Whether 70 years ago or now, war is stupid
Published Thursday November 6th, 2008
Each Remembrance Day I am haunted by the memory of youthful faces in uniform.
They peered back at me from photo frames, where they'd been neatly placed on a piano, dresser or sideboard in London following the Second World War.
As a child I hadn't known what to say to those who'd explained that this was Johnny or Joan or Jim. But I knew they were all dead.
A recently published and well researched book, London 1945 by Maureen Waller, is a compelling read and addresses well the horror of war and post-war adjustment.
Many mothers reluctantly handed over their young children at the start of the Second World War to almost anyone who would take them away from initial bombs dropped in 1939. But they scarcely recognized their children when they returned five, even six years later.
"I thought it would have been over in a matter of months, or I'd never have let either of you go," my mother later tearfully explained.
I hadn't seen my brother or parents during that period of time. My mother worked in factories "to support the war effort," my father was away with soldiers at sea, my brother evacuated at four years of age to a farm where children, working as farm hands, escaped the bombs but endured other unimaginable hardships.
I went with strangers near Wales, who later tried unsuccessfully to adopt me.
Three and a half million children were evacuated from England to all parts of the world during the Second World War. One in ten children died under bombs in industrial cities in the United Kingdom.
Eighty thousand German children were to die under our allied bombings.
The bombings of London, Dresden (to where German families with their children had fled), Coventry and so many other cities show the widespread death and destruction from joint retaliation on a unprecedented scale.
September 11, 2001, for all its undeniable horror and tragedy, was a crime and not war. Nonetheless, we learn that war in the Middle East as a result of this crime may be unending.
Millions have fled repeated NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) bombings in the Middle East, where families have endured the same indescribable horrors longer even than the Second World War.
Where diplomatic talks and humanitarian aid are so desperately needed in already war-torn countries, NATO military forces, with their archaic, immature and barbaric mentality of war and warrior and slogans of "Come Fight With Us," release further unrelenting NATO bombs with air strikes, and, because I remember what bombs do, I cry out "for shame!"
One thousand U.S. military bases, strategically placed around the world today, as shown in Chalmers Johnson's well researched Sorrows of Empire are all "potential declarations of war."
While spending $18-22 billion Canadian tax dollars on war in Afghanistan so far, a further eye-popping $490 billion has been allocated for the military over the next 20 years, and sadly, not for our time-honored, world-respected role as peacekeepers, now numbering less than 70, but in a more coercive role as peacemakers.
Food banks witness dwindling supplies and Canadian children go hungry. Heating costs are prohibitive for many as freezing temperatures ensue. Schools exhibit mould, sick patients wait for hours in emergency rooms and medication grows increasingly out of reach for many middle-income families with life-threatening diseases.
Life-giving industries, such as farming, fishing, education and health become subservient to monies increasingly given over to feed the appetite of the insatiable military industrial complex.
Ultimately, Margaret Duckworth, founder of VOW for Peace, recipient of the Order of Canada and numerous other awards for her lifetime work as a peace activist, whose brother died in the Second World War, might have summed it up best by proclaiming that "war is stupid."
Gloria G. Paul lives in Hoyt. Send your comments to letters@dailygleaner.com
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