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Syndicate
The reason why this is thought to have forged an indentity is that before Vimy to the British we were nothing but a Dominion Colony. Our General had to fight to keep the Canadian units together, because the British wanted to seperate them and and use them as replacements and reserves for British units, like they did with the other Dominion troops. Vimy was our test, we passed, our military gained a reputation independant of the British. It really was the first time Canada was really seen on the world stage. If you do not beleive me I suggest you google sir Arthur Currie and see what comes up.
You may think that both world wars were not our fight, and we should not have been there, but if you have ever travelled abroad, you will find many many people in Holland, France and Belgium that still thank Canada for its sacrifice to liberate and defend them. Whether you like it or not, many of the opinions that that world holds of Canada started because of our sacrifice in wars that weren't ours.
Wars and other neo-conservative stuff thrive in apathy. Chances are the reason so many support the war is that they probably haven't really thought about it very much.
The best thing we can do is start convincing people we know that the war is wrong. We do that by talking to people and letting them know why we think the government is going in the wrong direction about this.
Perhaps a lot of people think our troops are doing 'Peace Keeping' as they did (still do?) quite successfully in Cyprus. Actually they are involved in a counter-insurgency in attempt to prop up an Afghan government that NATO favours. Further, what the Canadian security establishment is doing on an organizational level with the Afghan Government might even be called neo-colonialism, if we are to believe a recent CBC report.
Our current Afghan mission can lead Canada's critics to accuse us that we are an imperialist country in our own right. For this reason alone we should be campaigning against the war in Afghanistan.
If we work hard enough at this, we may be able to shift public opinion. Maybe it's naive, but that's why I'm in politics.
One Newfoundlander's grandson said something that angered me. He said, my grandfather left nothing to go and fight for freedom, and he came home to nothing. Widows back home were in dire straights after losing husbands to war.
February Poll suggests Canada is tiring of being the world's do-gooder Domestic issues more important than volunteering Canadians for imperialist war on other side of planet
[ 09 April 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]
We were under British command for the duration of that war. During WWII, we operated under British command (they even used us at Dieppe because they didn't want to use proper British soldiers. Yay Canada!). Throughout it all, the military proudly continued to follow British custom and tradition.
Then that sonofabitch Trudeau came and ruit it all by making the CF wear different uniforms and use different salutes (coincidentally, much more like American uniforms).
But now, we are under US command and control. We don't use the latrine unless the pentagon says okay. Today, we are nothing but a US colony.
On the bright side, in the not-to-distant future, once we are finished slaughtering and being slaughtered in Afghanistan, we can erect a memorial to Op Medusa, and praise it as our defining national moment when we were no longer a US colony. But I won't hold my breath.
There they are , all the leaders of our countries with fake tears i thier eyes,fealing sorry for the killed soliers... and right after they leave they will be talking about sending more soldiers Afghanistan....
It a sad joke really... brimping us up to do their bidding...
sick bastards.....
Did anyone listen to Master-Cpl Franklin, a medic who served in Afghanistan on "The Hour" TV show last night ?. Both legs gone, and for what??? - to prop up US imperialism on the other side of the planet ?. I think Canadians should tell Ottawa to go to hell with their glorification of war propaganda. They should be told that at some point, Canadians won't have any objections to occupation of our Northern Puerto Rico by the Taliban.
Rich kids are unrecruitable. They're not stupid - they'd much rather that the poor go and fight their wars. They'd rather stay home and warmonger from the country club.
The real way to stop a war? Conscription with no exemptions for upper class brats. That's what we should be pushing for. Except that you know that if we did, they'd take advantage of the push for conscription and conveniently leave out the "no exemptions" part.
No university exemptions - lots of time to do university when you come back without a limb! No "national guard duty" - EVERYONE takes their turn at combat in Afghanistan (and Iraq when dumbfuck Harper sends us there), and everyone starts out as a grunt unless they're career military and signed up voluntarily.
