The Elephant Wears A Poppy

Tomorrow is Remembrance Day.  I heard on the news today that they have run out of poppies, so popular the little lapel flower has become.  I haven't worn one since I was a kid when they were made almost mandatory at school.  They were never worn in my family.  We never did anything to observe Remembrance Day.  My mother thought people made too big a deal of the war, even though she completely disapproved of American war resisters being harboured here in Canada during the Vietnam War.  She even tried to get assurance from my brother and me that we would willingly die for our country.  I simply replied that she would probably regret those words should that ever happen and isn't it nicer to have us alive.  I should also mention that none of my relatives died or served in the war.

My mother had her own issues about the Second World War.  She was proud of her brother who enlisted in the army and was in the reserves.  She was also relieved that he was for some reason never called up for action.  She also mentioned from time to time the social ostracism that her family, being German, felt in the community and how hurtful this was.  Never mind that she and her parents were born here in Canada, and never mind that her ancestors immigrated not from Germany but from Russia, since they were descendants of the German farmers that Catherine the Great imported to till the lands of Crimea in the eighteenth century.

People being what they are, we can all be inexcusably ignorant.

There is still pressure for people to wear the poppy and to attend Remembrance Day services.  Even in my elevator today our managers posted a notice advising tenants to do this tomorrow to remember those who, in his words, "gave their lives for our freedom."  I respect the fact that that horrible war occurred.  I respect that many people from my country were there, died, and that so many dreadful things occurred.  I appreciate that millions of innocents, especially Jews, Roma, disabled people and homosexuals, died in the death warehouses of Auschwitz, Ravensbruck and Dachau.  I appreciate that Britain was bombed.  I also appreciate that entire German cities were destroyed through carpet bombing and fire bombing from the Allies as well as the nuclear annihilation of two hundred thousand innocents in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

They fought for our freedom, they sacrificed their lives for us, they keep telling us this.  And this of course in its way is true.  What we are not told is they had little choice.  And what we are also not told this one day a year is that the first casualty of war is truth.  Nor that history is always written by the victors. 

I am not going to talk here about whether or not this was a just war.  As a pacifist, to me, there is no such thing.  I am not going to try to imagine what life in Canada would be like now had our country not gone to war.  No one could ever truthfully or accurately answer that.  Was World War II, even if to save the Jews and others from the death camps and to defeat Hitler and his Nazis, necessary?  I am not able to answer that question.  I don't have all the facts  and I wasn't alive at that time and even if I was I would not have found myself in a position where I could make any choices about the war since I would have been simply one more Canadian wanker on the receiving end of the very limited and very massaged information that arrived on our shores.

I don't know.

I also feel great sadness for our old soldiers, for what they had to endure.

I also feel great sadness for the people they killed and for what they had to endure.

I also resent this emotional blackmail that I feel subjected to every year that I have to be grateful for the freedoms that they died for, the freedoms that they killed for, the freedoms for which cities, heritage and whole countrysides and ecosystems were destroyed.  I don't want to be reminded that this could be the price of my freedom.  What a horrible price.  I DON'T WANT THIS, AND NO, THE OUTCOME IS NOT WORTH IT.

For twelve years or so, every November 10 or so, I would check out from our central branch library a book titled "Lost Treasures of Europe." http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89054769468;view=1up;seq=84 Here is the link if you would like to spend some time tomorrow viewing it online.  This book, published in 1946, is a brilliant photo essay depicting before and after photos of the many beautiful wonderful palaces, cathedrals, guildhalls and medieval villages that were destroyed throughout Europe: England, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, the Netherlands.  No sides are taken.  The destruction is absolute.

I think I would consider attending Remembrance Day services if there were a few subtle changes introduced.  First I would like to see the white poppy made as easily available as the red one.  I would also like to see the attitudes of those who approve of the wars to change or at least soften towards us pacifists.  Similarly I hope that more pacifists will feel welcome at the ceremonies and that they will avoid judging those who disagree with them and stand there in support, if not in solidarity, of those whose lives were inalterably changed and damaged by war.

We don't have to all agree.  But we can respectfully stand together if we give one another a chance.  When I feel that I can wear a white poppy at a Remembrance Day ceremony without others taking offence I might even attend myself.

When it comes to war there are many elephants in the room.  One of them wears a poppy.