Remember the past, look to the future, but keep your powder dry.

Today, May 8^th 2015 marks the 70^th anniversary of the end of WWII in Europe.  The Americans and to a lesser extent the Brits and Australians had a hard slog in the Pacific for a couple more months, but Europe was the main event.  The Canadian news has been full of the commemorations in Holland, our main theatre of operations at war’s end, and arguably our most enduring achievement, clearing first the Scheldt estuary (essential to bring Antwerp on-line as a port) and later The Netherlands of Nazi troops.

The Dutch to this day remember that we did this for them, but this is the last time there will be any significant number of veterans at one of these events.  The youngest of them are in their late 80s, so we’ll see how this is marked in the future. 

I don’t know about “doomed to repeat it”, but a self-willed ignorance of where you come from is in no way useful to ones’ understanding of the world.  There’s a line between chauvinism and identity and it’s a tricky one to walk, but as anyone who reads this knows, I refuse to hate myself for my ancestors or ethnicity.  There are plenty of others who will do that for me, so no need to borrow trouble.

Nevertheless, the past is the past and not to be lived in.  I have seen the definition of a Dark Age given as ‘when we no longer realize that certain things done in the past are possible’.  We often forget that our predecessors were in no way stupider than us; inconformity to current politically correct ethics does not make one unintelligent, regardless of modern cult-Marx university instruction. Could Canada put 1,000,000 people in uniform again (3,500,000 would be the figure proportionate to our current population)?  I know that we did, but I’m sure that would be a shock to most of our Millennials since they aren’t taught anything anymore.   

Canadian society has changed almost beyond recognition to our Great Depression/WWII generation, for good and ill.  People were tribal and racist back then, and we’d like to think that’s changed, but the changes are superficial since this is the natural state of most people.  Race relations in the USA have actually deteriorated in Obama’s Presidency, unavoidable when people take their cues from a race-baiting Administration and media.  This isn’t the way it was “supposed to be” but things are polarizing and stratifying. 

This is a matter of “us” and “them”, the default state of humanity.  Whether or not stripped of automatic racism, i.e. writing someone off due to their skin colour, affinity seems to operate in concentric circles.  The two biggest circles are religion and civilization.  Co-religionists have an automatic affinity, just as infidels, heretics, etc. are natural antagonists.  In the modern world, this isn’t a big deal for most groups, but it is lethally important to the Salafist interpretations of Islam.  Do I care if someone is a Sunni/Shia/Sufi/Ismaili/Alawi/Druze? No, with the exception that the latter four sects don’t cause me/us trouble; I consider Assad and the Baath to be secular, in case you care to quibble about the Alawi. 

I know enough about the differences in these sects to be able to spot civilizational affinities across broader religious enmities, but many Westerners don’t.  This takes some work, mostly reading, which most people can’t be assed to do.  It also takes a willingness to learn and admit you were wrong about things you didn’t understand, something even more people are bad at/incapable of.

This brings me by my typically torturous path to my second point.  As of today, Omar Khadr has been released on bail from an Alberta prison, despite the best efforts of the Canadian Government (ah, rule of law) and at least one of the American veterans he injured when he threw that grenade in Afghanistan.  I will not recant my opinion that a fourth bullet (Khadr survived being shot three times) would have saved a lot of trouble, but that was then and this is now.  Omar says that he is “a good person” and wants people to get to know him for that.  It may come as a surprise to some, but I’m willing to give him a chance to do just that.   He was brainwashed into jihad by his family (why the hell are they still allowed to live here?) and I am sceptical that he has left that all behind, but he’s been in prison (including Guantanamo) since he was 15 so it’s possible that he would like to do his time and fade into a quiet life. 

Only time will tell, but unless we were going to lock him up forever (which was not the case) he was getting out eventually, and now is as good a time as any.  I offer no predictions of his future behaviour; if I had that sort of prescience I’d use it on the lottery or the horses and not waste it on this sort of thing.  All I will say is that it’s possible (depending entirely on Khadr’s character) that cutting him a bit of slack is a good thing and will put him on the right track.  If so, great and I hope he makes something positive of his life.  If he regresses to his family’s mean, well, there’s still that fourth bullet.

