Ghost of a flea

Our debt

Colby Cosh writes on how we can best repay our debt (via Canadians are smug).

It is a mistake to insist to young people, on one hand, that they are born with a debt, and to leave them to discover for themselves, on the other, that the exact amount of the quid pro quo is unclear. They will naturally suspect a swindle. The increasingly typical inclination to suggest that Canada fought Hitler so that future Canadian backpackers would be treated well in Holland can be dismissed as merely revolting.

But there is one overwhelming practical justification for Remembrance Day. In truth, being aware of our military traditions and offering respect to old soldiers -- a few Canadian businesses every year seem to forget how -- is a debt we owe to ourselves and our own posterity. Sooner or later, a nation in which no one is willing to be a soldier is doomed. As the Romans learned, safety cannot be purchased from one's neighbours in perpetuity. A country in which the martial virtues are extinguished cannot hope to be respected while the world remains a polyglot chaos of peoples.

Cosh suggests asking any old soldier what he thinks of Canada's gun registry. Good idea. Then go ask any of the apologists for the Hitlerisms of our generation what they think of Remembrance Day. The answer will be equally instructive. An argument broke out along these lines in the Annex recently. The critic took Remembrance Day as an excuse to ask after WMDs, attack the Americans and move on quickly to his true grievance: the ill-treatment of Germans at the hands of Jews. I wish I was making this up. Canadian media, so eager to use anti-Americanism as a safety-valve for Canada's democratic deficit, has unleashed the same forces as those of Egyptian, Saudi and Malaysian despotry. In so doing they have provided all the excuse a drunken television producer needs to express his hatred of Jews. This is terrifying but it may also provide an opportunity to identify the bigots as they crawl out from under their rocks where they have hidden in shadows and cobwebs of their own hatred. Think of it as flypaper for the cultural end of the war on fascism.

Cosh suggests glory as the payment due those who sacrifice to defend us. Quite right. There is another debt we owe those people who sacrificed for our liberty. We must act to defend it now. The defense of liberty from the Hitlerites of al-Qaeda, International A.N.S.W.E.R. and their fellow travellers is not only a debt we owe to those who came before us. It is a duty we owe to those will take up the burden in generations to come.

And then... Donald Sensing writes about a new kind of veteran (via InstaPundit).

Science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein wrote the best definition of veterans that I have ever read. He was a medically-retired US Navy officer himself when he wrote his classic novel, Starship Troopers. In it he said that there is only one distinction between veterans and non-veterans. It isn’t intelligence or education or class. It is only the fact that veterans are those who have put their own mortal bodies between their loved ones’ homes and the war’s desolation, a fact that the full verses of the Star Spangled Banner first recognized. Veterans are those who love others enough to risk laying down their lives for them, especially people they do not even know. That’s all patriotism is, really: the willingness to risk yourself on behalf of people you do not actually know.

So the firemen and police and rescue workers of New York and Arlington, Va., are veterans of a new kind for a new kind of war.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at November 11, 2003 10:49 AM

Comments

Posted by: cbk at November 11, 2003 01:49 PM

Posted by: Paul Jané at November 11, 2003 03:42 PM

Posted by: Simon Jester at November 12, 2003 05:53 AM

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