Remembrance Day: They who question also serve

Every year I try to write a Remembrance Day post (or Veteran’s Day, as it is called here, which I feel gives the whole thing a rather different flavour). They’re generally pompous, except when they’re about buying new baby-manglers , but I’m going to go with informative this time (well, informative and pompous).

I can’t claim to be an expert on the military, nor do I feel comfortable saying Remembrance Day is “about” one thing or another. But I have always felt the emphasis that is placed on honouring those who are “willing to die for their country” is misplaced: it is far more horrifying to me that we ask our soldiers to kill for their countries. Especially if, inevitably, they should end up killing the wrong people, for the wrong reasons.

I’ve only written a couple of articles for The Beaver Canada’s History that touch on military history, but in both I was struck by the essential seriousness of senior military men about what they do, as contrasted with the sometimes flippant way politicians treat their responsibility for the lives of their citizens and of other countries.

For instance, there once was what amounted to a civil war in a country very far away. Canada had no interest there at all, but we were told by allies, who we thought were in a position to know, that our help was needed to combat an internationally coordinated threat that stood in opposition to every freedom we in the West held dear.

Our allies had bad intelligence. We sent our soldiers to a hostile environment, unprepared, under equipped, and essentially asked them to take sides in a conflict in which we did not understand either of the combatants. As a result, we ended up propping up an illegitimate and oppressive government, and contributed to the deaths of untold civilians. The threat, in the end, was less part of an international, anti-Western movement as it was an indigenous uprising.

The threat I am talking about was not terrorism, the country was not Afghanistan. Our troops were not called on to call in airstrikes on weddings. But in 1932, because of a panicky British ambassador in El Salvador who saw Communists behind every lamp-post, the Canadian navy was ended up providing support to a military dictator who took Mussolini as an inspiration, had come to power in a coup only three months before, and was recognized as legitimate nowhere (except, oddly, Norway).

The two Canadian ships had been sent by Canadian politicians who weren’t entirely sure where El Salvador was, and didn’t care to find out. They had been told the country was being overrun by Communists, and they believed it. They were told good English speaking plantation owners – Brits, Americans – were being murdered in their beds, and they believed it. They were told lies.


Victor Brodeur, the Captain with a conscience
Image from: http://www.journal.forces.gc.ca/vo9/no4/23-book5-livre5-eng.asp

The Captain of those ships – a French Canadian called Victor Brodeur – was able to tell them the truth after the fact. He told them the vicious dictator of El Salvador was able, because Canadian vessels were securing his western port, to free up his own troops. Those soldiers were able to massacre 40,000 Pipil natives, essentially wiping out a group that formed the labour force of the British and American owned plantations and that were treated worse than dirt in the country. Venturing out into the countryside (something British ambassador that had demanded military intervention had never done) Brodeur saw that the uprising had consisted of burning some farm buildings – no plantation owners were killed, no infrastructure damaged. Shown the massacre site by some proud and preening Salvadoran generals a few days later, it was revealed that exactly one Communist party membership card was found among the corpses – many of whom were wearing white sheets, now splattered in blood, in the vain hope they would be spared death as non-combatants.

Brodeur, conscious of what his country’s actions had wrought, wrote all of this in his report to Ottawa on his return. There was no follow-up from the politicians that had sent him there, no complaints to Britain, no international censure for El Salvador. However, in an example of the high seriousness of Canadian Parliamentary Democracy that has sadly only been matched since, one far-sighted and noble MP did bravely rise in the House of Commons to complain about the cost of the fuel the ships consumed to get there.

Apparently, I'm the camel, Heaven's the needle

French labour law being what it is, the owners of the apartment in which Amynah and I are currently living thought it would be more cost –efficient to continue to pay for their cleaning lady to come in once a week than it would be to break their contract and re-hire her on their return. We'll say her name is Margaret - she hails from Poland. She spent many years working in Milan and so her French is heavily spiced with Italian.

Having a cleaning lady is not something natural to me. Given that my Mom’s nickname is “Red” for her political leanings, I feel like I’m betraying fundamental principles allowing someone else to clean up my mess while I futz around on my computer.

For her part, Margaret seems to like us fine: I’m apparently one of the few clients that makes a point of talking to her, and given that it’s just Amynah and I here, the apartment doesn’t get too messy.

One thing I am often bothered by with Margaret is her tendency to speak to me as if I am a moron. I get that a lot here in France – I speak like a 4-year old on a sugar rush in French, without the coherence, so I understand why people tend to not take me very seriously. However her French isn’t so much better than mine, so there was likely some other cause. I discovered why yesterday, when I asked her how her Christmas had been.


_{Margaret's buddy, hanging out in the Cathedral}

Terrible, it turns out. She didn’t get to return home to Poland this year, and thus spent Noël in Strasbourg. Margaret is deeply Catholic, and started off on an impassioned, very long, and increasingly loud rant about the spiritual emptiness of the French, how everyone has forgotten about the Nativity and is focused entirely on presents and champagne.

