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[http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/michael_coren/2008/11/15/7421516-sun.html
Fightin' words
Wars fought during last century not necessarily about freedom
By MICHAEL COREN
Updated: 15th November 2008, 5:34am
Two weeks gone and already the air smells sweeter, the weather is finer and the food tastes better. Thanks Obama, you're the best.
But much as we must always remember that we owe most of our rights and privileges to the great Barack in the sky, we did at least spend a few moments last week recalling the sacrifices of millions of men and women - though mainly men - who fought and died for Canada and its allies over the generations.
All people of courage and honour should be revered. But can we please stop pretending that all this was about the fight for freedom.
As great as were the men who went off to fight the Germans in the First World War, their struggle had absolutely nothing to do with liberty. It was a chance to bash the Kaiser, to give the Hun a kick in the backside, to save the empire - which was itself an appallingly oppressive enterprise.
Yes, of course, Belgian neutrality had been compromised by the Germans and yes they did commit atrocities, but no more than did our allies the Russians as they smashed their way through eastern and central Europe in 1914 and 1915. The British still occupied Ireland and in 1916 executed Irish rebels fighting for freedom; men already so terribly wounded they had to be tied to chairs before being shot.
Young Canadian men were brave and tough, but Vimy Ridge, the Somme and the rest had absolutely nothing to do with freedom and much to do with murderous nationalism and ridiculous racial stereotypes.
In 1939 the war against the Nazis was perhaps more precise in that here was a tangible evil. But Britain and its colony Canada did not go to war for freedom - if so we would have stopped the Germans annexing chunks of Czechoslovakia and invading Austria, or taken on the Japanese when they raped China. Never think that the last war was about saving Jews or standing up for Poland. It was about the inevitable clash between the Anglo-Saxon powers and German expansionism.
It may well be that the Holocaust could have occurred only under the cloud of war and that millions would have been saved if Hitler could not have hidden his death machine. What is certain is that we became close friends with Stalin, who murdered far more people than did the perverse little corporal. We also gave half of Europe, including the Poland we had claimed to be defending, to the Soviets and left it there for half a century.
Today the myth has become a scandal.
These wars, we are told, were fought to defend tolerance, civil rights and equality. Not only is this insultingly dumb and anachronistic, it also obscures the authentic guts and flesh reality of the Canadian soldier throughout the last century. He ran up beaches in France and hills in Belgium not for government grants to the transgendered or tax-funded courses in multiculturalism, but because it would have been cowardly, wrong and un-Canadian not to do so.
It is, ironically, this unquestioning but solid and remarkable patriotism that is so despised today by the very people who moan on interminably about fighting and dying for freedom. We're probably less free now as Canadians than we've ever been.
What is more worrying, we don't fight against it because we're hardly aware it's happening.
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