Be warned: There are some dangerous people roaming the streets. They are well-dressed and sound reasonable, but then con artists do that very convincingly.
Women and children should fear them most of all. For these men – overwhelmingly they are men – have a history of mass murder, terror and rape, in which the most helpless are the most victimized (they really like shooting up the unarmed).
They are the new warmongers.
I wouldn’t pretend to know more than superficially what’s supposed to be happening in the Middle East, at present most pointedly in Syria.
Why Syria? Is President Bashar al-Assad any worse than dozens of others, for instance Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe? Any Assad successor in sight likely to be better?
Or is the West just methodically picking off Middle East strongmen and encouraging free elections and women’s rights – with such grand success as in Iraq and Afghanistan? What’s Canada’s interest anyway?
The Powers, as the big players were often called in earlier times, are doing what they have always done: jockeying, finagling, scheming, muscle-flexing, lying, back-stabbing and bullying for national advantage and strutting rights. The world’s people are so used to crises, instantly relayed by reporters and analysed by the social media before breakfast, that this time we may really be sleepwalking toward a third world war. Ridiculously small triggers set off the two world wars.
I started kindergarten the week the Second World War began. War was exciting to a child. We chose sides, “shot” each other, fell dramatically and rose cheerfully from death. We’d seen the movies.
War’s truth took time. Years later I read of a bored American soldier who idly shot a cow. The animal roared with pain, ran in circles, collapsed.
That tiny vignette, the animal’s useless death, the farmer’s bitter loss, symbolized much. This too was war.
It used to be that the 1939-45 unpleasantness was called “the last good (or just) war.” But gradual reassessment doesn’t let it off the hook that easily.
Antony Beevor’s bulky history, simply called The Second World War and freshly published (July), is a widely praised compendium of the war’s mass murders, unimaginable destruction, environmental crimes, political blunders. More: It includes gripping “letters home” from some combatants.
The evil of the leaders of Germany, the Soviet Union and Japan is no revelation. They were indifferent to their own soldiers’ and citizens’ death and suffering. By one estimate 158,000 Red Army soldiers were killed by order of their own officers.
Ordered to fight without surrender, all but 54 of the 21,000 Japanese defenders of Iwo Jima were killed.
But there were Allied atrocities, too, of course unreported at the time, and lesser – except perhaps the one solid claim to Allied war crime, the bombing of Dresden.
More horrible than “victors’ justice” was “victors’ rape.”
Some see the Second World War as simply a continuation of the 1914-18 war.
In between were dissolute escapism, false prosperity, a huge depression, numbing unemployment and a Germany that grew economically ever more powerful astride a weak Europe.
Is that the past? Or the present?
Quick, name the prime minister of Britain, the president of France – or of any other European country. Not a great one in sight. Does Barack Obama seem a likely Churchillian man of the hour? The appeaser Neville Chamberlain proved a shrewder prophet than Churchill of how war would ruin Britain.
Distracted by such towering issues as legalizing marijuana, gay marriage, hockey played or unplayed and loneliness in Vancouver, Canadians – whose last encounter with war on their own soil began 200 years ago – are especially innocents in this milieu.
