Remembering War

Bille Jo Gardner visited Wynyard this summer and did a little digging around history. She spoke of the Wynyard area’s Gunnery school North of Dafoe in a long letter that she wrote for the Wynyard Advance. I wrote the following for publishing the week of November 11th. It was not published and perhaps with references to local people meant that it should not have been published. I do not have the same inhibitions.

When I first saw the RCAF #5 Bombing and Gunnery school, there were buildings and a firing range still standing. At that time it looked remarkably similar to the air force training sites near Dauphin, Manitoba, one of which was within a mile of the farm upon which I spent my youth. The pilots flew their circles over the pasture and back to “touch and go”.

An ancestor of ours lost two of her sons to WWII – and her first husband to WWI. In the 1950's, our family “celebrated” Armistice Day seriously – we really believed that WWII was the end of war and that the United Nations ushered in a new era, one in which nations spoke to one another and resolved their differences. We believed that weapons would be hammered into plowshares.

The only winners had been the arms manufacturers, the wealthy, not the farmers, the women, or the children. There was comfort in believing that those sons and husbands did not die in vain - and that  they were the last Canadians to be sent to kill or be killed.

When I moved to Wynyard in 1980 as a physician, I inherited a number of WWII veterans. Some of them had stellar careers in the military and some were ordinary guys who survived. Two were suffering from PTSD – the long term version of “shell shock”.  When I asked one of these about his role during the war, he said, “they shouldn’t make us do that”; he suffered from formless nightmares. The really sad thing was that the nightmares continued even though Alzheimer’s meant he could no longer remember why he had them! The other gentleman was obsessed with various minor ailments, all of which he related to experiences during the war. I dutifully completed endless forms which we sent to Veterans’ Affairs, all to be denied. None of the people from WWII received debriefing – they were just sent home, having served their time, discarded veterans.

A friend of ours wrote about his father:  "Some of my earliest memories are of him pulling weights from pulleys attached to the ceiling in his recovery from polio. I also remember asking my mother why dad "yelled during the night". She told me not to worry about that "it's from the war" she said. That "yelling" continued until he died at the age of 83."

A friend of a soldier said, "H... and I were best friends in school. He was full of devilry and loads of fun. When he came back from the war he was a changed man. I never knew him after that and we never got close again".

In 2012, I attended Remembrance ceremonies in Ottawa at the same war memorial at which Cpl. Nathan Cirillo was standing when he was shot in 2014. I felt my ancestors – and the souls of those who fought in WWII - turning in their graves. The 45 minute service did not mention peace once.

As we approach another November 11^th, let us honour those who died, value those who survived and re-gird our determination that they not have died in vain. We must encourage our government to build civil society instead of bomb infrastructure.

Grandma was right. Grown men and women should not be resorting to guns to solve their differences.

Iraq and us

Canada going into the fray? The West supporting the guerrilla Peshmerga? The Peshmerga have been fighting a generations-long battle for an independent Kurdistan. The US was killing them a short decade ago. How could Western Intelligence get it so wrong? How could they failed to predict the rise of ISIS? The joke we’ve had for years is reality: “Military intelligence is an oxymoron.” (an internal contradiction.)    

Canada should not be adding violence to violence. What should we be doing? We should be recruiting hearts and minds by prominently supplying humanitarian aid to victims; we should be supplying well-trained peace-keeping troups to provide security. We should be searching for ways to decrease the levels of violence, to give the next generation less fertile ground for extremism. We should supply teachers and community development workers, mental health counselors and “lady health workers”. Diverting the cost of those CF-18’s to decreasing violence would be far more courageous than dropping a bomb from an airplane.

Women are still having babies under those drones and fighter jets – and they and their babies are dying for lack of care. For eight years, the Society of Rural Physicians of Canada (SRPC) sponsored a project in Northern Iraq. We were teaching emergency obstetrical skills. Now would be the time to launch another project, one of "working with" doctors, nurses, midwives and others struggling under difficult circumstances to care for the women and newborns. The previous project was cut by the Harper version of CIDA. Maybe it could be revitalized in the light of Harper’s verbal commitment to the health of women and babies.

In 2003, we met a convoy of trucks, Iraqi building contractors who were returning from a fruitless attempt to repatriate the contracts for rebuilding infrastructure. The spokesperson said, “Around the construction site are hundreds of young men with nothing to do. If they aren’t given jobs they will make trouble.”  

