Geoff Russ: If the world of Vimy's heroes means nothing to you, stay home on November 11
How can one honour the dead while spitting on the Canada they loved?
Does the world of the Canadians who fought at Vimy Ridge have any meaning to today’s administrators and activists? Will they even try to understand it?
Those who regard the Canada of 1917 as a primitive, unwanted relic may wear a poppy, but it is false for them to stand for a moment of silence on November 11 and say they honour the dead of the First World War.
Every year as the date approaches, a familiar but powerful chorus demands that Remembrance Day be remade, “reframed”, and “decolonised”. The memorial services are being recast as teach-ins to ponder Canada’s sins, rather than the sacrifice of its war dead.
Last year, the veil of feigned respect slipped off. In Toronto, the official ceremony opened with a meandering preamble about First Nations treaties, the “settlers”, migrants, and the transatlantic slave trade. It was all sternly read out by the city’s chief of protocol, Aretha Phillip.
Across the country in Calgary, Mayor Jyoti Gondek, ejected last month, parroted the settler-colonial narrative in full view of veterans and the great-grandchildren of the soldiers who shipped off to France.
In Nova Scotia, at Sackville Heights Elementary, serving military members were told that wearing their uniforms to the ceremonies would be unwelcome. Adhering to the directive would allegedly keep the day “welcoming” for all.
Ottawa’s Sir Robert Borden High School blared an Arabic political anthem linked to the war in Gaza during the ceremony, to drown out the day. Principal Aaron Hobbs justified it by attacking Remembrance Day as a date associated with “a white guy who has done something related to the military”.
It is the disgraceful spirit of the age that would rip up a soldier’s headstone and then lecture his surviving family about the contrived moral shortcomings of their ancestors’ generation.
All of the things that made Canada into a worthy and desirable country came about before the modern age, including during the imperial era.
The fealty felt towards an Empire that inspired so many Canadians to sign up to fight, is treated as foreign history, or worse, as a Great Satan whose memory is only fit for replacement. On the other hand, parts of our life that exist because of the Empire, like our parliamentary democracy, and even the inherited Canadian politeness, are seen as wholly and undeniably “Canadian”.
Many claim to love the democracy and freedom of Canada, while denigrating the culture that caused them to exist on this continent in the first place. This hateful tendency is not isolated to our country either.
Britain’s Peace Pledge Union has mounted a campaign to “decolonise” Remembrance Sunday to “challenge nationalist narratives” and emphasise anti-colonial insurgencies like the barbaric Mau Mau uprising in Kenya that began in 1952.
They now demand that the day be reconstructed around imperial grievance. It is a sentiment gaining traction, as seen in Northern Irish footballer James McClean, who earns his money in Britain but refuses to wear a poppy due to the sectarian conflict in Ireland.
In Australia, scholars and activists have been chipping away at ANZAC Day, held in April, which brands mateship, duty, and a national birth at Gallipoli as “white” myths that must be taken to bits. To the Anglosphere’s demoralisers, remembrance is only tolerated if it can be an opportunity to demand self-abasement.
As more people are taught to disdain their past, and people arrive with a chip on their shoulder towards the faded British Empire, these currents will not be calmed without action.
Those who reject Canada’s pre-modern past of the Red Ensign and the Empire have no moral claim to lead Remembrance Day ceremonies or rewrite them.
The men we honour died for their King, the Empire, and for the Canada they knew, not worthless modern abstractions of “postcolonialism” and “allyship”.
In the words of Prime Minister Robert Borden in 1914 upon the outbreak of war, “We stand shoulder to shoulder with Britain and the Dominions in this quarrel, not for lust of conquest, not for greed of possessions, but for the cause of honour.”
You can read about their patriotism and inspiring motives in the letters written home, the recruitment posters, and the badges of the Queen’s Own Rifles. If that world and impulse mean nothing to Jyoti Gondek or Aretha Phillip, they should keep their lectures to themselves.
November 11 is not a date to adjudicate debates about colonialism, slavery, or a war taking place in a desert almost 11,000 kilometres away. We will not import the fixations of a faculty lounge into the moment of silence.
Some will say it is distasteful to “politicise” Remembrance Day, and they are correct. However, the first shot has already been fired by those who want to hijack the date. At Toronto City Hall, scriptwriters turned the cenotaph into a podium for bashing “settlers”, the most naked and cynical brand of politics.
The correct answer to the trampling of our remembrance is defence, not silence.
It should be plainly asserted that the fallen did not die for a country that would despise them or their lives.
The National War Memorial in Ottawa was chosen to embody heroism and self-sacrifice. The bronze figures march through an arch topped by the carved symbols of “Peace and Freedom”, and the memorial was unveiled by King George VI to mark the “Great Response of Canada” of the First World War.
Yet, Ottawa lives in its perennial bubble where Canadian imagery decorates the streets and the federal workers are comfortably unaware of the rest of the country.
Meanwhile, cities like Toronto and Calgary are being transformed into places where the memory and desire for a distinct Canada are treated with disdain and suspicion along with its inherited traditions and heroes. Safeguarding Remembrance Day is one way to help ensure they remain truly Canadian cities, for at least one day per year.
Wearing a poppy is our small gesture to say that those who died will be remembered for doing no less than protecting the country, at a cost that most modern Canadians will never comprehend.
We cannot revere them as a generation of heroes on one day and stand for a moment of silence, only to resume tearing down Canada the day after.
Good Canadians must now defend Remembrance Day from those who think Canadian identity and memory are things to be gutted and cast aside.
This, at least, is owed to the fallen by their descendants.
Geoff Russ is the Editor-at-Large of Without Diminishment. He is a contributor to a number of publications, including the National Post, Modern Age, and The Spectator Australia.
