Canada has a century-long reluctance to ask any ironic or analytic questions about war, about Canadians who wage it, about those who demand that we keep remembering it, demand that Canadians kowtow forever in obeisance and bury any misgivings under a fool’s comforter of plastic poppies.

Are soldiers the only people who ever mattered in Canadian history? Dead soldiers killed in wars? Did World War One create modern Canada? Is that how Canadians came to define themselves? By killing people? So say historians like No-Star General Jack Granatstein. I say “General”Jack is full of shit. I say inventing a way to make insulin to help diabetics is one beacon that, woven with other positive advances, helped Canadians to define who we are. Not knifing krauts in the mud.

But tedious old bores like enemy-stompin’ Jack Granatstein want people to remember constantly for many reasons. One of Jack’s reasons is so that the vengeful old hawk can get the funds to keep building war museums. Every time a Canadian turns around, history professor Granatstein has wasted our taxes by building another god-damn war museum, filled with the same exaggerations, lies and exclusions we’ve been subjected to for decades. Jack’s jingoistic blatherings about our glorious soldiers (Jack being a soldier, by the way, and thus partaking of the glory he seeks daily to generate) always remind me of another well-known Canadian, a movie director who never stops whining that Canadians don’t celebrate Canadian artists with sufficient noise and glory. By which this movie director meant: Canada has not celebrated ME and my talent enough. Oh really, well, here’s one Canadian reader and writer who thinks we’ve heard quite enough immodest horn-blowing from both Norman Jewison and Jack Granatstein.

Is there one nano-crumb of proof that Remembrance Day EVER stopped the next war? Not one.

Every single participant in a Canadian war was a hero who wants only to be celebrated every day of every month forever. Well, that’s quite remarkable. I guess the two families I know best are the only families in Canada’s war history who contained grifters, losers and what I call veteran conmen. Let me tell you about two.

One relative I will call my “Uncle Stan.” Tragic figure. Uncle Stan came home from WWII with shell-shock. The whole family of lesser, war-deprived beings got down on their knees and kissed his beer-stained puttees. Just awful that shell-shock. Made Uncle Stan gulp down a quart of Captain Morgan’s rum every day for the next forty years — just for ballast.

“You Gutless Pussies!”

Uncle Stan loved to blare one-upmanship routines at all the younger males in the family, along the lines of “You gutless pussies never had to flick open a kraut’s carotid artery and make sure it stayed open. You can never be men.” Uncle Stan, wreathed in a boozy aura of rum, used to lean down and scream this into the face of a nine-year-old boy who was not even an embryo when the war began. How do I know? That little boy was me.

After 10 years of his delirious dick-wagging, braying out "Taps" on a tin whistle, all the while lying under the dining room table and screaming abusive taunts, a relative and I finally looked up Uncle Stan’s war record, seeking innocently to understand Stan's tragic neurasthenic deficits all the better.

What did we discover? Uncle Stan had spent the entirety of World War Two as a typist at Comox on Vancouver Island.

So I asked Uncle Stan finally, “How precisely did shell shock afflict you? You mean, the bombs went off in Japan or the South Pacific and traveled under the ocean all the way to Vancouver Island and then – O God! – shook the rum bottle right off your typewriter table there in Comox? How tragic! Is that what really happened, you useless, lying, bullying waste of protoplasm? I guess that’s why your chief accomplishment after the war was maintaining a 40-year-long alcoholic stupor?

We copied Uncle Stan’s glorious war record and mailed it to every member of the family we could locate. Why? Lest we forget.

Inebriate Number Two, Advance and Be Recognized!

Another lifelong boozed-up souse and member of my family, Cousin Bozo, had deep dents in his forehead in 1946, which he always pointed out on every Remembrance Day. “I fought and was torn apart, so you yellow-bellied suckababies, cringing at home, could enjoy our wonderful Canadian way of life.” Cousin Bozo’s war record was finally researched under the freedom of information act by one of his own children.

Bozo had two notations of interest. One night in the winter of 1943, after the army camp bootlegger had closed, during midnight check at a maritime basecamp hospital, the enterprising Bozo had been apprehended by military police in the act of licking alcohol swabs off other soldiers’ leg wounds. I’m sure Bozo had expected the Carruthers Medal for Nocturnal Derring-Do. Instead he drew two weeks at hard labour for conduct unbecoming a drunken fucking asshole.

Dents for the Dense
The other tale concerned the origin of Bozo’s prominent forehead dents, which, in later years, he never ceased to claim caused him deep pain and loss of consistent nooky. Bozo’s son discovered that his father's indenture (so to speak) had happened, not dodging Nazi bullets on the cliffs of Dunkirk as Bozo told, but after a night of vomit-flecked indulgence, when Bozo had taken a header off the tailgate of a troop transport truck in Halifax harbour, drunker than a rodeo goat, on the way to the ship that never took him overseas because his head wounds had been serious enough to keep him in Halifax for the duration of the war.

My deep shame is that my family is the only family in Canadian history that had veterans of that kind, cowardly titsucking ning-nongs of the most abject life station. Isn’t that odd? Only my family? I feel so bad. Every other Canadian soldier was a hero.

One thing many of these “professional veterans” will tell you in their cups, should you ask them exactly how much fawning praise and bootlicking do you guys require? They will answer: more, we want more. Because the ego wounded in childhood can never get enough of the healing balm of unending praise, even if it is totally unmerited.

In my life I actually met several honest returned veterans. I always asked what was the Second World War like?

