War Victims

Research seems to indicate that increasingly civilians are targeted in war zones, succumbing in ever-larger numbers the more civilized we become. Isn't that a conundrum? The more technologically advanced armies become, the less frequently do they actually face one another in combat. The theatre of war has become a long-range tussle of armaments designed to rout and extinguish. There are fewer opportunities for the protagonists to actually face one another as they did during the battle of Thermopylae, for example, or the Battle of the Roses, or the Battle of the Rhone.

Civilian populations are increasingly at risk for many reasons, not the least of which can be an unspoken motivation for revenge, a determination to visit on the enemy population those conditions which the enemy is exposing one's own population to in a deliberate effort to instill fear and horror among the populace, to undermine support for their country's war effort, to demoralize leaders and subordinate the drive to victory to one of containment.

In engaging in warfare, one country against another for reasons of hegemony, of conquest, of imperialist ambition, political, religious, "humanitarian", we sublimate our humanity in the fever of its prosecution.

There will always be controversy over acts of supreme brutality like the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both cities targeted to deliver a deadly message. Is it possible that there was any apprehension about delivering such huge numbers of people to such a horrible death? Once the initial message was sent was it still seen as providential another should be sent to nail home the unmistakable threat of more to come? Not likely. Was it the blood-lust of revenge?

Canada is facing a firestorm of protest over the new National War Museum's exhibits relating to the Second World War. While demonstrating the brutalities of war in the artefacts being displayed there are a number of messages. They are conflicted messages; on the one hand the pride a nation takes in the sacrifices its sons and daughters took on in their readiness to defend the homeland. On the other hand, the harm that is done in the name of the nation at war.

Museums have an obligation, like historians, to render observable and understandable historical undertakings through the lens of the unaffected observer, as close to impersonal as possible; demonstrating, if and where possible a well-rounded, non-judgemental picture. Museums collect, preserve, display and educate through interpretive juxtaposition. In the case of Canada's War Museum, it is the military history of Canada that is on display, and the exhibition enables us to think in the round, presumably.

Until and unless we take offence that the Museum seeks to place another interpretation on events that does not accord with our vision of ourselves as being 'right' and the one-time adversary 'wrong'. It's actually simpler than that; the exhibition seeks to remind us that right or wrong aside, there are profound impacts on humanity that can never be retrieved from the historical context; losses that go beyond the rationally explicable and owe their tragedy to the worst impulses humankind can muster.

So there are questions about the actions of the Bomber Command units whose pilots flew courageous missions across the Atlantic to strafe and bomb cities in Germany, much like the Nazis flew across the Atlantic to bomb London and parts of England. Except that the Allied powers thought themselves to be humane, while the Axis powers gave no thought to the welfare of humanity in their pursuit of victory. It makes us squirm to have to realize that there is a lot of slippage in there.

Wonderfully historic cities like Dresden were carpet-bombed, and citizens' lives completely destroyed in their thousands upon thousands. When countries go to war against one another because their leaders so decree it should be, no one interviews the citizens to enquire whether they may be prepared to offer themselves up as the ultimate sacrifices to the powerful and the greedy.

We err, we are human.