Canada’s Vimy pride open to debate
Re Fog of war and time cloud Vimy’s original message, opinion, April 6 In his attempt to debunk our Canadian pride in Vimy, Jamie Swift vastly underrates the Canadian intelligence. We are capable of simultaneously holding several contradictory views in our minds and hearts.
We can deplore war and all its horrors and pray for peace while we honour the sacrifice of our valiant young people. We know that Canada was in two parts, even before the Plains of Abraham, but we can still acknowledge the courage of both anglophones and francophones.
The fact that a significant number of Vimy’s Canadian combatants were British-born simply reflects the immigration patterns of the day and demonstrates that, then as now, Canada’s newest citizens are among its best.
We can recognize Britain’s historical place in our history without devaluing Canada’s great and still-glowing commitment to world peace so that Vimy never happens again.
Vimy Day should be just one of the many days on which we honour Canada and take pride in our heritage and identity, however myth-ridden.
Karen Riehm, Toronto
Finally, some historically valid commentary on the Battle of Vimy Ridge. Once and for all, please, may we put to rest the myth that Canadians went to fight in the First World War for freedom or for Canada.
We joined the war because Canada formed part of the British Empire; we had no choice. Most volunteers were British-born, not native-born Canadians. The war did not unite the country and create a nation. It split the country deeply in two because of huge opposition in French Canada, which saw (correctly) that this war was an imperialist, European conflagration that had nothing to do with Canada.
The battle for Vimy Ridge had no strategic value. It formed a tiny part of a much bigger mess, known as the Second Battle of Arras, which accomplished nothing — as did most battles on the Western Front, which amounted to a horrendous, endless meat-grinder of human beings.
There was no glory in that war, only horror. Why we insist on trying to heroize the vast numbers of young men who died, essentially for nothing, is beyond my comprehension. They were victims, not heroes. The only justifiable responses to that war are compassion, terrible sadness and the deepest abhorrence of human violence that one can muster.
Steven Spencer, Pickering