We Have Already Forgotten Them

 Although the date of Remembrance Day, November 11th, is the anniversary of the armistice that brought the First World War to an end, it is the fallen from both World Wars, or World War Parts I and II if one views it as a single conflict with an intermission, whom we remember.   The phrase that traditionally expresses the purpose of the day is "lest we forget".   It is evident from everything that has been happening this year, however, that we have already forgotten.

 

When from 1914 to 1918 and again from 1939 to 1945, young men throughout the Dominion of Canada and the other realms of the British Commonwealth heard and answered the call to take up arms and do their duty for King, Country, and Empire what was it they were fighting for, that they were willing to, and in so many instances did, make the ultimate sacrifice of their very lives for?

 

If we could put that question to the fallen soldiers of both conflicts, those who fought in the First World War would most likely give their answer in the language of the older values of honour and loyalty.   Those who fought in the Second World War would probably be more likely to just give the simple answer of their country.   If pressed as to what they understand by their country, they might provide a fuller answer that includes such things as their home, family, friends, neighbours, traditions and institutions and shared way of life.   If we were to press them even further by asking the follow-up question of what they perceived to be the nature of the threat to their country, chances are the answer we would receive would be that their country’s very freedom was at stake.

In the German speaking lands, the devastation that resulted from both the First World War and punitive measures imposed by the victorious Allies as well as the constitutional vacuum created by the foolish decision, at the insistence of the liberal Democrat American President who wanted the war to be about making the world “safe for democracy”, to drive the reigning Hohenzollern (Prussian) and Hapsburg (Austrian) monarchs from their thrones, had combined to create the conditions whereby the leader of a then-obscure nationalist and socialist party, a bitter veteran of the first war with a mesmerizing, charismatic personality and the command of a private army of street thugs, rose to the chancellorship of the Weimar Republic.    He then manipulated the Reichstag into giving him the emergency powers to govern as a dictator.   His regime, like that which the Bolsheviks had established when they seized control of Russia and created the Soviet Union, was a totalitarian one, that is to say, a regime in which the state demands the full allegiance of those it governs, permits no competition to its claims on their loyalty and obedience whether from parties other than the governing party or from traditional social institutions such as the family and the church, and asserts total control over every aspect of the lives of the governed, recognizing no distinction between private and public.   Like the Soviet regime, Hitler’s governed by fear, employing secret police and tribunals, a snitch culture that encouraged people to inform on their family, friends, and neighbours, and other methods of state terrorism.  

 

As bad as all of this was in itself, it was not it per se which caused people in other countries to fear for their own freedom.   It was the way in which Hitler kept expanding his Third Reich.   Rejecting the restrictions imposed upon Germany at Versailles, he began rebuilding the country’s military machine upon assuming power and made known his intent of bringing back all of the German-speaking peoples in lands stripped from Germany at the end of the first war.   It was clear, however, that he would not be satisfied with restoring Germany to the status quo ante.   In 1938 he achieved the Anschluß (annexation) of his birth country of Austria, which had not been a part of the previous Germany which Bismarck had united under the Prussian monarchy.    Then he laid claim to the Sudetenland, a land populated by Germans which had previously been the Bohemian Kingdom under the Austria-Hungarian Empire but which had become part of Czechoslovakia after World War I.  When Britain and France opposed his expansionism, he agreed to talks and the Munich Agreement was the result, which quickly embarrassed the governments of Prime Ministers Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier.  They had agreed to the “return” of the Sudetenland, thinking they had won “peace in our time”, a phrase Chamberlain borrowed from the Daily Office in the Book of Common Prayer, but Hitler just turned around carried out what had been his intention all along, the conquest of all of Czechoslovakia.    Needless to say, Hitler had no intention of stopping with Czechoslovakia and by the time he was pushing Germany’s quite legitimate claim for the return of Danzig as an obvious means of achieving the end of the conquest of all of Poland, and forging an alliance with his arch-nemesis, Stalin’s rival totalitarian regime in Russia, as a preliminary step for said conquest, it was clear that no sane person could trust his word with regards to limits on his future conquering ambitions.   So it was that when the invasion of Poland led to the renewal of the larger conflict, and the lads of the Commonwealth Realms again took up arms to fight alongside Mother Britain, it was with the conviction that the freedom they so highly valued was in peril.   

 

Although we of the present day have grown up hearing and seeing the words “lest we forget” everywhere around this time of year and reciting the words “we will remember them” or the common variation “we shall remember them” in the Ode to Remembrance taken from the fourth stanza of Laurence Binyon’s “For the Fallen” in Remembrance Day services it is quite evident that we have forgotten them.