Well, they didn’t get jobs. Billions of dollars went to US contractors to do shoddy work on bridges, sanitation systems, etc.  ISIS was predictable.  The weapons manufacturers are rubbing their hands in glee – how marvelous that both sides are using the same weapons! Addicted to a never-ending escalation of new bullets.

Simplicity Home After CYM

Our home is twenty-six kilometers from the nearest small town of 2000 people; our nearest neighbour is one and a half miles away. It is on a land trust, the vision of which was a working collective some members thought would be dependent upon the produce of the land. (Never part of my vision, I planned to work in Wynyard as a physician.)

Times changed, the other couple moved away, their children really required on a more intellectually challenging academic setting in the city but Bill and I carried on. We’d fallen in love with the site in 1969 and were determined to live there, even without close neighbours. We’re still in love with the site and the home we’ve been privileged to plunk down here but nearer neighbours would be nice. Elizabeth, our daughter, and her partner, Erin, are in the process of purchasing the three season house but this is pretty ambitious for them – both of them need a certain population density for their talents.

Canadian Yearly Meeting’s Bible study on Simplicity was very thought-provoking. Is this home simple-living?

The chickens provide us with eggs – in return, we feed them oats, purchased feed that looks like kitty litter, and kitchen scraps. There are too many chickens to overwinter in the coop so we will have to make a decision. The first step is to see who is laying; count the eggs daily – there can be up to ten brown eggs, seven white eggs, two blue eggs and one green egg. Maj lays the green egg and she is very interested in “setting” these days – she figures she has laid enough eggs and she will “sit” on them until they hatch. Sorry, Maj, wrong time of the year for chicks, we'll take those eggs right out from under you!

The garden is overrun with “friendly weeds” – dill, coriander, calendula, poppies and chervil. In fact, the potatoes, corn, onions and carrots are practically choked. The raspberries need picking – always a pleasure, I usually do it when I want to eat them as well. Dealing with gooseberries is an urgent matter – it is one of two jams that I like, the other is strawberry. (And, of course, marmalade – the kind that Brenna and I and a host of others make.)

The door of the chicken coop – intended to last the time that we were away – barely lasted the week, the temporary hinges more temporary that I had expected. Coop also needs cleaning. Chicken fence could be moved so that the “pasture” was more friendly.

The tasks that I would like to outsource (in other words, pay someone to do) are: cutting down the trees that are encroaching upon our house, clearing the weeds in the paving at the front of the house and shingling the roof of the greenhouse. (This spring I came to the realization that I am afraid to climb up there. The slope is just enough to disturb my sense of security.) And then there is the guy who is supposed to be fixing our well – excuses, excuses – maybe time to find someone else.

Indoors the piano needs tuning and the cracks in the living room needs plastering followed by painting.

Making things simpler includes de-cluttering one’s brain. If we can really put teachings of the Spirit into action, it means really living the Biblical phrase “take no thought for the morrow”. This doesn’t mean, don’t plan anything; it means don’t worry over it – it also means be ready to always change as “moved” by the Spirit.

Making things simpler means disposing of things not useful, things not used, and this includes all the things that we keep around ourselves for the “just in case, I ever want to (insert whatever activity eg. SCUBA) again. I think that it means living the uncluttered life. It means disposing of the cumber. I don’t think that means that we become obsessively tidy – besides disposal of the physical items, it could also mean “disposal” of the attachment to the items.

Making things simpler may also mean giving up some cherished beliefs of right and wrong, of “right” or “wrong” ways to do the task, of “right” and wrong directions to travel. It means contributing to the greater good, the commons of the world by our ethics, morals and philosophy.

We should all be living more simply; in fact, it is the only way in which the human race will survive. We must have fewer children, and less possessions. We must learn to contribute less CO2 to the atmosphere and poisons to the water. Not just a good idea – this is a “must”. This is not an onerous task – the corporate capitalist economy makes it sound as though everyone must give up all their pleasures when what they really mean is that the richest 1% is going to have to give up luxuries. Most of the rest of us already fail to contribute much to the global climate chaos.

