November 11th is Remembrance Day in Canada, a day set aside every year to celebrate the making of war veterans through our past wars and to encourage our young people to become veterans themselves in our future wars. I know that's not what they say it's for. They say it is to 'honour' the people who fought in our wars. What makes fighting in a war honourable? Certainly not bravery, enemy soldiers were just as brave and we are certainly not celebrating them. Not patriotism; Nazi soldiers were no doubt patriotic, as patriotic about Germany as ours were about Canada. Not self-sacrifice, since both sides sacrificed, died, were wounded. For that matter, most of the people who die in wars now are civilians, and Remembrance Day is definitely not about remembering or honouring them. Civilians killed in war aren't even people, they're not even soldiers, they are 'collateral damage', and certainly there is no day set aside to think about them.
Patriotism is not a virtue, neither is bravery or sacrifice or loving your spouse or your children or being loved by your parents, because those things apply to both sides in any conflict and if we admit that the Taliban were fighting for their country, were brave, skilled, loved their families and left widows behind them when we killed them, well, it sort of makes you question how honourable killing them really was. Our soldiers deserve our gratitude because it is they who fight and not us. In fact, they are fighting for us. And by 'us' I mean the Prime Minister. The PM said "bomb Libya" so our troops bombed Libya. If the PM had said "bomb Sweden" our troops would have bombed Sweden. Our fighting men and women are thankfully free from ever having to consider the moral implications of whether or not they should bomb Sweden - their moral choice is made when the sign up: follow every legal order.
Fighting the Taliban wasn't necessary to protect any Canadian rights or territory; we invaded their country, they didn't invade ours. The Afghanistan mission was a failure anyway; we neither caught nor killed Osama bin Laden there, which is why we went in the first place. But, and here's the point, given that the Canadian government was going to send X number of Canadians to war there, I am very grateful that I wasn't one of them. Therefore, although I honour our veterans, I do not honour them for what they have done, because war is largely immoral, inhumane, unChristian, and unjustified - war is never the last option, you always have the option of doing without whatever the war is over. I don't honour them for what they are, because what they are is being played for suckers by politicians who wouldn't declare war in the first place if they didn't figure their political objective was worth the cost of a certain number of our soldiers dying. I honour our fighting men and women because when our soldiers go off to battle irrelevant enemies in far away places, as ordered by whatever politician happened to get 38% of the vote in the last election, it saves me from having to go to jail for refusing to wage war myself.
If a veteran on Remembrance Day ever took a young person aside and said, "Listen, I've been to war. If anyone every tries to send you to one, for God's sake don't go. Refuse. Go to jail. Face a firing squad. Don't believe what they tell you. There's always another way," then I might be happy. Just one. But you can't expect that, because that would invalidate the veteran's own value as a veteran, which is based on war being a good, noble, heroic, necessary, honourable, Godly thing.
If I approached you to donate to end world hunger, you might think it was wishful thinking, that there will always be hungry people, that ending hunger would cost too much, that it is impractical - but you still might donate. If I told you I was working to create a world without war, what would you do? We all know what we are willing to sacrifice to win a war. What are we willing to do to not have wars?
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