You can bet the media would be screaming for an end to the war when the rich brats of politicians and media owners start coming home in body bags in large numbers to rest in pieces along with poor kids.
It's what Democrats should be pushing for in the US. Except that most of the Democrats' leaders are also rich hypocrite warmongers who wouldn't want their own kids to do what they want poor kids to do.
That's one way, but I'm not sure I'd suscribe to involuntary servitude irregardless of income level. Might as well scour the streets in a truck and haul people of the sidewalks. In a way, that's what's happening now with Cdn reservists. Reservists have the right to refuse overseas service as part of their employment terms. Military briefing teams have been busy crisscrossing the nations armouries where the part time soldiers usually work from, enticing them with promises of large paychecks, tax free salaries while in theatre, danger bonuses, etc. To many part timers, who often are located in economically depressed areas, the allure of making some fast cash for six months of work overseas entices them to climb aboard that truck. The best way to avoid our participation in wars...let the mothers of soldiers who have been killed overseas take successive year long turns at being our Prime Minister, entrusted with the decision of when our country should participate in military actions.
So, I got it all wrong, did I? It won't be the first time.
In any case, I do believe that the proposition that WWI was totally without purpose is debatable and get's debated. And even if it were a purposeless slaughter, that doesn't mean it wouldn't have had a very profound effect on all involved, especially a young country like Canada.
Should opinion polls be the key criteria in decisions about war and peace?
Not entirely. The Royal Family kids have all been in the forces, and one of them went to the Falklands, another is off to Afganistan.
It's forgotten now that one of the reasons John F. Kennedy was so popular was that he and his brother Joseph Jnr had served in the US Navy and had seen combat. Joe was killed in a air raid when his plane, nothing more than one giant bomb, blew up prematurely. John was injured in the Pacific theatre.
Despite their family's immense wealth they had shared in the risks and casualties of war just as any poor or working class person would have, and they had the fatalities to prove it.
[ 10 April 2007: Message edited by: FraserValleyMan ]
Vimy: Sense? Sensibility?
By Major John R. Grodzinsky
Department of History
Royal Military College of Canada
Kingston -- Vimy Ridge is so ridden with mythology that when it comes to teaching this topic to my students, half the time is spent unravelling myths. For example, while Major-General Arthur Currie was much involved in planning the attack on Vimy, he did not lead the Canadian Corps during the battle. Rather, a British officer, Lieutenant-General Sir Julian Byng commanded it, while Currie led the 1st Canadian Division. Canadians did employ tactical innovations, but these were also used by the First and Third British Armies during the Battle of the Scarpe (Vimy was but one part of that offensive) where, in several cases, British formations achieved greater successes than the Canadians. Nor was the Canadian Corps purely Canadian at Vimy, as a British division and other units were assigned to it.
We should be careful in saying Canadians succeeded where the British and French armies did not -- their struggles there in 1915 and 1916 were in entirely different situations, which leads to the biggest difficulty with our nationalist perspective about Vimy: lack of context. This is not to belittle what Canadians achieved during those days in April of 1917 -- but we should ensure that in crafting our history, we do, indeed, let facts get in the way of a popular story.
I apologize for using profanity in my response to your post. You were, as you said, merely providing poll results. My anger was in response to the view that the "popularity" of a war, in the aggressor country, makes a difference in terms of its legality or morality. You didn't express that view, so I had no business venting my anger at you.
ETA: Just noticed FraserValleyMan's post:
Amen.
[ 10 April 2007: Message edited by: unionist ]
It seems obvious to me that, just as the rocket scientist Bush gets a buzz out of all things military - a sort of perverted romanticism, with perhaps a hint of repressed homosexuality - having done little more than joyride in expensive flying toys, so Harper feels a warm glow as he summons images of noble soldiers going over the trenches, drawn more from faded photographs than anything approaching an understanding of the realities of war.
