War and me

When I'm in London one of the places I always visit is the Imperial War Museum. (For me the uniforms make it real.) Their exhibit on the Holocaust showed a film of Joseph Goebbels making a racist speech, in which he tried to wag his finger but ended up wagging his whole hand.  Pretty strange.

I've also visited the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, where two exhibits have connections to my parents' hometowns.  One is a cannon from Fort Louisbourg, near where Mother grew up.  The other is a wartime diary kept by Father Raymond Hickey of the North Shore Regiment.  He was a priest in the vicinity of Father's hometown of Cambellton, New Brunswick. (Father recalls that Hickey had plenty of anti-Catholic prejudice to deal with.)

On this last visit to London I also went to the National Army Museum for the first time, and it made me feel sad.  Other London places I visit include the Canadian war memorial near Buckingham Palace, and Tavistock Square with its statue of Gandhi and monument to draft resisters through the ages.

How do I feel about war?  I'm anti-prowar, which isn't quite the same as being antiwar.  There may be good wars in theory, but in practice I tend to view each individual war with skepticism:  even the best ones are usually messy.  My Huffington Post avatar is of JS Woodsworth, first CCF leader and an uncompromising pacifist.  Stephen Harper made an issue of Woodsworth voting against Canada declaring war on Germany in 1939, but didn't mention that he was isolated even within the CCF caucus.

How would I have voted if I'd been an MP then?  Well, Canadians took a more honorable course in 1939 than did the Americans, who hid behind arrogant, short-sighted neutrality for two long years until Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and Germany declared war on them. (Remember that the next time some US loudmouth attacks the cowardice of the French, who undeniably showed more courage than Uncle Sam did at that not unimportant moment in 1939.) If I thought the vote was going to be close, I'd have voted yes.

But the vote clearly wasn't going to be close, so I would have voted no just to remind the government that not all Canadians were on board.  As it is, I'm glad Woodsworth prevented the vote from being unanimous.  Unanimity is overrated.