By Barry Stagg
March 1995
COWARDS
World War II ended in 1945. This writer was born in 1953. I grew up with my parents' memories of that war and the full knowledge that their friends, relatives and neighbours had fought and even died "over there". Even today the only commemorative plaque in my mother's Boswarlos home is one issued on the death of Sir Winston Churchill. It still stands in a place of honour in her kitchen. It stands as much in memory of my father as it does of Sir Winston.
Today cowards born after the war are portraying the Allied effort in World War II as one that was racist and murderous. This developing attitude is typical of those who can safely ridicule by virtue of the distance in time and space from warfare. From the point of view of courage and historical significance I place these cravens in the same category as the odious holocaust revisionists who would stand on mass Jewish graves and bellow that the slaughter did not take place.
The unfortunate aspect of the passage of time is that it breeds indifference and ignorance. This is the basis upon which Canadian writers and film makers found their claims that Canadian, American and British efforts to end this vicious war were inhumane. These people ignore the basic fact that the focus of the Allied war effort was to kill the enemy and to subdue the peoples and the countries who opposed our effort to end what amounted to a genocidal movement by Hitler's Germany and Hirohito's Japan. Those were the enemies of 1939 and 1941 and those were the enemies that were cruelly, effectively and properly vanquished in 1945. In the end it took atomic bombs on Japan to end that part of the war. It ended the war quickly and any debate over the number of Allied soldiers it saved from certain death is absurd. The point is that it saved a large number of our fellow citizens from fighting against the enemy. That is enough in the context of war time.
The sadly contemptible aspect of the present revisionism is that the targets are old and are increasingly unable to occupy the centre of the public stage. Old soldiers are now just that. They are senior citizens. Many are no longer active public figures. Still they are not a silent bunch and it is up to some of us youngsters who never had to fight a war to push up to the front ranks. We must at least defend their efforts when their skins were on the line and their very hearts were a bullet away from oblivion. If we do anything other than support the veterans of what must not become a forgotten war, we are as cowardly as those who would preach in 1995 that they would not have fought in an unjust war in 1939. Of course, on close examination of the sensibilities of such people, you often find that they would be quite willing to go to war in 1995 on behalf of various of the animal kingdom against such "bad guys" as Newfoundland sealers. It is in that way that we can get the proper, sickening context of where our present day pacifists stand in relation to ordinary humans.
I could say that I never thought I would see the day when supposedly well informed Canadians would in effect be defending Hitler's Germany or the vicious Japanese regime that specialized in the torture of Allied prisoners of war. However in reality I am not surprised. The comfort of distance and the all consuming reality that they will never have to lift a finger in anger against a killing enemy gives all the courage to these cowards that they will ever need. What we must do is defend the right of ordinary civilized people to defend themselves against murderous aggressors. That is what World War II was all about. When our parents were fighting World War II they were out to kill the enemy. That is warfare. In 1995 while the Canadian government slithers toward half heartedly deporting ancient Nazi war criminals thirty years after it would have meant something, we need not turn our intellectual weapons upon ourselves.
Thirty years ago in 1965 the elderly war criminals of today were still young, vigorous and had real power in the societies to which they had fled after the war. Canada was one of the countries that harboured war criminals. This is evident from the exhaustive investigation carried out by the federal government. However the "vigorous efforts" to punish these war criminals have been postponed until they are old, feeble and objects of pity to the uninformed.
One of the pillars of a democratic, civilized society is the willingness of citizens to fight to the death for the individual freedoms of each citizen. That is a trait that cannot be masked by a strong economy or by fifty years of war free living. The willingness to battle for individual freedoms and the right to live independently is one that must be applied in peacetime as well as wartime. Newfoundlanders are finding that in 1995 they need these very same powers to survive in a world where a substantial portion of the Canadian citizenry has grown fat on government largesse to the point where Canada is willing to throw away the resourced based industries in Newfoundland as just being a bunch of useless make work exercises. Just as sensible citizens must join issue with the pacifist revisions of World War II so we must line up with the economic soldiers in the real battle for the survival of the Newfoundland economy. There are no places in this battle for cowards or for those who are economic traitors to the cause of raising Newfoundland to a position of economic independence in this country. Those who put their own comfort and their own grasp of government money ahead of the welfare of the population as a whole are heading in that traitorous direction.