To suggest there is no linkage between his Vimy grandstanding and Afghan policies is absurd, they are sides of the same coin, an expression of profound ignorance. He will always be insulated from the realities of war and his fantasies will persevere. Clearly they're shared by a large number of Canadians, who also haven't the first idea about it, being more concerned about the implications of global warming for their snowmobiling.
It is deeply disturbing to see America's revamped militarism creeping north; the same opiated haze of ignorance and forgetting descends and distorts and corrupts; the incremental legitimation of unspeakable acts, the glorification of a practice that should have gone the way of slavery, a practice that is the very essence of what civilization is NOT about.
What happened to 'the war to end all wars'?
And, yes, I'm sorry, soldiers are killers. Professional killers.
That's one perspective. I suppose on could say the same, with a bit less emphasis, about the police.
Many years ago Gwynne Dyer has a TV series on war. I forget which of his many interview subjects said it, but the idea was that a soldier was not so much someone who offers to kill, as someone who offers themselves up to be killed, or at the very least to accept a high risk of that outcome.
If anything has over 50% support in the polls, you can almost be sure the politicians want to do it too.
If that were true, we would live in a democracy.
DULCE ET DECORUM EST
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.
GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori..
[the last words are from a Horace ode: "it is sweet and proper to die for one's country"]
competing nation states under a capitalist social systme is the cause of our wars....
So the only true way to be anti-war is to be an anti-capitalist...
Well, yea. But every capitalist country isn't at war with every other country. So there's got to be more to it than that.
The experience of WW2, for example, demonstrated that societies with social systems antagonistic to each other were able to work together for common cause. The Nazis were defeated on two fronts, after all. It would be a mistake to put the struggle for socialism ahead of the struggle for peace. Consider the weapons we now have on planet earth.
He thought he could build "socialism" in one country and use the Comintern to get the rest of the world to put their socialism on hold in the interests of placating the imperialists.
Even today, the heirs of Stalin prefer peaceful coexistence with capitalism to overthrowing it.
But now you're talking blood in the streets and mayhem. And I think this could be a possibility at some point. They want to raise cain abroad with millions of people's lives at stake, and so borders are tightened and security increased here to prevent shit from happening to us and more importantly the home of empire and all their expensive property and real estate.
I think eventually, most nations will arm themselves with nuclear weapons, and developing nations will more easily deter imperialist aggression. I don't believe that real democracy will happen slowly but surely as some have predicted. A large part of the world is regressing now as it is.
Capitalism is fascism with the mask on, and the mask will come off sooner or later when the status quo is threatened by democracy. Then will be the time for socialist revolution and re-adjustment of power structures for all time. Some say there's a heckuva storm in the forecast.
Well colour me pink! Just when I was thinking that Lenin thought that the struggle for peace, and the struggle for socialism were one in the same struggle.
[ 10 April 2007: Message edited by: Cueball ]
Well, in the mean time the rest of us will just do our best, 'kay?
And we have mixed economies in the richest countries today, not laissez-faire capitalism which Vlad and Joe knew of in the 1920's and early 30's. Vlad and probably Joe wouldn't recognize capitalism today. Socialism continues making capitalism bearable for hundreds of millions in the western world. And socialism for the rich is the incentive for fascists to don their masks and play at democracy. Even capitalists don't want capitalism as it was before.
But they don't want socialism infecting the developing third world either though. Imagine what New Deal socialism could do for an Angola or Haiti, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh or Birkina Fasou. The democratic capitalist third world is where the real lab experiment in dog-eat-dog capitalism has been playing out since the cold war. We gain glimpses of 1920's-style laissez-faire capitalism happening on tragic news reports nightly. And it's like time stood still for hundreds of millions.
Aldous Huxley
There were no wars before capitalism?
I'm glad we put an end to World War II (among others) instead of waiting for capitalism to disappear from the face of the earth.
I'm told that there were even some people fighting against the Nazis and their allies who were not anti-capitalist.
Go figure, eh?