“In Nature’s economy, the currency is not money, it is life.”   Vandana Shiva

It's WWII Out There

Crop Dusters:

“Sounds like world war II out there,” a neighbour opined. Indeed. I remember the air training runs that continued for several years after armistice in 1945 – our farm was under the circuit. The planes had to come over our farm because the other direction put them too close to town. Touch and go, touch and go. Around and around they would circuit as pilots practiced the most crucial of their tasks, landing and taking off. (Anyone can fly a play, I'm told, once it is in the air.)

In this case, the plane skims a field dusting fungicides onto the crop leaves instead of landing. It is an elegant dance – swing low over the field, then pull up and circle around to do it again and again. And not risk-free. A young pilot lost his life a few years ago when his plane stalled during one of those runs.

It is hard to be generous with the needs and exigencies of farming when my thoughts are constantly interrupted by the noise overhead. Business as usual demands that the farmer stay ahead of pests and abreast of the latest biological and chemical means to produce crops in an uneasy market. As I ponder the unsustainability of the present practice – just as resistance develops to antibiotics, resistance develops among insect, bacteria and fungi to agri-biz's chemicals. Do we know what spraying fungicides does to the mushroom population? Sprayed fungicides do not stay exactly where they are put, especially in this watery world.

While the farmer is also heavily dependent upon the petroleum industry, another environmental bad guy in a time of rising carbon dioxide levels, I too drive and fly for work and pleasure. For every pass of the plane there is probably an environmentalist somewhere boarding a plane for a conference in some exotic country where they will talk about sustainability. We know that we can't keep being “fruitful and multiplying”, that we can't keep extracting limited resources from the world, that we can't keep exhausting the soil and that the economic model that requires endless “growth” is eventually destined to fail – or be replaced but we don't know how to do it. We don't know how to quit doing “business as usual”.

Unable to prevent the world's environmental trainwreck, I'll return to the subject of my concern and try to make life better for me. Since our yard seems to be on the overflight patterns from both spraying companies, could we ask that the pilots quit using our house as a landmark? There are tracts of land on either side of us without people living on them.

It's 6:00 am and it sounds like WWII out there.

Clearing the Plains: Apology doesn't Cut it.

My knowledge of Canadian-Indigenous history was limited largely to school textbooks where the settlers “conquered” the land and made treaties with the Indians. Social relationships across the racial boundary were limited. There were no Indigenous kids in my primary school. My aunt and uncle hired their neighbours, a poverty-stricken Metis family for house work and animal/field work. She said that the man was hardworking and that the woman tanned hides. Their children rode on our school bus and mostly kept to themselves.

When we entered grade eight, the residential school kids came into our schools. Mostly they seemed a lot like us; every summer we became “drug-store Indians” so our skin colour was close to theirs. There was a boy whose first name was “Doctor” who was on the track team and always won the regionals. I developed a limited friendship with Amabelle Bear in grade nine, limited because the residential school forbade contact except in school!

Grade nine was the year that our father discovered that his hired hands (who were Cree from Camperville) had to cash their cheques through the Indian agent, who claimed 20%. He told us that he didn’t know of “a good Indian agent – they were all cheats and drunks.”
(He "banked" for them after that.)

That was the 1950’s.

Colonialism became a topic of conversation in the 1960’s; we settler kids recognized the role that our ancestors had played – “claiming the land” that was not ours. The prairies were the “commons” of aboriginal people just as the highlands had been the “commons” of Scotland.  Our ancestors, having been ousted from the commons in the British Isles (UK) came to North America did not recognize that they were repeating the abuse.

The Dewar family were sheep herders in the 1700’s when the industrial age began. The lords of the land claimed the commons for their private use and shut out the peasants in a series of events referred collectively as the “closures”.  The Dewars immigrated to Eastern Ontario but discovered that the land, the soil and the climate forced them to spread out – the lower farm productivity meant that each person needed more land than in Scotland. My grandfather was drawn west to claim a quarter-section (160 acres) near Dauphin, Manitoba in 1885 and work it as a homestead. He lived in a sod house in summer and a dirt hole in the winter. The second summer he went back to Ontario and eloped with his sweetheart – she spent the first winter of her married life in a 12 x 8 hole in the ground with her husband and her bachelor brother-in-law.

