Of all the terrible things that happened last week this was among the worst:
The tragic murder of a young Canadian reservist and the Parliamentary shootout was all the more shocking because of its sudden, seemingly out-of-the-blue fashion. In the same way, on a daily basis in tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan, in Yemen, in Somalia, children in schools, celebrants at weddings, and other individuals and families are suddenly, shockingly killed by a Hellfire missile fired from a remote control-operated drone, likely with the Canadian-built targeting camera courtesy of L-3 Wescam in Burlington, Ontario.
The moral equivalency is disgusting. It would be beneath notice if the attitude, in one form or another, was not so pervasive. I remember walking around the University of Toronto's downtown campus on 9/11. There was one overarching theme to the conversations. Whether stated directly or hinted, however cushioned by formulaic expressions of compassion, the message was very clear:
The Americans deserved it.
That same attitude is now being expressed toward Canada. We as a nation deserve whatever a random Islamist or organized Jihadist group decides to serve up. After all we bombed their countries why should we be exempt from the price of war? Except that the murderer in question, I don't intend on using his name, was a native born Canadian of partial Quebecois descent. He is not a foreigner he is one of us. His homeland was not attacked, his country was not bombed and his immediate family was not killed by the Canadian military. The only relationship was one of religion. Some of his coreligionists on the other side of the world, some violent and some peaceful, have been killed in a war by Canadian forces.
It is exceedingly odd that people who otherwise scoff at religion should be so sympathetic to such deep, albeit perverse, religious sensibilities. When a Christian organization peacefully protests the persecution of their fellows in China or Iraq it is characterized as the "Evangelical Right" seizing control of our foreign policy. A soldier on honour guard duty is murdered in a religious frenzy and carefully hedged expressions of sympathy are the order of the day.
These contradictions exist only if you miss the one consistent element. It does not matter what, when, how or why, all that matters is the who. The Western nations are always villians and all others must be victims. The underlying premise, borrowed from Marx, is that the success of some must come at the expense of others. The West is rich and peaceful because we have exploited the other nations of the earth.
Leaving aside the sloppy and convoluted histories that support this view, note the lack of agency. The Muslim, the impoverished African or the Latin American peasant is always a hapless victim. They would quickly and easily right themselves if only the West would leave them alone. If not for the Evil of the American military and the State Department then peace and justice would flourish through out the world. Not a sparrow falls that is not the fault of America or its international henchmen.
The caricature of the West is matched with a caricature of the Rest. The complexities of history, economics and religion are reduced to shibboleths of capitalist oppression. The poor decisions of governments, the irrational habits of peoples and the failings of institutions are ignored. The rest of the world is nothing more than a stock character in a Western based morality play. Our villains and our heroes imposing themselves, like something out of the Iliad, upon the hapless peoples of the Third World.
This view is, of course, deeply patronizing and historically ignorant. Some non-western nations have not only overcome western exploitation, both real and imagined, but have surpassed much of the West in terms of technological progress. You would be hard pressed to find any European city as modern and efficiently run as Tokyo or Seoul. The rapid advance of the Chinese, who are even now only half-developed, beggars imagination. These are not hapless victims. They are thinking men and women who chose to better themselves. When you look at the advance of the nations and peoples of East Asian, and contrast it with the violence and superstition of the Middle East, the driving force here is ideas and culture. American foreign policy has been as blundering in Asia as in the Iraq or Egypt.
What makes Canada Canada is the ideas and values of Canadians. Syria and Iraq are violent places because their peoples have made them violent places. The arc of Canadian history from Baldwin to Diefenbaker was the movement away from tribalism toward a civic nationalism based on individual rights. This is why multiculturalism is such a dangerous idea, it points us back down the road we came. Not so long ago, a blink of the historical eye, there were sectarian riots in Toronto and ethnic riots in Montreal. There are people alive today who can remember "No Dogs or Jews Allowed" signs at posh Toronto country clubs. We've gone from that to inter-racial couples being an unremarkable fact in less than fifty years.
This is progress, genuine progress in the original and proper meaning of that word. The murderer of Cpl Cirillo is not victim, or a random madman, he is an aspect of a Dark Age evil that still exists in much of the world. He represents not a legitimate grievance but all the bigotry, violence, tribalism and superstition that has scarred the history of mankind. This is the dead hand of the past trying to drag us back. There is only one proper response. We saw it brilliantly displayed last week through the heroism and skill of Sergeant-at-Arms Kevin Vickers.
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