This Remembrance Day is the second since the COVID-19 pandemic decided that we weren’t allowed to gather in public spaces without the risk of destroying our lungs and those of everyone around us. Since that is far less of an issue now, with all of us hopefully double-vaccinated and (less hopefully) still taking the precautions to wear masks and distance (like me)
However, this year has featured a rather uncomfortable event that conflicts with much of our pride and reverence for the land that soldiers died for in two World Wars and many others, that being the discovery of the mass graves at the site of residential schools across the country.
What followed is a widespread acknowledgement of the genocide these residential schools perpetrated against Indigenous families and children, attempting to force out their culture and, as the 6,105 ribbons representing the numbers of bodies found tells us, did far more than that.
For me, it makes it hard to reconcile the lyrics of our natural anthem. “God Keep Our Land Glorious and Free” rings hollow when it wasn’t really our land in the first place, and what was done to get that land wasn’t particularly glorious.
It doesn’t change the graves of soldiers across Europe, the broken men and women who came home. And it doesn’t really change the sentiment that they shouldn’t have had to.
World War One was, to put it bluntly, and idiotic war caused by a snarl of diplomatic entanglements collapsing all at once in a wave of assassinations and greed. Soldiers died for lands they had no stake in, for reasons that made little sense to the average farmer suddenly heading overseas to die surrounded by corrosive gas and clouds of metal shards.
The Second World War was somewhat more focused; the Nazis were quite intent on conquering everything they could and eradicating anyone they deemed undesirable; Jewish people, the Roma, the gay and transgendered communities, and the disabled, among others. Men still died and came home broken; that there was a more solid reason meant little to the PTSD-addled veterans. They still suffered and died far away, and considering how many open white supremacists there are in Canada today, I imagine it doesn’t feel ‘worth it’ at all.
Remembrance Day has never been about glorifying war. Heroism, at least how I saw it portrayed growing up, was never about winning wars or defeating enemies; it’s about saving the lives of fellow soldiers, remembering the horrors that were inflicted rather than the nebulous causes that were used to justify them. It’s always been about the soldiers, and the concept of ‘Never Again’; that we can’t allow what happened to these warriors to happen to their children, when some demagogue decides to wipe out an ethnic group for power.
Never again.
