generalspeaking

A Time for War, A Time for Peace

At this time of year older students are assigned the tasks of studying war and history, and some are tasked with writing essays or poetry about war. At times such as these, when VE day is commemorated, sadness overtakes us. Thoughts arise of various nations' young conscripted to fight battles their nations called them to. As a national spirit of appreciation for their sacrifice is evoked.

Children write of the tragedy of war. They write of the resolve of their countries' efforts to ensure that they could, in their turn, live in an environment of peace and security. They write also of the futility of war. In their idealistic youth they wonder why it is so that countries go to war against one another.

Why make war, they wonder, when one can live in peace? It takes some while before the full understanding permeates their consciousness that there are times that peace can only be attained through the medium of war.

And that, in fact, although wars are horribly atrocious events harming everyone involve; the belligerent countries, their national armed forces, and invariably their citizens as well - since war, despite the humanitarian conventions signed by combatants to ensure the protection of civilian populations, does victimize everyone - armed conflict as a human institution of long standing and longer regret is often unavoidable.

No country will stand by in supine disinterest while its territory, its resources, its self-respect, its populations, heritage, culture and values are under siege by the violent intentions of a neighbour. And since countries make alliances with others to ensure they are protected from the military advances of belligerent countries, it is inevitable that when a country involved in a pact with others is threatened, wars that were once locally contained now result in conflict with wider geographic involvement.

During the two great World Wars, Europe was in a conflict of dreadfully-consequential conflagration when Germany resolved to raise itself in strategic power to dominate its neighbours. Because Britain was involved, its former colonial countries were called into action. And when, in WWII, Japan, as part of the Axis, decided to attack the United States, most of North America followed into the European theatre of war.

The sacrifices were huge. For Canada, 40,000 Canadian lives were lost in World War II. There are graves holding Canadians' military remains throughout the world of the Commonwealth, and in parts of Europe where Canadians fought. Canada had a million of its men and women, representing one-tenth of the population, in war-time service by war's end, in 1945.

By the time Canada's military personnel returned from Europe the country employed almost 120,000 people in building airplanes for wartime production. Canada, at that time, had the most powerful economy in the world, next to the United States, and was a military superpower. At the end of the war, Canada had the fourth largest air force in the world, the third-largest navy.

Almost 250,000 personnel were in the Royal Canadian Air Force. The Canadian Navy possessed almost 400 modern sailing vessels. The country's military is a far cry from what it was, then. Throughout the years of peace, and particularly after the fall of the Soviet Union there was no need seen for a strong military. We were engaged a peace-keepers, an issue that made us feel good about ourselves and our place in the world.

This has slowly changed. Although the country's military strength is nowhere near what it was during its largest war-time operation, it now more closely resembles how a peace-time national force should look, with an enhanced and growing military personnel base, better remunerated and cared for, and a greater share of the national treasury set aside to modernize its equipment.

Nazi Germany's defeat at the hands of the allies brought an end to their dream of a thousand-year Reich and world domination. It also brought to the attention of the public a side-issue that Germany had entertained itself with; the mass extermination of world Jewry. That issue saw success in the scope of its annihilation of Europe's Jews. There have been other genocidal tragedies since then. But not yet another world war.

Yet there is, on the near horizon, the potential for another world-wide conflagration. The world was consumed once by the aspirations of a fascist ideology, followed by a Communist ideology. We are now witnessing the world divided by another aspiration, that of an ideology of world domination through religious conviction, with the use of terror as the weapon of entry into another world war.

Irony abounds in the scenario where the Middle East, that very place where the remnants of European Jewry settled into the dream of a state of their own that would provide a haven from racist attacks that so demolished European Jewry, has now become a stepping-stone to repetition of what brought them there in the wake of the Holocaust. Israel, and Jews, will once again become the first victims of a burgeoning new violence.

Radically fundamentalist Islamists have developed their groundwork for imposing a war on Democratic, non-Muslim nations of the world. They have not spared Democratically-inclined Muslim nations of the world either, targeting them equally for the imposition of sharia law and all that it implies, leading to their vision of eventual Islamist world domination.

Using the very institutions and moral tools established at the end of the Second World War to represent peace and security in the world totalitarian nations have defied the logic of justice. The United Nations has been manipulated to the point where irridentist-inclined collaborators find themselves comfortably ensconced, and dictating the parameters of human rights from their heights of abusive totalitarian power.

Handily allied with an axis of other radical-right- and -left-ideologized countries with much in common. These are countries that spurn the weakness of thought and action inspired by democratic idealism. Freedom to these countries equates with casual domination of their spheres of influence, neglecting the fundamental needs of their populations, threatening those who criticize them.

Another world war? Perish the thought, lest we all perish, given the new tools at humankind's disposal.

Nuclear weaponry, now in the hands of incendiary-inclined, unstable governments like Pakistan and North Korea, with Iran coming up strong in their wake, to be used by those who have no compunctions about first-strike mechanisms or total annihilation. And who value the enhanced capability that funding and arming proxy militias offers them.

Mutually assured destruction means nothing to them. Lacking rationality, valuing the emotive vision of instructive and clinging to a faith that would demolish all others as unworthy of existence, they exemplify the ultimate madness that eschews MAD.

That very nation - Iran - standing at the cusp of nuclear armament, with its clearly stated intention to "wipe Israel from the map", and then lead its supporting nations to a new reality, becomes our nemesis. For the moment, until another such country with its own vibrant vision of who and what it represents arises.

For the moment, at this time in world affairs, however, the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose essence is the belief in divine intervention bringing the Apocalypse to reality, defies peace. When it only - another, and the original Aryan nation, will survive the Apocalypse it so fervently looks forward to.

What matter then, if they simply advance the time and place of Apocalypse?

Labels: Technology, Terrorism, Traditions, World Crises

posted by Pieface @ Saturday, May 08, 2010