The Call of Duty

I don’t think soldiers are honoured enough in Canada.  I’m not saying they should be exonerated from the legal system, or given special privileges.  I’m talking about honour, a civic responsibility.  A handful of my grandfather’s brothers fought in WW2; the proof of which for me is a mustard coloured paratrooper bag in my room with the worn initials H.W. Nichols on it.  But I don’t think soldiers receive their due from young intelligent people who imply that, ultimately, it takes more courage to say no to war than it does to say yes to it.  These people say courage lies in listening to your personal beliefs, and following them through, and if that means not going to war because you don’t believe in it, that’s what it means.  And that’s true, too.  But I will never be under the impression that refusing war (the classic example being Mohammad Ali) takes more courage than the act of actually doing it (Joe Louis)— that is, putting yourself in live, mortal danger.  The great majority of my generation have no grasp whatsoever of mortal danger, only a grasp of the ideology of war and war-machine tactics of persuasion, which are particularly easy to accrue and criticize today.  But people who say following personal beliefs through and saying no to war because they don’t see the rationality of it tend to imply their superiority over those who disagree.  This implies everyone who would decide yes to it is deficient in some way— maybe poverty has impelled their decision; maybe they weren’t educated enough to see ‘the truth about warfare’.  But I have friends who have said yes to warefare and they are no less intelligent than me, and many more times the men; personal conditions may have played a role in their decisions, but I’m not going to criticize their integrity for that reason.

Only liberal democratic ideology could say refusing war as critique is more courageous than putting your own person in harm’s way.  Yet another case of the blatant fascism of individuality than has come to pervade the higher strands of liberal democratic policy.