A "message" from Message - POLEMICS of yellow ribbons, soldiers, baby-killers
Every Canadian fatality in Afghanistan has an addendum, a pro forma epitaph:
"We mourn the loss ...''
"The deaths of these brave men will not be in vain .''
"They died doing what they believed in ...''
All of which is true. And if the statements issued by the International Security Assistance Force press office often read shallow and interchangeable, it's because dying is a fact of living in an active military, with soldiers in combat.
What's equally predictable is how casualties - of troops and civilians - have been, will continue to be, manipulated in the battle for hearts and minds and political agendas at home.
The modern anti-war movement - coalescing around Afghanistan and Iraq - was careful, in its earlier days, to refrain from criticizing soldiers. Indeed, they portrayed themselves as activists on behalf of soldiers, concerned for lives put at risk by war-mongering government. The administrations were the enemy, in Washington and London and Ottawa.
But that pretence, never accepted by most military personnel, has been abandoned and soldiers are no longer left outside the loop of protest.
We've returned to something approaching the baby-killer denunciation of Vietnam.
In Quebec, where disapproval of Canada's Afghan mission is most pronounced according to opinion polls, a group calling itself the Quebec Coalition for Peace - because sticking "peace" in there is a favourite branding gimmick - has been leafleting residents around CFB Valcartier. It is from that base that the Royal 22nd Regiment, the Vandoos, will shortly be deploying to Kandahar.
A send-off parade planned for last night was also to have been targeted, possibly disrupted, Western troops accused of complicity in civilian deaths and war crimes.
However polemical and disgraceful the campaign, it might simply have been dismissed as typical zealotry by an extremist fringe.
But in the National Assembly this week, a number of MLAs refused to stand, much less applaud, for visiting soldiers. Perhaps this should be expected in a province where the national anthem is routinely booed at sports events. But it was a contemptible exhibition by elected representatives.
It's political and personal and mean-spirited. Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe has indicated he won't attend the parade. Neither will Jack Layton, as he lost no time in announcing.
On a smaller scale, but no less symbolic, was the little tempest at Toronto city hall over support-the-troops bumper stickers affixed to emergency vehicles. Under the rubric of not permitting purported political sloganeering, Mayor David Miller and others originally supported the no-decal edict, now reversed.
To read the complete article of Rosie Dimanno, please click on the following link: http://www.thestar.com/columnists/article/228550
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