Remembrance Day this week marked the 90th anniversary of the end of the war that was to end all wars.
Instead the Great War of 1914-18 became the prologue to the most hellish war 20 years later. It was brought to an end with the dropping of an atomic weapon that carried within it the secret of the sun holding the potential to turn our planet into a charred wasteland.
Together the two world wars—and the lesser wars from the Korean peninsula and Vietnam to South Asia, the Middle East, across Africa and the Balkans—made the 20th century the most blood-soaked and carnage-filled 10 decades in all of history.
Yet humankind by some extraordinary luck, or divine sympathy, survived the madness and organized industrial-type killings unleashed by Cains against Abels of our age, while turning the page on the last century.
Our desire for peace has become a yearning of just about every people across the globe as we become aware how perilously poised we are on a knife’s edge of nuclear killings.
Our yearning for peace is one of the oldest wishes, and it connects us to generations past, even as we hope to maintain faith in keeping our world safe for unborn generations yet to come.
It is out of these hopes we have made a ritual of our gatherings on Remembrance Day, recollecting memories of past wars and lessons seemingly learned, and praying for soldiers who laid down their lives that we, in time, might harvest peace.
HONOUR WARRIORS
But do we—citizens of free democracies—truly honour our warriors, some buried in unknown graves in distant lands when we remember them merely as fallen soldiers; and do not speak forcefully about the world they secured for us with their dying breaths?
We do not honour well our fallen heroes if we only remember them as lives lost in wars that should not have been waged. They were soldiers—selfless and brave—who stepped forth to defeat evil so that the rest of us could rendezvous with our loved ones and chase our dreams in safety.
To truly honour our fallen heroes while drawing the proper lesson from their valour, we need to speak with much greater emphasis of their readiness to go to war knowing well the difference between freedom—defended unto death—and serfdom.
Our fallen heroes at Vimy, Dieppe and on the beaches of Normandy “blotted out evil with good” like those ancient Athenians, as Pericles reminded his people, who died defending freedom. Their valour extended immensely the realm of freedom in our lifetime. Their sacrifices prepared the grounds for raising the largest number of people ever from dire poverty into dignity of work and income during the past quarter century.
Our fallen heroes were soldiers wearing uniforms of democracies, and they wore them freely as did Pericles’s warriors knowing “happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous.”
Our fallen heroes intuitively grasped the oldest lesson history teaches, that wars cannot be abolished legislatively, nor wished away by prayers; and peace might only be secured by being prepared to wage war against evil, and disarming Cains among us before they do harm.
This is the lesson we forget at our peril.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
- Israel: Decades-old conflict not about to cease - Saturday November 24, 2012 at 1:56 pm
- The better man lost the U.S. election - Saturday November 10, 2012 at 9:16 am
- The puzzle in U.S. presidential elections - Saturday November 3, 2012 at 8:43 am