 

Since March, we have allowed the lying snakes of the print, broadcast, and electronic media to frighten us with a virus, the danger of which they have magnified beyond anything that the facts, even those available at the time the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, certainly those which have since accumulated, support.   Out of that fear, we have allowed our governments to declare states of emergency and award themselves emergency powers, which they have then handed over to their chief public health officers, essentially making them dictators.   We have tolerated them taking away our freedom to worship.  We have tolerated them taking away our freedom to meet with our friends, family, and other loved ones.   We have tolerated them taking away our freedom of speech.   This was a growing problem here in Canada long before the coronavirus, mostly because of left-wing crackpots who have deluded themselves into thinking that by silencing people whose speech expresses ideas that don’t conform to their narrow view of what is acceptable to be thought on matters such as race, sex, and religion they are “fighting Nazis” just as our soldiers did in the Second World War.   Now it has gotten worse as our governments have encouraged the suppression of ideas and information which conflict with those coming from the public health officials in the name of public safety.  

 

The politicians and dictatorial doctors who have trampled all over our basic rights and freedoms have co-opted the language of war and twisted it to their own purposes.   We are fighting a war against the coronavirus, they tell us, and we all need to do our part and make sacrifices for the common effort.   Those who fought in the real World Wars, however, sacrificed their lives as individuals in the common effort to protect the rights and freedoms of everyone else.   What our politicians and doctors are asking us to do, is to sacrifice the rights and freedoms of everyone else – for if you support lockdown measures, social distancing, mask mandates, the closing of churches and synagogues, and the Nazi-like snitch culture that comes with all of these things, it is not just your own rights and freedoms you are sacrificing but all those of your family, friends, neighbours, and countrymen as well – out of our fear of dying from COVID-19.

 

On Tuesday, November 10, our premier in the province of Manitoba, Brian Pallister, and his chief public health officer, Brent Roussin, once again failing to understand that since repeated previous restriction increases coupled with bullying and threats to the public failed to produce the desired result more of the same is not likely to achieve it, announced that they were placing the entire province back into lockdown – clampdown they are calling it now – with the strictest restrictions we have seen yet, except that the schools will stay open this time, beginning on Thursday and lasting for at least four weeks.   They wore poppies as they told us this, impervious to any sense of the irony that they were taking away from us, that for which those whom those poppies represent died.   Red armbands might have been more appropriate for the occasion.

 

We have forgotten those who died for our freedoms.   Worse, we have failed to keep faith with them, and are giving up in irrational fear, everything they thought it worth the ultimate sacrifice to bequeath to us.

 

God Save the Queen

May God have mercy upon us all.

 

Lessons to be Learned

On September 30th, 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned to London in the belief that he had secured “peace for our time” by negotiating a deal in which the German speaking areas in Czechoslovakia were ceded to Hitler in return for a promise that he would make no more territorial demands. The ink on the Munch Agreement had hardly had time to dry before Hitler broke his word and occupied the whole of Czechoslovakia – the government of which had not been party to the agreement that assigned it to its doom – before turning his eyes on the Klaipėda Region of Lithuania and the city of Danzig in Poland. By the time September 30th, 1939 rolled around, the Second World War had been underway for almost a month.

Chamberlain has been severely judged ever since – not primarily for giving away part of somebody else’s country but for failing to observe one of the basic lessons of the schoolyard, i.e., that giving a bully what he demands is more likely to increase his demands than to satisfy him. After World War II the Western world, now led by the United States of America, determined never to make this mistake again. Unfortunately, it seems to be a failing of human nature that when we have learned one lesson thoroughly it tends to drive other lessons that are just as important out of our heads.

Let us consider two other lessons that pertain to dealings with other nations.

One such lesson is that you should not threaten the use of force unless you have both the ability and the willpower to follow through with your threat. The reasoning behind this should be self-evident. Bluffing, if you know what you are doing, can work as a strategy in poker but in international relations the moment someone calls your bluff you are exposed as an impotent buffoon.

The other lesson is that if you have the strength and the willpower to back up a threat of force you should still hold that threat in reserve to be used only when all reasonable efforts to find a diplomatic solution have failed. War is destructive, awful, and costly and should only ever be entered into as a means of last resort. This is a lesson that those who are on a constant lookout for the next Hitler that they might not appease him are especially prone to neglect. Diplomacy involves talking, negotiation, and compromise and these things smack of appeasement to those for whom the lesson of Munich overrides all other considerations. Diplomacy and appeasement are not the same thing, however, and if, in your determination to stand up to bullies, you bypass the diplomatic process altogether and lead with threats, you will yourself have become the bully.

