Memories and choices

Editorial

There was a time when Remembrance Day recollected battles long since passed. Until we joined the fight in Afghanistan, Canada had not been at war since 1953, when the Korean War ended in an unsatisfactory truce, the instability of which resonates until today. For decades after that, Canadians were peacekeepers, whose blue berets were symbolic of a country that sought a middle ground between hostile enemies.

This week also marks the 72nd anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, which represented the end of the beginning and the beginning of the end for millions of European Jews, many of whom had persuaded themselves that Hitler’s genocidal pronouncements and the Nazis’ increasing contraction of Jewish freedoms would end somewhere short of the unthinkable end point we now know was coming.

As historian Dr. Chris Friedrichs said at the community-wide Kristallnacht Commemorative Lecture Sunday night (see cover story this week), Kristallnacht was the Nazis’ assurance that they could proceed with impunity in executing the Final Solution. For the self-righteous who see the Holocaust as a German phenomenon, the reality is that the extent of the Shoah was a direct result of every country’s refusal to act.

The resonance of all this came together in a strange way Monday, after the annual Kristallnacht commemoration, but before Thursday’s solemn ceremonies at cenotaphs across the country.

Canada’s Parliament has determined that our country’s military role in Afghanistan is to end in 2011. But news emerged this week that Canada’s government plans to assign perhaps 700 military trainers, in addition to support staff, in what is described as an assignment to teach security forces in Afghanistan to manage the country’s civil situation after Canadian forces leave next year. This new mission reportedly could keep Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan until 2014.

This proposal, certain to raise howls from those who oppose our country’s involvement in any conflict, raises again the issue: Is there such a thing as just war?

Thanks to Canada and our allies, Afghanistan was liberated from the Taliban, a band whose Stone Age theology ensured women would be more likely to receive lashes than an education, whose punishment for dissent from a most extreme, unthinking and literal form of Shariah law would be death or worse. Of course, idealistic posturing does nothing to deflect the fact that what Afghans have now is corrupt, autocratic and not reflective of Canadian norms of pluralism and freedom. This is fraught terrain, because this week we commemorate those Canadians who have given the greatest sacrifice in defence of an Afghani regime that is not saintly. But neither is it the Taliban. Those who demand an immediate Canadian withdrawal must remind themselves of this fact.

On Sunday, at the Kristallnacht lecture, Dr. Reva Adler spoke of the catastrophic results of the world’s failure to intervene in Rwanda and in Sudan. She did not need to mention the fate of European Jewry after Evian and Kristallnacht.

The admirable desire for peace can manifest as a refusal to get involved. It was in the name of peace that an anti-war movement gained strength in the 1930s in North America, delaying the entry of the United States into the conflict, prolonging the Allied victory, resulting in incalculable numbers of deaths.

No matter what happens in Afghanistan, including Canada’s role there, there will remain countless tragedies in the world deserving of intervention in the name of humanity’s duty to protect others. Most will go unattended, because of a lack of resources, a lack of attention and an unwillingness of world powers and their peoples to get involved. It is a grisly process of prioritization that calls on us to intervene on behalf of one group while leaving others to their fate. This is among the unanswerable human riddles we considered this week as we remembered our lost Canadians and the horrors of Kristallnacht.

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