I wasn’t sure if I’d write anything on Remembrance Day, but then I saw this National Post editorial:
Still, we risk dishonouring those Canadians who have gone to war to defend our nation and its values when we seek to revise our history and downplay our contributions to wars fought in the name of freedom. This is especially true at a time when more than 2,500 of our soldiers are battling the Taliban and al Qaeda on the plains and in the mountains of Afghanistan. Nearly 100 have lost their lives there in the past six years trying to bring stability to the people of that nation and deny terrorists a staging base from which to plot their attacks on the West.
Amen. But…
As far as I can tell, most people believe war is both bad and sometimes necessary. There are few pure pacifists and pure soldiers at either extreme. The extent of our discussion about war dissipates into ultra-ambiguous opinions like, “I think war should always be avoided, but sometimes it’s necessary, like WWII,” and “Mankind has always fought wars and always will, but, I agree, there are cases when war can and should be avoided.”
It’s pointless to get into hypothetical because, if you consider the major wars from the past century, they tend to occur in unprecedented circumstances that people aren’t intellectually prepared for (but which people nevertheless take for granted as largely the same as past precedents — think of how quickly Iraq was compared to Vietnam, Saddam Hussein was compared to Hitler, anti-war politicians were called compared to Neville Chamberlain as “appeasers,” and the recent Georgian conflict was compared to Sudetenland). As conflicts play out (or not, if a peaceful agreement is reached) and become part of history people begin to appreciate how defective the earlier assumptions were (the First World War is the great example of this).
And talk is cheap. Peaceniks can say “sure I’d support a war against XYZ” but when actually faced with the reality they renege. War mongers can say “sure there are cases when war isn’t the answer” but as soon as any minor conflict breaks out they declare the solution is to choose a side and run in with surface-to-air missiles.
One way in which talk can actually be useful (and is really essential) is in defining our concepts of things like “freedom” and “justice.” The more I hear politicians talking about “dying for freedom” the less I’m inclined to take them seriously — unless they follow that up by giving us an impression of what freedom is and what it’s good for.
Anybody can say they’re fighting for freedom. Arguably, that’s what everybody says they’re fighting for.
In fact I’m tempted to suggest that “freedom” is what people say they’re fighting for when they don’t actually know (and don’t care to know) what their actual reasons are. I wrote about this last year when I claimed war is a retreat from complexity.
If we can’t articulate exactly what it is our predecessors fought and died for, and what we stand for now, then we aren’t justified in claiming to be morally any better than our enemies, because they’re almost certainly fighting for the same reasons but merely facing a different direction.
If our politicians can’t explain and exemplify the values and ideals we’re at war for, then “it’s all just part of the game” — just like any other fight among boys, a show of physical strength when minds and morals have failed.
This isn’t to discredit the sacrifices that have been made — far from it. This is about fulfilling the purposes of those sacrifices, sustaining their vitality in our mind (not just in habits, gestures, and rhetoric), building from them towards even greater purposes; above all, ensuring that a century from now we aren’t seen as the evil side, ensuring we aren’t ultimately defeated by sacrifices of others made in the name of “freedom” facing another direction.
