Anyone who lived down at the Flume Road end of Beach Avenue in Roberts Creek during the 1980s probably remembers an old First World War veteran named Irving. Irving and his wife Minnie had a lovely home overlooking the Strait and, even at his advanced age, he was a tireless gardener. He was also very generous to his neighbours, sharing his fine root vegetables and butter lettuces grown under glass.
Irving had survived the trenches of France and could describe the sight of men – just boys, in some cases – and teams of horses being blown to bits in that insane, civilization-ending bloodbath billed as “The War to End All Wars.”
A normally cheery Englishman, Irving would become quite rigid and outspoken when it came to discussing the war. He maintained that wars were fought for the bankers, who made obscene profits by lending money at interest to the belligerent nations and then for reconstruction after all the engineered devastation. Politicians he regarded as mere dupes and tools of agents of the great banking houses, which stayed well hidden in the background.
Nowadays that would be called a conspiracy theory, but in Irving’s day it was called an opinion, based on facts that were readily available in the 1920s and 1930s but were flushed down the memory hole during the next cycle of wartime propaganda. In any case, it was Irving’s view of the war that robbed him of his youth, and he was entitled to it.
War waged under false pretenses is commonplace, with the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 over non-existent weapons of mass destruction being the most glaring recent example. When Canada joined NATO’s bombing campaign over Libya in 2011, based on claims that were also later found to be false or highly exaggerated, was the stated purpose to destroy a relatively affluent and independent nation and unleash a flood of African migrants and refugees on Europe? Of course not. But that was the effect of the mission. Was it by miscalculation or by design? That’s the kind of question that old Irving would ponder.
Honouring our veterans on Remembrance Day doesn’t mean we have to buy into glib fantasies about making the world safe for democracy or that we blindly accept reheated propaganda masquerading as history. If the expression “they died for your freedom” means anything, it means they died for your freedom to question why they had to die in the first place.
