On Remembering and Freedom

I wrote this on Remembrance Day in 2012. 

On my way down to the war memorial today, I was thinking about the way we remember our fallen soldiers from wars past.  We remember them as heroes, as model patriots and gentleman, as people who paid an incredible price for God and country.  It is often said that those who died in the war gave their lives for our freedom.  But what exactly does that mean?  Does it mean we would be living in some sort of prison cells, or as slaves under German occupation, or that we would never have been born at all if Canadian soldiers hadn't fought and died?

The answer to all this is: I don't know.  If anyone is familiar with the Nazi plans for invading the world once they had finished with Britain and the rest of Europe, I'd invite you to leave a comment here for my education (preferrably with references).  But for the time being, given that we joined the war as an ally of Britain, rather than as a country that the Nazi's moved against directly in provocation, let's assume the Nazi's weren't realistically planning on taking over the U.S. and Canada, or at least hadn't thought that far ahead - despite what the various governmental propaganda-makers seemed to indicate.  No, I'm betting that, if Hitler had won the war, he would have realized that a complete occupation of North America was a fools-bet at best, and that he didn't have the resources to do it.

But if Canada and the U.S. weren't directly at risk, what does it mean when we say that these brave soldiers fought, and sometimes died for our freedom? 

Here's where I became stuck for a little while.  On the one hand, if we weren't under a direct threat from the Nazis, we probably could have spared a lot of Canadian blood and grief by choosing a different course of action.  On the other hand, allowing the Nazi's to rule Europe might have led to just as much eventual bloodletting through ethnic cleansing and continued rebel-resistance in France and Britain.  You could say that our soldiers fought, and sometimes died, for the freedom of the many European people who would have fallen under the Nazi occupation.  So you could say that our soldiers fought for freedom in general, but for our freedom?

A crowd of about 6-700 people was gathered around the cenotaph in Rothesay as these thoughts were milling about in my head, all with poppies adorning their coats and hats, all in solemn silence listening to some small children reading In Flanders Fields.  This year one particular passage caught my attention:

...Take up our quarrel with the foe,
to you from failing hands we throw
the torch; be yours to hold it high...


What does that mean to take up their quarrel with the foe?  Of course John McCrae can't have meant that we should keep fighting Nazi's until they're extinguished from the earth - you get the sense that he meant much more than that, that "foe" was something bigger than Hitler and the Nazis.

And then the trumpet played Last Post, and I was reminded of my Grandpa, Walter Haughian, who fought on the Italian front as an artilleryman in WWII.  I started feeling a little ashamed of myself, like in asking whether what he fought for was really my personal freedom was also questioning the legitimacy of the life-long emotional scars he bore as a result of that terrible war.

So I asked myself, what did my Grandpa fight for?  If the rest of his life was any indication, he fought for love - love of his family and friends, love of his country, and love of life in general.  But is this the same thing as freedom?  Yes - allow me to explain.

If you know anything about the Nazi's ideology, much of it was based on a misinterpretation of Darwinian evolution, and a likely intentional misapplication of the objective concept of "survival of the fittest" to the clearly subjective idea that one group of humans can declare itself to be the fittest, and proceed to impose their concept of artificial selection on the species.  Of course, this wasn't how it started - it started as a visceral knee-jerk reaction from a segment of society that blamed their own misfortune on what they referred to as immigrants.  These people (many of whom had lived in Germany for generations) were not ethnically Germanic, and therefore were counted as immigrants who were displacing true Germans from their jobs.  The hard economic times of the 1930's, combined with the sentiments of national shame imbued by the results of WWI, allowed the Nazi party to turn this knee-jerk reaction into a convincing story that was easy to buy into for many hard-working Germans.  Ethnic nationalist pride soon turned into blatant racism and hate, justified by seemingly scientific eugenics and Social Darwinist-type arguments, leading to what we all know today as the Holocaust, where almost five million innocent people were killed because of WHO THEY WERE. 

This is key.

Now ask yourself, where else have we seen people killed for who they are?  A few examples I came up with:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omagh_bombing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Chicago_riots
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_House_massacre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_against_LGBT_people
http://www.torontosun.com/2011/09/22/boy-bullied-to-death-dad-says

We like to think of ourselves as living in a world that is far more fair and just than it was in the 1940's - and it probably is.  But the truth is people are still persecuted for who they are on a daily basis, and the global media makes this information so accessible that we really shouldn't feel that the world is okay. 

Take up the quarrel with the foe

So who is the foe?  The foe is hate.  It's really simple, when you think about it.  Hate - whether it is justified by someone's conception of science, religion, or economics, whether it is against another country or certain individuals in our own country.  But how do we take up the quarrel?  How do we keep the torch of justice and freedom burning?  Surely we don't all need to enlist?

To you from failing hands we throw
the torch; be yours to hold it high.

What our soldiers gave us, what my Grandpa and John McCrae gave us, is another way.  We can take up this quarrel, without taking on the same burden of death and disaster that they took on themselves, because we have the tools to do it.  To me, the most likely danger to North America from losing WWII came from the possibility of Nazi-sympathizers gaining political power, and forming alliances with Nazi Germany (such sympathizers were quite common in Canada and the United States prior to WWII).  Hitler and the war forced our grandparents to see the rhetoric for what is was - hate speech.  60 years later, when we see a piece of hateful propaganda, we have the perspective of constant ideological conflict and several world wars to help us sift through the rhetoric.  We have the insight to question the motives of those who would sway us towards violence and conflict.  And ultimately, we have the knowledge that in showing love for our fellow-humans, we have held the torch high and banished the seeds of hate that lead to ugly conflict.

The world isn't perfect.  John McCrae knew this, hence his instructions to hold high the torch - to shed light on hate and see it for what it really is.  The freedom they gave us was true freedom - freedom of the heart and the mind - it is up to us to use it, that we may continue to keep the foe at bay.