Need I go further and point out the compounded folly of leading with empty threats that are no more than bluffs?

It becomes much easier to forget these lessons the closer the “Hitler of the month” comes to resembling his archetype. For the last month the world has been treated to yet another round of the dark comedy stylings of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un who dresses, talks and acts like a supervillain who has somehow escaped the confines of a Hollywood film version of an Ian Fleming novel to wreak havoc on the world stage. From shooting missiles over Japan and threatening to sink the island nation to apparently detonating a 120 kiloton hydrogen bomb and threatening to reduce North America to ashes and darkness he has been hamming up his bad guy act with real panache.

Governments around the world have responded to these shenanigans by condemning North Korea’s actions and hoping that somebody else would do something about it. The designated somebody else for most of the world, the government of the United States of America, has itself been trying all year to pawn the North Korean problem off on yet another somebody else, the People’s Republic of China. The reasoning behind this was that since China is North Korea’s neighbour as well as the regional power it is their responsibility to make Kim toe the line. The problem with that reasoning, of course, is that Red China is the power behind North Korea. North Korea demands that the United States withdraw its military presence from the region where it is protecting South Korea and Japan. Some see Kim’s motivation as aggressive – that he wishes to complete what his grandfather Kim Il Sung started in 1950 and to subjugate the entire Korean peninsula to his despotic regime. Others see his motivation as defensive – that he fears, and not without reason, that the Americans have targeted him for regime change. Whatever may or may not be going on in Kim’s head, it is certainly the case that Beijing regards America’s ongoing military presence as standing in the way of its regional hegemony and it has been playing Kim as a pawn against the United States. To expect China to pressure Kim into behaving is like expecting an opponent in chess to sacrifice a piece that is threatening your queen but which you cannot remove without placing your king into check. It is not going to happen.

As the American government has come to realize what they ought to have known from the get go, they have turned to other strategies for dealing with Kim. President Trump has been attempting to match Kim rhetoric for rhetoric, but what he hopes to accomplish by this is unclear. As Kim has responded to each of Trump’s Mr. Tough Guy tweets with yet more defiance it would seem to be a counterproductive strategy. Then, last week, the Americans convinced the UN Security Council to impose economic sanctions on North Korea. This too is a dubious strategy. It worked well enough for FDR when he imposed an oil embargo on the Japanese Empire but this is because his intention was not to pressure Tokyo into abandoning its militarism and expansionism so much as to provoke an attack that would give him a casus belli for entering World War II. It failed JFK, however, when he embargoed Cuba to try and bring down the Castro regime. Most often it is nothing more than a particularly perverse form of virtue signalling – a gesture that demonstrates our disapproval of a government by punishing that government’s people.

American UN Ambassador Nikki Haley and Defense Secretary James Mattis both maintain that there is a military option for dealing with North Korea. Sunday’s training exercise, in which American bombers from Guam, accompanied by South Korean and Japanese fighters, dropped live bombs on a range a short distance from the 38th Parallel, was obviously designed to give credence to this threat. China and Russia have also stepped up their military presence in the region, however, and unless the Americans have completely lost their minds and are actually willing to sacrifice millions of people on the altar of Mars in order to take out one petty tyrant, this is all bluff.

There is no realistic military solution here. The only solution – if one exists – is to be found through diplomacy which ought to have been turned to long before this escalating war of threatening rhetoric began. This means that the distinction is going to have to be drawn between what is non-negotiable and what is merely desirable. The security of the United States and her allies against the threat posed by North Korea – and more importantly, the Red China behind North Korea – is non-negotiable. A non-nuclear North Korea or a North Korea with a better regime than the neo-Stalinist Kim junta may both be desirable, but they are not realistically attainable as the security of the Kim regime and the nuclear program that protects it are North Korea’s non-negotiables. Therefore, enter into talks – real talks, mind you, not petulant, “my way or the highway”, unyielding bombastic demands – with Pyongyang, with the firm resolution to never compromise the former, but prepared to give way on the latter. Drop the hubris and the Manicheanism and enter into negotiations. Back up your bargaining position with strength, as Reagan and Thatcher did when negotiating with Gorbachev, but follow their example by going to the table and talking.

That is the only sane approach to this mess.