Franklin ship found

After all this time I thought they'd never find either the Erebus or the Terror, but I'm happy to have been proved wrong.  This for a great change is the latest of breaking-news and not what you'll usually see here, but I wanted to mark it.

http://news.ca.msn.com/top-stories/lost-franklin-expedition-ship-found-in-the-arctic

Prime Minister Stephen Harper says one of Canada's greatest mysteries now has been solved, with the discovery of one of the lost ships from Sir John Franklin's doomed Arctic expedition.

"This is a great historic event," Harper said.

"For more than a century this has been a great Canadian story.… It's been the subject of scientists and historians and writers and singers. And so I think we have a really important day in mapping together the history of our country," the prime minister said.

At this point, the searchers aren't sure if they've found HMS Erebus or HMS Terror. But sonar images from the waters of Victoria Strait, just off King William Island, clearly show wreckage of a ship on the ocean floor.

The wreckage was found on Sept. 7 using a remotely operated underwater vehicle recently acquired by Parks Canada. When Harper revealed the team's success at Parks Canada's laboratories in Ottawa Tuesday, the room burst into applause and hollering.

 This is a big deal, as the search for the lost Franklin expedition of 1845 (his third expedition, his first very nearly as calamitous his last) greatly exercised the imagination of Victorian Britain and beyond.  The original search was looking for survivors and obviously found none, but did end up doing a very thorough job of charting the Arctic.  This in turn is the basis for Canada's (as the successor to British North America) claim to what we call our northernmost territory today. Anyway, I will be watching this for whatever info comes from this discovery.  It's not every day that I'm actually excited about something in the news, but you can mark this one down.

Vimy Ridge and the perils of a land war in Eurasia

9 April marks the anniversary of the 1917 attack by the Canadian Corps on the German position atop Vimy Ridge in France.  This is held up as the battle which forged Canada as an independent nation, and that is certainly arguable.  What is also arguable is whether or not it was worth it.  Pierre Burton (spoiler alert) is of the opinion it was not, and the scale of the carnage makes this view compelling.

3598 soldiers of the Canadian Corps were killed and another c. 7000 wounded in a battle which was 90% over in one day, finished in three. For this reason (and that we did what the French and British armies had failed to do) Vimy should also be remembered in the hope that we can avoid it happening again.

Canada lost over 66.000 men in WWI and 45,000 in WWII, so some lessons were learnt, albeit at the expense of the Soviet soldiers who died in heaps fighting the bulk of German forces on the Eastern Front.  My take-away from all of this is "stay out of Europe", and current events are reinforcing that view.

Speaking of the Eastern Front, the Russian shenanigans are in play again in Eastern Ukraine, specifically the Donetsk/Kharkov area.  Hearkening back to my last post, my notional Putin Risk Matrix is looking more like Risk, the game.  An exaggeration of course, but the current government building take-overs and calls for referendums in Donetsk, etc. is exactly the same play as Crimea and shows no signs that the West's stern finger-wagging is in any way a deterrent.

I've heard some vague reports of Ukraine mobilizing some forces to take out the agitators occupying those facilities, and if so it's about time.  I'll not hold my breath, but it could happen.  My point here is that things could get messy, and in this case no-one outside of Ukraine cares enough (proven by lack of concrete, effective action) to start a war over it being carved up. As lethal as modern warfare can be, the Vimy casualties are comparable to US losses in Iraq over an eight year period, so whatever could happen in Ukraine (militarily) won't be WW magnitude.  That said, our tolerance for losses is not what it once (sort of) was so our bar for expenditure of blood is much lower. 

Prediction?  I'll go out on a limb based on available info and say there's another putsch in Donetsk.  Again, no warranty on that opinion is expressed or implied.  I will put money on no Western troops confronting the Russians over this, and hope that I'm right.  That's not because I wish any ill to the Ukrainians, but because if their cause isn't worth enough for them to bleed for it, our people shouldn't either.