National Post (National Edition)
Counting my blessings in freedom
WHICH WAR? WELL, PRETTY MUCH ALL OF THEM.
— JOHN ROBSON
So I just saw a news story saying “Telling people to count their blessings this holiday season is a recipe for depression.” And I don't want to spoil the victimhood party. But since telling people their life stinks and they can't snap out of it is certainly a recipe for depression, I'm counting mine anyway, starting with not spending Christmas on the Somme or in a concentration camp. It may not be exactly a cheerful thought, but Remembrance Day is more an inspiring than a cheerful holiday.
Technically it's not even a holiday. It's something far more important: A day where people do something spontaneously that government accommodates rather than causes or, more probably, tries to cause and fails. For instance United Nations Day which you don't even know when it is and though I do I don't care. On the flip side, Common Sense Day is obviously non-governmental but does not seem to attract as many celebrants as one might wish. Especially this year and with regard to the American election.
So let me try to tie that seething mass of gloating and ranting back to Remembrance Day and Passchendaele and have it turn out better than you'd expect. Because though in many ways an appalling spectacle, it was not nearly as bad as many people think.
I mean the “Great” War. But it also applies to American politics, which consistently dismays people who need dismaying because it is loud, boisterous, decentralized and highly effective. At the moment, I grant, far too many Republicans are convinced a priori of massive voting fraud while too many Democrats and their fellow-travellers are convinced a priori that voting fraud is impossible. But here's what's not happening.
Civil war. Mass slaughter. Incarceration of dissidents. Exactly the same things that do not happen after a Canadian election, or instead of one. Wild talk of Trump the dictator or, back in the day, of Chrétien or Harper notwithstanding. And such things do not happen here because we won the war.
Which war? Well, pretty much all of them. Even though Remembrance Day is of course tied not just to war generally but to one specific war, the First World War, because it's on the date of the armistice, at the time of the armistice, and because that war looms so large.
Even in the United States, whose Memorial Day is in May because the Civil War looms larger than any other for them except the Revolutionary War for which they have Independence Day. But Nov. 11 is Veterans Day and rightly so because the First World War was a bigger deal to them than you or they might think, including the surprising fact that they had far more men killed than us.
Of course we were there longer, and there'd have been no war for them to join otherwise as without Canada the Allies would have lost by mid-1917. But when the Americans finally showed up, they made a vital and very costly contribution to the victory.
Yes, victory. To those Americans and others who give the First World War much thought, it often stands out as a monument to stupidity, their own as well as other people's. But as I argue in The Great War Remembered, we are too hard on early 20th-century generals and statesmen, failing to appreciate their dilemmas and underrating their achievements, on the battlefield and even the Versailles settlement.
As for the Americans, their main failing was not getting belatedly sucked into the morass, it was failing to deter Germany before 1914.
Had they done so, the history of the 20th century would have been much brighter.
No Lenin and no Hitler, for starters. But do we read In Flanders Fields and think “Ah yes, hold up the torch, take up the quarrel with the foe?” We should. Because Kaiserism needed defeating, less urgently than Naziism but not by as wide a margin as we often suppose.
So did Communism, Napoleon and Louis XIV. And the Turks at the gates of Vienna. And others who were not beaten like Genghis Khan. Thus on Nov. 11 we should remember Vimy, Juno and Kapyong, but also Khe Sanh, Ramillies and Egbert's Stone, and Badon Hill too.
It is because we won these battles, or rather because someone else won them for us or died trying, often horribly, that I am free to write and you to ridicule this column, denounce one another's politics, character and intellect and insult the prime minister. Then stand shoulder to shoulder in the cold and remember that we are free because so many risked, and gave, all their tomorrows for our today.
After which, just possibly, we will approach our differences with a bit less venom and a bit more charity. A blessing worth counting again and again.