The gist of what both confessed was this:

“The Second World War was the best time of my life. I was a backwoods clod, pining in rural boredom, hot to leave the farm. I’m one farm boy who signed up to escape thousands of nights of prairie darkness because we couldn’t afford a candle; lying alone for your entire adolescence, with nothing to do but hold your dick in your sock and fantasize that Betty Grable, all dressed in white with a physician's parabolic mirror strapped to her forehead, had just grabbed your balls, leaned over, and whispered in your ear, “Cough, dear.” I did chose to get shot at, to get out of a non-place with no books, no challenge, no sweet-fuck-all except a farmer father who wanted me to grow up and be his plough horse. Screw that! So, I yelled, “Bring on those Nazi bastards. Ride over those battlefields, you dyed-blonde, corpse-buggering Valkyries, here I come, Adolph!” World War Two gave me adventure in spades. I got French pussy, Dutch food and German stiffs. I got to shoot krauts every fucking day. It was the greatest, most exciting time in my life, and, after demobilization, my life back in Canada sucked big time. Life was never again that sweet.”

Put that on just one cenotaph, you lying old drunks.

Let’s see that text on the ribbon of the next wreath you lay at the Tomb of the Unknown Liver, you cirrhotic, Cyrano-nosed buffoons.

Canadian Art Too Remains Dishonest or Silent in the Face of Our War Record

In all of Canadian art, there is scarcely a moment of analysis or irony about the whole cumbrous war-remembering machinery that clanks along each year, spewing out plastic poppies and edited memories of warfare. Oh, we have dozens of written passages on the horrors of war, and whole libraries on the unrescindable nobility of every soldier who ever donned Canadian brown. But there is little mention of cowardice, of fragging your own officer, of death by friendly fire, of falling on your own bayonet when blind-drunk.

One Canadian play, filmed once, “Wedding in White” features a couple of nasty old buggers, professional Canadian veterans, who attempt to destroy the life of a young girl once they return from the killing fields. But, aside from that, Canadian writers always end their war novels in a French ditch. Canuck artists seem to pull a shroud of “no comment” over all the beastly enormities committed by returned veterans back here in Canada. There is seldom any attention paid to the unending glut of martial bullshit that veterans' descendants have had to abide.

I have written elsewhere about my total disagreement with Canadian soldiers being sent to Afghanistan to be killed.

One recent defense of this useless slaughter came from the lordly hawk, John Manley, such a guaranteed warmonger that Conservative Prime Minister Harper chose a former Liberal cabinet minister,Manley, to write a pro-war report about why we should keep flying Canadians to Afghanistan to be shot. I nearly barfed when Manley was on TV the day he released his report. He actually said that one of the reasons Canadian mothers and wives and fathers should offer up their children to be shot, blown up and murdered was so that Canadians abroad, such as John Manley at some French banquet, could hold their heads high in pride, that Canada too was sending its sons and daughters to die in agony, their guts splattered over Afghani trenches. Listen, John Manley, you pink-eyed snotfuck, send your own kids. Leave mine the fuck alone.

How dare you and that swine Harper ask Canadians to sacrifice their children in unwinnable wars. Alexander the Great could not conquer Afghanistan. The Russian Army could not conquer Afghanistan. But Stephen Harper can?

The whole Remembrance Day charade, in which a nation annually bows in humility before dead liars, plays directly into the hands of the government draculas who will eventually send your children to die. So every time you buy a poppy, like a stunned yoyo, remember that you may indirectly someday finance the death of your own grandchildren. Please consider stopping these government beasts from mauling Canada’s future. It’s quite simple. Stop voting for them.

The old proverb is correct: "the first casualty of war is truth."

And it's the most persistent casualty.

---revised by Bill Casselman, November 8 2010

Reader’s Comment

Bob emailed me:

Thank you, thank you, thank you! Finally somebody telling the truth. I am a former service member (I refute the term veteran—the only thing I’m a veteran of is the phony ‘Cold War’).

While I’m not ashamed of my service, let’s be real. I joined the ‘peacetime’ air force for the adventure and because my old man told me to buck up in school or get a job. I did gain a useful trade—thank christ I didn’t go army.

I have attended remembrance day services for years out of a sense of duty and respect. This one past will be my last. I viewed this year’s event through completely new eyes and with with increasing abhorance. It was nothing but a public Christian celebration of war (I never realized this before until I started thinking for myself - thanks internet!). The ‘ceremony’ consisted of the old shop-worn formulatic mentions of the cannon fodder, and then on to the real reason for the gathering, namely the continuing self-aggrandizememt of the remaining vets, (many of whom probably fit the descirption of your two uncles), along with the militaristic jingoism surrounding the current batch of ‘heroes in the making’ in Afghanistan. Not a word of the millions of innocents slaughtered—no preaching on the immorality and horrors inflicted by the ‘total war’ doctrine, such as death camps, terroist bombing of civilians, use of WMD, etc. No firm moral statement calling for reflection on the evil of it all, or a call for it’s final demise.

What we got instead were the empty platitudes droned out in a ‘reverend Lovejoy’ fashion for about 45 minutes of a one hour “production”.

Your analysis of the Passchendael movie was bang on. (Wish I had that18 bucks back). Gross was an embarassement to Canada in his ‘Dudley Do Right’ role in the ridiculous Due South homage to another over-rated Canadian institution. They’re just cops fer chrissakes, and increasingly incompetent ones at that—enough of the hero worship already—get the hell over it! And that goes for firefighters, ambulance people, etc. It seems anyone with a uniform is eligible for this adolescent adulation. Who’s next, Canada Post letter carriers?

Thanks again Bill—made my day.

November 18, 2008 6:34 PM