Remembrance Day

A BC teacher has written an article for The Tyee explaining why he refuses to wear a poppy for Remembrance Day.

View the article at

http://www.thetyee.ca/Views/2005/11/09/DontWearPoppy

Whether or not The Tyee prints it, here, FWIW, is my response.


Why I Wear a Poppy

Clay McLeod’s premise (“Why I Don’t Wear a Poppy”, Nov. 9) is that the sacrifices of Canadian soldiers in World War I and II and in Korea are not worthy of remembrance because “wars are never completely black-and-white.” This is an extravagant example of what is currently called “moral equivalence,” of failing to see any distinction between degrees of right and wrong. This is a critical failure, because in the real world, moral choices are always between degrees of right and wrong. Real life is never black and white.

But to equate the actions of Hitler with the internment of Japanese Canadians, and the wearing of a poppy with the wearing of a swastika, is to smash one’s moral compass and hide all the pieces.

McLeod claims “Unarguably, WWI was ‘for king and country,’ not freedom and democracy; its causes were rooted in European imperialism and nationalism.”

I’m afraid that view, although currently fashionable, is in fact quite arguable. It is perfectly reasonable to claim they did, as they believed they did, fight for democracy and that small nations might be free.

In World War I, it remains true that all the great democracies were aligned on one side, and the other side was solidly autocratic. Had the autocrats cleanly won, they would presumably have imposed autocratic governments; their loss, conversely, produced democracy, for a time, in Germany and the former Austrian Empire. So how was it not a fight for freedom and democracy? It also remains true that the war was started by the autocrats, by invading Serbia, and it was also the autocrats who invaded Belgium without a casus belli. Had they won, it would have been a severe blow to the freedom of small nations.

McLeod then denies that even WWII had any preponderance of morality on either side: “WWII was a complex conflict based in the context of the resolution of WWI. Although that context gave fertile soil to the most notorious example of evil known to history - Hitler and the Nazis - the resulting conflict was more a continuation of imperialist rivalries and nationalistic competition than it was a legitimate battle between good and evil…”

This is double talk. If the most notorious example of evil known to history is on the one side, supporting the other side is, necessarily, a moral issue.

Nor did Britain, France, the US, or Russia go to war in order to expand their empires or to crush Germany as a nation. Without looking at each case, the claim is absurd on the historical facts.

McLeod considers the Korean conflict his coup de grace: “The fact that we recognize the efforts of our soldiers in the Korean War … conclusively demonstrates that we are not just recognizing the efforts of soldiers to protect freedom and democracy.”

Freedom and democracy were not at stake in Korea? This is possible to believe only in hindsight. Whatever his later crimes, Syngman Rhee was then a democratic leader, democratically elected. Kim Il Sung refused to hold scheduled UN elections in North Korea, and instead invaded to seize the South.

And perhaps not even in hindsight. Compare the situation, in terms of either personal freedom or democracy, in North and South Korea today. Can McLeod believe a different result to the Korean War would not have mattered, for either?

Finally, McLeod argues that, in any event, war per se is evil: in confronting evil, we should instead use tactics of passive resistance.

To be consistent, though, he should advocate the same approach for the criminal justice system. Faced, for example, with a rapist and slasher plying his trade in our stairwell, the proper response is not to call the cops, but to get out there and bare our breast to him to shame him into better behaviour. To a child molester, in turn, we should offer our own children so that he comes to see the error of his ways.

That ought to work.

But even if all this were not so, it would still be beside the point. McLeod is labouring under the false premise that Remembrance Day is a day for celebrating the victory by force of “freedom and democracy.”

“Remembrance Day uses the veneer of virtues like ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ to glorify military solutions to the world's problems.” It is not, and nobody I know understands the poppy in this way. The point of the poppy is that they grew amid the graves of the fallen.

Certainly, if I were going to make the case for war as a glorious and a good thing, I would not take the vast death toll of WWI trench warfare as my symbol.

It is a day, rather, for remembering the sacrifice of soldiers who suffered and died in war.

McLeod believes it would be apt to commemorate the sufferings of those killed in the concentration camps. They manifestly did not die for “freedom and democracy.” Yet he refuses to honour the sufferings of soldiers who fought and died in war, because, in his opinion (not theirs) they did not die for “freedom and democracy.” Is this not inconsistent?

Indeed, even if McLeod is right about the real causes of this or that war, it is surely relevant that the average soldier believed that he was fighting and perhaps dying in a noble cause. Isn’t it both illogical and cruel to claim that, because they were mistaken or misled, their sacrifice is to be discounted?

And what of the special virtues of the soldier? Courage, loyalty, forbearance and persistence in the face of adversity, self-abnegation. Greater love hath no man, after all, than one who will lay down his life for his fellow man. What is the justice in ignoring such things? If war is wrong, it is wrong to blame the soldier.

“Regardless of whether I'm right or if I'm deluded myself,” McLeod concludes, “the fact is that violence is a never ending cycle.”

Unfortunately, this too is McLeod’s delusion. Violence does not, in fact, self-perpetuate. Germany and Japan, for example, have not returned to war as a result of the violence used against them in WWII. Uganda has not gone to war again because of the violence used to unseat Idi Amin. Arresting and imprisoning criminals does not visibly cause them to reoffend.

As some wag once observed, “violence never solved anything—okay, except maybe Fascism, slavery, American independence, the survival of the Jewish race…”

Wear the damned poppy, McLeod. Your morals are showing.