Remembering all victims of war
- New! Listen to a podcast of SCM York’s Alternative Remembrance Day service
by David Ball (Toronto, ON)
SCM General Secretary
It’s November 11. Remembrance Day.
I’m heading up to York University for a remembrance service (more on that below). Also on my mind is the upcoming Pilgrimage of Resistance, which leaves next Thursday for the School of Americas vigil in Georgia, and will meet with all kinds of intentional activist communities along the way. I’m starting to see this trip as a “spiritual activist road-trip” or as an “Empire exposure tour.” I’m excited to journey with the 10 other pilgrims.
A lot of people on the Left, I think, try to ignore Remembrance Day as hard as we can. We argue that, because it has been totally coopted by the pro-war propaganda machine, if we wear a poppy or honour the day we are complicit in that war machine. We are constantly told, “Support the troops” by the very same people who send troops to be slaughtered in wars that seem too often more like chess games for oil, trade and global obedience, rather than the myth of “democracy.” As Fr. Roy Bourgeois, founder of SOA Watch says, “How can you teach democracy through the barrel of a gun?”
Personally, that doesn’t seem very “supportive.” I have a bumper sticker that says, “When Jesus said ‘Love your enemies,’ I think he probably meant don’t kill them.”
From a spiritual perspective, remembering also means to bring into the present the lives (and deaths) of those who have seen the horror of war first hand, in order to make us conscious of the horrors of war. We use litanies (and funerals) in the Christian tradition not because they have a magical powers upon the souls of the dead, but rather that the living might learn something about the meaning of our lives, and might find a healthier relationship to our own deaths and to the deaths of others.
Where does a remembrance day service fit in?
I think that a lot of violence and oppression stems from our culture’s fear – and obsession – with death. We try to control others, to enslave them to make us comfortable, and able to avoid the fact that we all must die. No matter how big our empire, how many nuclear weapons we have, no matter how much oil we can squeeze out of the battered Earth through any means necessary – nobody has yet figured out how to live forever. It terrifies us.
Admitting that we live in a Culture of Death – as exemplified by war, but also by all forms of oppression and injustice (which are forms of war) – is the first step to overcoming our addiction to conquest and comfort.
Today, I’ll be wearing a white poppy (a symbol of peace-making and honouring the dead of war, on all sides) and helping lead an antiwar Alternative Remembrance Service at York University, as part of disOrientation week. During the service, we’ll be remembering the scars of war and oppression, and naming the colonial conquest of Canada and the Indigenous peoples who struggle to survive and resist the Culture of Death. But this call to resist is for all of us, not only those who are oppressed.
You can see the litany and use it in your home context, or for personal reflection.
