If true, this is powerful and compelling. No reasonable person would show disrespect to someone who jumped in front of a bullet to save their life. But what if the bullet wasn’t aimed at you, and that hero didn’t jump, they were pushed into the line of fire by someone else? (2)
Remembrance Day is not about remembering at all. It is a ruling class trying to make us forget what really happened in WWI, to forget what caused people to create the slogan “lest we forget” in the first place. That this plea has been so perverted is the real disrespect. (3)
This thread briefly tells the story of WWI from the perspective of the working classes who were thrown into fire, whom we were supposed to remember. More detail in Canada in the World but the definitive book is The Vimy Trap (Ian McKay and Jamie Swift). (4) https://btlbooks.com/book/the-vimy-trap
Caveat: some will respond to this by asking “what about WWII? the Korean War? peacekeeping? Afghanistan?” Those are all addressed in Canada in the World (discounts avail by DM) but the symbols and history of R-Day are clearly WWI, hence the focus here. (5) https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/canada-in-the-world
WWI was not about freedom, democracy, human rights, it was about empire. Germany was a rising capitalist empire that needed to expand but Britain, France, US had carved up the globe for themselves. The war was about who should control Africa, Asia, and esp the Middle East. (6)
The European ruling classes - many still monarchies - lined up behind the power they most trusted as centre of world capitalism, the British Empire or the rising German Reich. War itself was sparked less by Fr Ferdinand as by the near completion of the Berlin-Baghdad railroad.(7)
17M people would die in four years of misery, much spent in cold, damp trenches infested with lice, rats and the pervasive smells of death and feces. The 53M survivors were left w/permanent injuries, PTSD, and poverty, returning to society that made no provision for the poor. (8)
Millions of war dead were from the colonies. People from Africa, India, Indochina, etc, conscripted (forced) to fight for the very empires that were occupying their lands. These soldiers were often pushed forward as cannon fodder to absorb the greatest amount of fire/death. (9)
The Canadian elite saw war as an opportunity to curry greater influence in the British Empire. PM Borden, in cringeworthy imperial pageantry, declared Canada “ready, Aye, ready!” and proclaimed the “cause of freedom” at stake. False on multiple levels but Borden knew this... (10)
WWI was a test case for modern propaganda, as the elite built nationalist narratives to counteract growing int’l working class solidarity. With modern, industrial war/death on the horizon, the masses would have to be mobilized to fight for the flag instead of against it. (11)
Imperial Germany had neither will nor capacity to launch an invasion of N America. The Kaiser, like his British counterparts, wanted greater access to the resources and cheap/slave labour of Africa, Asia, Middle East. Whomever won the war, those people would remain conquered.(12)
All the same, the Canadian elite threw working class lives into the fire. One of every 16 Canadians would be mobilized and 60,000 killed to ensure that British and French capital continued to violently reap profits from Algeria, India, Vietnam. Hardly a gallant cause. (13)
After an initial surge of popularity, Canadians came to hate the war and Borden could not generate volunteers. So working class men were conscripted, leading to massive protests, unrest in Canada. Police killed five people in Quebec City, including 14-yr old Georges Demeule. (14)
Ok so the war wasn’t about freedom, and a lot of people died for the profits of the rich. But shouldn’t we still remember those working people who died? Of course, and the best way to do that is to listen to them, and not the rich people who tried to speak for them. (15)
Most veterans of the First World War did not return home feeling patriotic/proud of what they’d survived. They were angry at the generals, politicians, and capitalists who had put them through such hell. Many returned home as revolutionaries, protested against war monuments. (16)
It is no coincidence that socialist/communist revolutionary movements swelled towards the end of the war; such revolutions were successful in Russia, Germany, Finland, Hungary and nearly in Italy, Spain, and elsewhere. This was true to a lesser extent in Canada too. (17)