As she went on, her ire illuminated the failing of “The French,” gradually focusing in on “The People in Her Neighbourhood” shining briefly on “Some of Her Clients” before inevitably focusing a white-hot spotlight on “Me.”

“Here you have this big apartment, a fancy car, spending time on your computer, but in the end, what will it all mean? When you die – and you will die – and they put you in the ground, what then? God gives you everything, and all he asks is that you believe! When you go up to Heaven, they will ask you – do you remember that cleaning lady in Strasbourg, so many years ago? Do you remember what she told you? What will you say?” (“That I don’t own a car, and the apartment’s not mine,” I thought).

I am, as a rule, fascinated in religions in general and how their adherents negotiate the modern world while staying true to their faith, though I usually don’t making dinner conversation out of it. That said, I fully understand Margaret's impulse: she likes me, she believes in the redemptive power of Christ, and believing I'd not already made his acquaintance, felt it her Christian duty to introduce me to the Lord.

To say my soul is in peril is one thing. But to imply that I’m some sort of patrician, idling away my days on the back of Amynah’s labour, my lily-white hands too delicate to scrub my own floors? That upset me: Red Sharon’s son is no bourgeois parasite!

Maybe I should give her next Wednesday off and clean the place up myself. That’ll show her.

Leiping Leipzig

_{And why wouldn't they?}

We stopped in Leipzig to visit our friend Stefan, who kindly showed us around town. The place had not suffered much in the war, but forty years of communist neglect had done a lot of damage to the former capital of Saxony’s historic buildings. Construction cranes and heaps of slag are all over the city, as they try to restore the place to its former glory, and centrally-planned brutalist slabs share space with idiosyncratic Beaux Arts wonders.

For the most part, the autocrats of the GDR had left the edifices of the Saxon bourgeoisie alone, to crumble of their own accord. One exception, Stefan explained with typical understatement, was the old university chapel: “They blew that up in the 1980s. This did not go unnoticed.”


_{The Stasi emblem - they weren't aiming for warm and cuddly.}

There were protests, which was remarkable, given the state of fear people must have been living in. We got a taste of that in the Stasi museum, which memorializes the East German republic’s secret police methods. These ranged from the tragic, like mothers interrogated for the ideologically impure school essays of their children – to the absurd, like a camera hidden in a pillow strapped around the abdomen of a female agent to fake a pregnancy (“Ooo! I can feel it clicking!”) Another disguise kit included a hard helmet, prompting me to wonder if the agent was to infiltrate the Village People.


_{They were efficient, at least: these are confiscated "Western" musical cassettes, repurposed to record phone taps.}

All joking aside, it was a chilling place, and the events it memorializes are not purely historical, by any means – more than one exhibit had photographs ripped from the walls by people that had recognized themselves or loved ones.

That said, we know how the story ends, and it ended here in Leipzig.



The St Nicholas church was the scene, starting in the 1980s, of a series of protests against the regime. Initially, these were demands for a better quality of life but over time bloomed into the mass movement that eventually overthrew the regime, disproving Stefan’s observation (quoting Goethe) that given a choice between injustice and disorder, Germans will always choose the former.

May Day

Yesterday was May Day which is still an actual holiday in France. In terms of holidays, it’s a bigger deal than Christmas, if the importance of a holiday can be expressed as an inverse ratio of public tranport service (Christmas, the trams ran once every half hour. Yesterday, not at all).

The telephone poles of Strasbourg had been plastered with retro-revolutionary “Take to the streets” posters, so we were unsurprised when our morning was interrupted with loud chanting and music. Turns out the May Day parade was going right by our house.

As a history enthusiast, this was sort of like going to the zoo for a wildlife biologist: Hey look - actual Communists! I thought they were extinct! They followed the much larger union contigents, but they were honest-to-god Communists (not a bunch of teenagers with an ill-understood copy of the Manifesto. Reflecting the hard times they've fallen on in recent years, the Marxists were splintered into about a dozen factions, including the three dudes (one of whom was about 7 years old) representing the Union Senegalese Communists. The largest of the communist groups even had a banner with the faces of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. (Dear Comrades: If I may share just a thought for your consideration. Stalin - really? That’s the face you want on your banners to advertise your ideology? You don’t think he might be even a little off putting for anyone who isn’t a complete sociopath?)

Parade over, we hopped on our bikes to have a nice outdoor lunch with a Canadian family we know here. On the way, we passed about a dozen sellers of fleur de lys. It is a tradition, (strictly enforced” to sell little nosegays of these things on May first. This being France, which has no shortage of rules, you can actually be fined for selling them any earlier than May Day.

Despite my curiosity, we didn’t buy any. Instead, for your viewing pleasure, we did acquire some roses from our friends, whose front yard is overgrown with them. They are now sitting in our plastic water bottle cum flower vase and making the apartment smell nice.