September 1995
by Barry Stagg
VIRTUAL HIROSHIMA
The annual angst-fest from North American "peaceniks" has come and gone with the noting of the fiftieth anniversary of the atomic bombings of Japan. It seems distastefully ironic that the resolutely pacifist protesters of this era are the very sort who would have been hysterically beseeching the Allied forces for help against the amoral murderers of the Axis countries. In the harsh morning light of death and brute violence many of today's peacefully righteous would have had to decide if armed resistance to fascist genocide was preferable to pious prayer. What would be the cry for help: Perhaps "Help me but do not hurt my enemy".
Today's lofty-minded pacifist would rather be a refugee than a soldier. The sacredness of helpless victimhood has reached new heights in the virtual reality of 1995. It is virtual reality because few of these contemptuous saints have any experience with oppression beyond the terrors of losing a pay-equity application. Of course in the world of vast emotional pain and suffering of the narcissists of this pale age that is more than comparable to death camps and death marches. After all these things are attacks on the dignity and "self-esteem" of some of the most civilized people the world has ever known.
It is as if, with the dawn of our era of easy, mass communication of drivel, that the hubris-laden sophisticates have transcended the vulgar limits of human decency that constrained people like Winston Churchill and Harry Truman. Today's modern species has ascended to a higher moral plateau from which to view with distaste, the historical feat of surviving the Nazi atrocities of 1939-1945. Better apparently to be a pitiful and defenceless refugee filled to the brim with righteousness than to attack the monster driving the sorry parade of misery and murder.
The foundation of the inexplicably popular opposition to the historical fact of Hiroshima is found in the comforts of the pre-computer version of virtual reality. In this long running cinema of the imagination the comfortably afflicted can pathetically empathize with the dead and maimed of yesterday's enemy. While they grow wealthy and insulated from horror thousands of miles from any war frontiers, they can indulge in the same shallow fantasies that their trash-class neighbours bleed out of the soap operas. These are people without the courage to live life in the wind and rain and pain of reality but who prefer to live through a contemptible and ultimately voyeuristic identification with others. There is no difference between the useless soap opera fanatic and the high-brow voyeur from ten thousand miles behind the front lines who identifies in some horrible way with the child vaporized at Hiroshima. Both are living in fantasy worlds made possible by the wealth and the opportunities for idleness that the defeat of Germany and Japan brought to this continent.
The actual reality of 1995 is as it was in 1945. People will not be stampeded into miles of sorry refugee misery if they have a chance to stand and fight. The glorious martyrdom of the armchair victims is a true and incomprehensible fantasy to real people facing real weapons in wartime. The supposed advanced civilization of today is only a smug arrogance born of years of protection from the ravages of war. A quote from Edmund Burke is apropos:
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing".
Better to be a righteous refugee than a soldier charged with the unhappy but necessary task of killing. That is the apparent creed of a network of missionaries who perceive the power structure of their own segment of humanity or even humanity itself to be inherently oppressive and worthy only of disassembly. The connection between the "peace missionaries" and the "animal rights" demagogues is obvious and based on simple cross-membership. Does the term "intellectual backwater" have any application to these groups? Backwaters are washed out by storms. World War Two was such a hurricane. There has been no storm in fifty years and the stagnant backwater grows on in marshy pungency.
There is a banal domestic aspect to this endless debate over successful war strategy. In 1995 the behaviour of our Canadian government is in smart lockstep with the champions of professional pacifism. To the Canadian government the Canadian international military effort is a pacifist parlour game. The inoffensive puffery of Foreign Affairs minister Andre Ouellet is as greasily consistent as the efforts of his Conservative predecessors. To offend is to commit unpardonable sin. To challenge tyranny is simply inconceivable. To remain impotent punching dolls in Bosnia appears to be as inevitable as it is unpalatable. Ouellet and his boss appear to believe that fighting is foul and neutrality is divine. Anyone who has a soldier serving with the Canadian Forces in Bosnia must cringe at the way the government overlooks the treacherous extortion of concessions by the Bosnian combatants who use our soldiers as readily available hostages. It is less than reassuring to learn that Chretien and company routinely run opinion polls to determine the apparent mood of Canadians on the whole sorry Bosnian peacekeeping process before making yet another timid decision.
Perhaps a final quote from that seminal British parliamentarian Edmund Burke will focus this ramble through the folly of our times:
"Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion".
Courage is the foundation for such a sentiment. The courage to recognize and fight evil with deadly force is one of the essentials of life. It is time that lesson was reviewed.