The Dewars worked for their survival in those days – they really did have to raise their own food and go hungry if they were unsuccessful – but most of the skills they needed were adaptable from their European peasant traditions. Little did they know that as they struggled to adapt old world skills to the prairies the First Nations peoples were forced into an agricultural model and starved onto the worst available land with no previous survival skills for an agrarian lifestyle. They had been successful nomads, hunters and gatherers for centuries.

About the same time that he discovered the Indian Agent cheque-cashing scam, dad discovered the Peasantry Act of the 1890’s. The Peasantry Act confiscated machinery that was more progressive on the theory that the Indians (sic) needed to progress through each step of agrarian development – they needed to start as peasants with only hand tools. Somehow Dad conveyed his indignation over the Metis and Cree along the Red River in Manitoba being forced to surrender their tools.

None of these egregious incidents prepared me for “Clearing the Plains”.

“Clearing the Plains” is not for the faint-hearted person, white, Indigenous or immigrant. It describes almost two centuries of crass disregard for the very people who helped settlers survive; it describes deliberate policies of starvation promulgated by the federal government under John A. MacDonald. It describes horrendous suffering – and, at times, great empathy. This is a tale of a planned and enacted genocide over more than a century. 

I say to Prime Minister Harper in his “apology” to First Nations peoples: “Mr Harper, 'Sorry' doesn’t cut it!”

Remember D-Day: It is Russia and US this time

And learn from our past. Could the terrible loss of life and environmental destruction that was World War II been prevented? If we don‘t learn from our past, we are bound to repeat our mistakes; honouring the battle of D-Day and the men who lost their lives should include  answering the question, “how could it have been prevented?”

My aunt lost two sons in the war; she spent almost a decade in mourning. She spoke resentfully of people who got rich during the war while she lost her children. 

So as the US and Russia face off over the Ukraine, what could we learn from World War II?

When someone, a leader or a country says that it wants world domination or implies that it is somehow “above the law”, they mean it! Hitler said it. Now the US says it. 

US exceptionalism was recognized as fact in the eighteenth century; unfortunately the more recent US leadership have mistaken exceptionalism for superiority. Paul Bolt, on taking his position as US representative to the UN said (and I paraphrase) that there wasn’t really a United Nations, the world was governed by one super-power and everyone else had to go along. In fact, the failure to understand the nature of US exceptionalism has lead to universal blindness about the invasions and bombings of more than seven different countries in the last century, the building of military bases in more than 25 countries, the surrounding of China, Russia and the Korean Peninsula – and acceptance of US hegemony at the security counsel. Finally, the United States does believe that it is above the law; it does not accept the existence of the International Criminal Court.

The US wealthy need to keep having wars. They even support the use of drones so the sales of arms will continue but US citizens don’t actually have to get killed. Obama has made threats to Iran, Syria and now Russia – none of which have threatened the US. So the US is on a war path.

Why do we (the rest of the world) stand silent?

1. Denial:  We can’t believe that the world would go to war. Chamberlain so wanted to believe Hitler that he called the “Munich Agreement” of 1938 which “gave” Czechoslovakia to Hitler, a “Peace agreement”.

We can’t believe that there would be unscrupulous people in the arms industry who would lobby for war for their own profit – of course, that’s not what they say.  They say that the war is for “education for the woman”, saving “babies from being thrown out of their incubators” or “to establish democracy”.

We can’t believe that the sales of arms is ethical; we can’t conceive that people have no responsibility for arming terrorists, underground militia, or despotic governments – or for the people killed by the arms from which they profited.

2. Personal Gain: This played a role in the delay with which the US entered WWII. It plays a role among nations currently allied with the US; disagreeing with the US might mean imposition of some new sanctions, some passport hassle or trade issue. Additionally, of course, other countries may have arms industries equally eager to see a war break out. Canada could become very wealthy if a major war occurred in Eastern Europe.

3. Bad-mouthing the US: No one wants to be labeled as “anti-American” partly because the term “American” is equally applicable to Mexicans, Central and South Americans and partly because mostly we like the citizens of the United States even as their government doesn’t represent them on the world stage.

Even so, the United States is behaving like a big bully; it must accept the same rules as everyone else. Why is it in the Ukraine in the first place? Why is it leading the inflammatory remarks towards Russia? Become civilized and behaviour as civilized adults and start negotiating a peace process.

The fact that Russia and the United States both have nuclear weapons means that no one will be left unaffected if war occurs - we cannot afford to just watch the process - we need to be vocal.