs or all Muslims for 9/11? All Jews for Son of Sam? All women for Marguerite Petrie (for many years Canada’s most prolific mass murderer; She killed 23 people in 1949. More than Marc Lepine.)


2. Because it was women who were killed, because they were women.

As above, isn’t singling out women for special memorial, because they are women, as sexist in principle as singling out women, because they are women, to be killed? In effect, by doing so, you are commemorating not the women, but their murder. And, in effect, you are honouring Marc Lepine and his beliefs. Not the women, who were just there for another day of class, and worrying about the upcoming final.

And note that this argument in itself suggests that the Ecole Polytechnique was an anomaly, saying nothing about men or society as a whole. In Canada alone, 500-600 are murdered every year; in the US the figure is more like 15,000. (About seventy-five percent are men.) Remarkable that, in fifteen years, Marc Lepine’s deed still stands out. I submit that it is precisely because it is so unusual, and so offends our sensibilities. We are accustomed to and inured to the murder of men. We cannot stomach the murder of women. It is “man bites dog.” Or rather, “man harms woman,” instead of the expected, traditional, “man supports, defends, protects, rescues woman.”

This being so, it demonstrates precisely how supporting our society is of women. The very reverse of what it is commonly claimed to represent: widespread “gendercide” against women.


3. Because Ecole Polytechnique was more recent.

The Halifax explosion stood out because it was on the same day, in the same country, more died, and it was by comparison not commemorated. But it was never commemorated, even when recent, as the Ecole Polytechnique is. And there have been as bad and worse mass murders and massacres since Ecole Polytechnique, on other days or in other countries, that are not commemorated.

Air India flight 182: 331 people killed.

Can you name the day? Can you name the victims?


Trish Shields asks if I am referring to the death of men in war.

No, I am not just referring to the killing of men in wars. You may also have heard the phrase “women and children first.”

Note too that the great majority of officially-registered homicide victims are men, the vast majority of known suicides are men, and the vast majority of those the state executes are men. It is the general principle everywhere in our society. Men are expendable. Women are not.


She then says:
1. the killing of men in wars does not count because this is something men are doing to themselves: men are the ones who run the governments.
2. we should in any event stop seeing it as “us” and “them.” And
3. nobody remembers the names of those killed at the Ecole Polytechnique.


1. The killing of men in wars does not count because men run the governments.

Women cannot avoid responsibility for wars at least in democratic countries in which they have the vote. The officials who actually issue the orders are merely their servants, expressing the popular will.

Now compare the death toll from war among democracies in the 20th century, when women had the vote, to that in the 19th, when only men held it. Do you see a reduction in violence?

No, you see the reverse. If women were less warlike, their sudden fifty percent voice should have had a significant effect in this regard, should it not?

Accordingly, it is probably unfair to blame the men for wars even in non-democratic nations.

As I mentioned once before on this list, in most wars everywhere, the men who go off to fight are themselves convinced—and quite explicitly-- that they are doing it not because they want to go out and get killed, but for the sake of their women: their wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers. They are protecting the home fires, defending their sisters from rape, their babies from bayoneting, avenging nurses who were reportedly murdered, or something similar. They are showing their readiness to protect and provide.

They may have been misguided; in that case, they deserve our sympathies and our memories that much more.

Or they may have been right. You may recall that in the streets of London during World War I, women carried white feathers which they pinned on any young man they saw. It was supposed to symbolize cowardice, as they were evidently not at the front. In the Second World War, Lady Astor called any man who was not involved in D-Day a coward. (This especially upset the troops who were busily fighting their way up Italy.)

Consider too the US Civil War. Abraham Lincoln himself, without malice, assigned responsibility for it to Harriet Beecher Stowe: “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war?” It was believed at the time to be primarily women who were calling, rightly or wrongly, for a war to end slavery. And the Franco-Prussian War was commonly known in France at the time as “Empress Eugenie’s War.”

That accounts, I think, for the two biggest conflicts in the democracies in the 19th century.

Remember again Aristotle’s observation in Ancient Greece that warlike cities were dominated by women. The general tendency to leave government officially at least in male hands may indeed have developed, this suggests, as a way to prevent war.

After all, men have more at stake: they’re the ones who get killed. It stands to reason that they would be more cautious in resorting to it. Indeed, military service has often been the explicit justification for giving them political power.

So there is little sign women are not having their will fulfilled in these matters.

We know for certain that the primary victims of war are men. We can only speculate whether the prime instigators are primarily men. It is society: the discrimination against men is systemic.

And note: this is in important ctntrast with what happened at Ecole Polytechnique. That was a lone gunman, one crazed individual. There is no reason to suppose it has any wider significance. Very unlike the matter of war worldwide.


2. We should in any event stop seeing it as “us” and “them.”

My point exactly. And my problem with the Ecole Polytechnique remembrances, which single out the event, as Robert has said, because it happened to women. And was done by a man. Anyone’s death diminishes me; because I am involved in mankind (er, “humankind”?). A woman’s death should not count more than a man’s death, just as a German’s death should not count more than a Jew’s death, nor an American’s death more than an Iraqi’s death.

And nobody’s crime should count more because they are a man or a woman. Just as it should not count more because they are black, or native, or gypsy.


3. Nobody remembers the names of the women killed.

How many of the names of those killed in the Halifax Explosion can you give? Can you even cite the exact number? How about Air India? How about those killed in Korea?

QED


I heartily endorse what Harold has said. It is time to get beyond this mad war and mad hate between men and women, which harms us all and helps no one.

As Leonard Cohen put it, “the homicidal bitching that goes down in every kitchen/ Over who will serve and who is going to eat.”

Or as John Lennon put it, “War is over. If you want it.”

Steve Roney