Canadian soldiers mutinied twice when Canada tried to invade Russia in 1918 to crush the Russian Revolution. “On y va pas,” shouted an angry soldier, as generals fired shots at his feet in Victoria, BC. They were marched to the docks at bayonet point. (18)
Many veterans joined unions and strikes like Winnipeg 1919, expressed solidarity with Karl Liebknecht or the Bolsheviks. Most were disillusioned, disgusted by what they’d been put through. Veteran Fred Varley expressed war’s futility and horror in paintings like “For What?” (19)
The anti-war mood in Canada after the war was so strong that the typical nationalistic praise of the war effort had to be subdued. Remembrance in the 1920s/30s was not just solemn, it was often explicitly anti-war. Instead of celebrating ‘heroes,’ they mourned ‘victims.’ (20)
Canada’s most prominent war memorial was built in that spirit. Walter Allward, responsible for the Vimy Memorial (1933) consciously designed a monument to peace. The images he created did not celebrate the courage of the soldier but crystallized the stupid cruelty of the war.(21)
The mood was so anti-war, the elite had to allow it space. Books like Charles Yale Harrison’s Generals Die in Bed were hugely popular, highlighting the way that class shaped the injustice of the war: wealthy generals die in bed while poor kids are slaughtered in the trench. (22)
Even mainstream newspapers had to reflect, for decades, the staunch anti-war sentiment of Canadian society, despite their editors’ often aggressively pro-war positions (JW Dafoe of the Manitoba Free Press called WWI “the most romantic page in our national history.”) (23)
Letters to the editors hammered this point, as veterans and their families lambasted the war and the class system it upheld. This was highlighted by a series of war photos published in 1934. Some pictured here. Next tweet is a caption of a photo of Cdn soldiers w/one German. (24)
The photo (not pictured) featured canadian soldiers and one German soldier, after the surrender. The Toronto Star caption reflected the mood of public memory of WWI, as of 1934. It was evident that many Canadians still rejected the nationalism of the war. (25)
Indeed, for all the patriotic fervour the elite drummed up, the greatest threat to the war effort was that working class soldiers would realize the enemy was not the German but the general. Front line truces (like that famous xmas eve) were common and heavily punished. (26)
Of course, this was not what the elite wanted us to remember. They needed to be able to sell us whatever new war would be necessary for capital (and there were to be many) so they tried to create a counter-narrative. Canada’s most conservative, pro-Empire voices set to work. (27)
One of the primary focus points was Vimy Ridge, a battle they constructed as gallant, glorious, or per John Buchan, “the birth of a nation.” In fact, military historians view it an insignificant skirmish within the Battle of Arras, Germans retreating to take a new position. (28)
But this charge uphill to certain death has been canonized as a turning point in Cdn history. Our memory of Vimy Ridge would more logically be to remember that powerful men sent poor people to their slaughter for nothing. Anger at this injustice, not patriotism, would be apt.(29)
Anger, maybe, at the men who tried to twist this class murder into something reverent? At John Buchan, future Baron of Tweedsmuir (not present at Vimy Ridge) who assured us we were collectively ‘born’ during the slaughter. (The war certainly did protect his investments.) (30)
Anger at John McCrae, author of “In Flanders Fields,” the poem immortalizing the poppy in our memory? McCrae betrayed his fallen comrades when he glorified a war which, he wrote, he had “ached for.” McCrae also supported conscription, hoping it would “stab a French-Canadian.”(31)
Or anger at PM Borden, who used the war to justify criminalizing workers’ organizing while wages were forced down, censoring the press, shutting down foreign language newspapers and organizations and throwing people into concentration camps. Hardly a bastion of ‘freedom.’ (32)
A day set aside to kindle our remembrance of that anger - anger expressed by many of the men who died or survived the front - would be a worthwhile project. The working class has no nation and we could rightly have a day to be angry at our being turned against one another. (33)
Remembrance Day is not such a day. It (and the relentless plastic poppies produced by convict forced labour) is about forgetting what the veterans of WWI tried to warn us: imperial wars enrich the rich and impoverish the poor, at great and bloody cost to the poor. (34)
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