Remembrance Day

This weekend, I went up with a friend of mine to Montreal to see a hockey game. Friday was Remembrance Day in Canada, just as it was Veterans Day here in the USA. Earlier in the day, I’d heard President Bush exploit the supposedly sacred Veterans Day ceremony to launch an angry attack against opponents of the Iraq aggression. The pot-calling-the-kettle-black nature of Bush’s vitriol ("it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began") is too breathtakingly Orwellian to lend itself to rational analysis.

Incidentally, many well-intentioned people think I'm nuts for saying that "Support our troops" has been made equivalent to "Support the war." They swear up and down that the two are completely separate. Yet even the president himself takes every opportunity to fusion the two.

Even if you forget about this shameless attempt by an increasingly mistrusted president to co-opt a supposedly sacred day to selflishlessly shore up his sagging poll numbers, the difference in tone of Remembrance Day ceremonies was striking.

Even when the honor of US Veterans Day and Memorial Day ceremonies are respected, what is usually said at those ceremonies is something like this: “We honor these veterans/deceased who risked/gave their lives for our freedom.”

Though no soldier has died in a war for our freedom in the last 60 years, it’s right and proper to honor those few living veterans who HAVE risked their lives in such important wars.

Yet when I watched Canadian TV in Montreal, I saw that the tone of Remembrance Day ceremonies was a bit different. The ceremonies did honor those who died in Canadian uniform, particularly in World War II. But I was struck by the fact that officials made a point to honor those Canadians who’d died as international peacekeepers, trying to preserve a little peace and sanity around the world. It was then-Canadian foreign minister (later prime minister) Lester Pearson who conceived of the whole concept of international peacekeeping forces, an idea for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. So Canadians rightly take pride at this.

[Interestingly, at this year’s Memorial Day ceremonies in my town, I saw a guy in a New Zealand military uniform, with a UN patch on the sleeve. When I asked, he said he’d served in a peacekeeping mission either in Papua New Guinea or East Timor. I don’t recall seeing anyone thanking him for his service.]

I commend Canadians for not only honoring those who defended their own country but who tried to help humanity as a whole.