This Remembrance Day, take a moment with me to reflect on the status of peace in the world.
To take just one small slice, reflect that this week, the UN referred to Gaza as a ‘graveyard of children.’ And that there has been a total failure of the UN security council to arrive at a binding ceasefire due to US and Russian veto power. Biden says a full ceasefire would empower Hamas and so won’t commit to it. Perhaps it WOULD empower Hamas, by allowing them to dig in even further. But, only if the eventual resolution comes about after armed conflict, instead of disarmament and a negotiated settlement.
Lest we forget are powerful words, but if we do not meaningfully incorporate them into our awareness and actions, they come to represent hypocrisy, and lost wisdom gained through the expense of incomprehensible amounts of human suffering.
It is hard to confront and bear witness to the amount of armed conflict in the world today, and its disastrous consequences. It is far easier to keep our focus inside of our national bubble, and forget the dangers and costs of inflexibility and nationalism, or check out via an endless stream of novel entertainment.
But, the highpoints of Canada’s international reputation have often been predicated on our peacekeeping and liberating activities.
We helped in Rwanda: https://www.veterans.gc.ca/eng/remembrance/wars-and-conflicts/caf-operations/rwanda
We helped in Bosnia: https://www.veterans.gc.ca/eng/remembrance/wars-and-conflicts/caf-operations/balkans/
We helped in the Netherlands: https://www.veterans.gc.ca/eng/remembrance/wars-and-conflicts/second-world-war/liberation-of-netherlands
Spend some time today reading about Sgt Norman Kirby, and some of the other Faces of Freedom:
https://www.veterans.gc.ca/eng/remembrance/people-and-stories/faces-of-freedom/norman-kirby
It is easy to not realize and take for granted what an incredible gift it is, and how incredibly fortunate we are, that the phrase “His schoolteacher lost an eye, an arm and a leg to trench warfare. He understood what it meant to go to war. He understood the fear. He understood the loss of life.” is something that is almost totally alien to the kids of my generation, and every generation thereafter inside of Canada.
As part of our public education system, we should send Canadian school children to see the monuments, and some of the literal thousands of graveyards throughout France and the Netherlands. Many, many of our best and bravest lay there today:
https://www.cwgc.org/our-work/blog/how-to-find-and-visit-war-graves-in-france/
Coming face to face with the tombstones lacking any age on them helps communicate the gravity of the situation. The adults graves in these war cemeteries display the ages when they died. The kids who lied about their age to enlist and go fight – their age is not mentioned. It helps put into perspective some of the modern travails we face. It gives gratitude for our peace, and opportunity. And it should instill a realization that peace sometimes needs to be fought for, and a sense of drive, and determination to honour our fallen by ensuring we do not turn a blind eye to the suffering of the world, to those who need our help.
One of the key lessons we’ve seemed to forget is that conflict zones require a heavy, armed international presence to enforce a ceasefire. In the hot zone. Not supplying one side of a conflict against another, but occupying and displacing the forces that otherwise seek to fight. Similar to a friend getting between two people about to fight when tempers are flaring, the international peacekeeping force enters the arena and displaces the conflict, enforcing a separation between the combatants that greatly reduces the possibility of casualties while an equitable solution is determined.
An enforced ceasefire is the only way to stop rampant killing on both sides, which only perpetuates conflict and drives generational scars and trauma.
For anyone who ever grew up with a grandfather, or other family member, who would go silent when stories of war came up, remembering not the glory and the romanticism, but rather the horror and trauma that humans have the capacity of inflicting upon each other. Or growing up in a family where beloved fathers, sons, brothers went off to war, never to return and forever leaving a hole where their presence should have been. Understand that is still the current reality for millions of people throughout conflict zones today – in Ukraine, Palestine, Yemen, throughout the various conflicts throughout Africa and other parts of the South America, the Middle East and Asia. This is a far more common experience globally than our bubble of relative peace in North American and Western Europe.
The only way to increase the security of our bubble, which is really much more fragile than we’d like to believe, is by creating the conditions for peace outside of it.
Instead of providing Canadian APCs, German tanks, US laser guided munitions, French missiles, Polish jets or any other military resources to combatants, we should be arming a 3rd party peace keeping force consisting of both sides’ neighbours and economic allies and mandating an end to violence with a refocus on humanitarian aid and infrastructure development. That is the leadership for the 21st century that we need – one that properly reflects the major lessons of the 20th.
Extremism will never be effectively fought by armed conflict. Instead of sending tanks, missiles and troops to enforce our will, send hospitals, employment and teachers and watch local support for groups like Hamas disintegrate. If Israel displayed as much care for the Palestinian people and they did for Israelis, Hamas would be vilified in Palestinian politics, rather than being elected representatives for a huge amount of Palestinian territory. They would enjoy no popular support and would be 1000 times easier to disempower and dislodge. But as long as they are the only visible champions of Palestinian rights in Gaza, then who else will Gazan Palestinians identify with? Who else’s ideology would they internalize, and teach to their children? The lens of intergenerational trauma needs to be first and foremost in our understanding both sides of this, or any, national conflict. It makes it more predictable, and therefore easier to defuse.
Let the sons and daughters of Israel and Palestine, and the Christians of the West, remember that they are all the children of Abraham, and brothers, sisters, cousins in faith. Let the voices for peace inside their societies find purchase and traction, and may we all work together to create better avenues for peace to take root and heal the conflicts of this world.
Honouring Remembrance Day. Thank a vet today, and every day. Never forget.