Some left-wing activists are just plain stupid....

They understand little about Remembrance Day.....

Although we often think of those outside our borders as the enemy -- the insurgents in Afghanistan who plant IED’s in the hopes of killing our soldiers, or the foreign jihadis who fight a religious war against the West -- some of the most effective enemies exist right here within our borders. These people refer to themselves as anti-war activists, or anti-racists, or social justice activists; but really their goals are all very similar. They are people like Naomi Klein, socialist anarchists who use any means necessary to undermine our success as a nation, and the prominence of western civilization’s accomplishments.

Harsha Walia, an " activist, writer, researcher and facilitator " who "has been active in a variety of voluntary social justice issues over the past decade including feminist, anti-racist, migrant justice, Palestine solidarity, Indigenous self-determination, anti capitalist, anti-poverty, and South Asian diasporic movements" penned a piece about Remembrance Day in the Vancouver Sun. Only it wasn’t about Remembrance Day, which she writes is symbolic of those who are “most eager to create a steady flow of the dead to remember”, but about all of the other days of the year that should be memorialized for those who have suffered and died due to human and corporate greed, military wars and occupations, man-made poverty and, let us not forget, that ubiquitous environmental devastation.

Indeed, according to Ms. Walia, Remembrance Day, and war memorials in general, tend to be sites of political and national mobilization, designed to manipulate you, the hapless patriotic Canadian, to conceptualize past memories of warfare and our war dead, in order to direct current wars and future military conflicts. Do you understand that logic? When you bestow a wreath at the grave of your fallen grandfather, you are enabling and perpetuating the western military-industrial complex, something which is anathema to the modern pseudo-leftwing movement and their self-despising existence within our borders.

Ironically, of course, it was the left that once saw fit to rise up against fascism in Europe in the twenties and thirties; leftists who went to Spain to fight in the Civil War. It was the left that saw the importance of an alliance with the military powers of the West and the corporate assembly plants that provided a mechanized Army to fight the Nazis. When faced with the peril of annihilation by fascism, the socialists rallied the working class toward supporting our government and our troops in that battle against the enemy.

Today’s so-called leftists, however, have never faced the peril of an enemy that threatens the planet. So comfortable are they within the free societies created by the men and women who fought and died for their luxurious existence, that they take the one day that we spare to give honour to them, and manipulate it into some kind of odious political revolt against our “militaristic” leadership.

Ms. Walia’s objection to our flag-waving, our respect for the uniform, our traditional military songs, and our patriotic tributes to fallen soldiers, is to me a sign of a subculture that is rotting our society from the inside out, paradoxically rejecting the very things that allow them to stand free and criticize our civilization for having the wherewithal to fight and vanquish the Nazi enemy. These modern revisionists cast our soldiers today as villains in the international game of neocolonialism:

But again this is not about Remembrance Day. Today, I am haunted by the faces of those who are being slaughtered and murdered by ‘our boys’ in Afghanistan. The day after Remembrance Day, after we underscore the seemingly unique sacrifice of veterans and selectively grieve for them, where is the indignation and sorrow for the daily dead of Afghanistan? Where is our recognition – let alone remembrance – of the soaring number of deaths in a country where, just in the past six months alone, over 2000 people have been killed. According to figures by the UN Assistance Mission to Afghanistan, civilian death in Afghanistan have soared by 24% during the first half of 2009 compared with same period last year.

The rhetoric of the above paragraph is chilling in it’s choice of words. Our soldiers in Afghanistan are “slaughtering” and “murdering” Afghans. Why, we’re little more than an extension of the white Christian Armies sent forth to continue our Crusade against jihad, in the words of Elizabeth May, modern conquistadors against the enemies of Jesus Christ.

Why, Ms. Walia even takes an opportunity to snipe at former Afghan MP Malalai Joya, perhaps the bravest woman in Afghanistan, by characterizing her resistance against the misogynistic murderous Taliban as validating the “perpetuating policies of death, violence, and destruction” Truly, the modern feminist movement has allied itself with some very strange bedfellows when it considers the Taliban an acceptable compromise to the “racist” civilizations which occupy Afghanistan.

We are “narcissists” for remembering our fallen war dead. We are “self-righteous freedom-lovers and democracy-promoters” for asking people like Ms. Walia to take one day to respect, with sincerity, those who gave their lives because they truly believed it had to be done to guarantee our future as a nation. Alas, all she can dwell on are our “murderous” soldiers in Afghanistan and how we interned the Japanese during the Second World War.