For the second year running, I spent Remembrance Day in the company of the military, treading water in a sea of green on a parade ground while the army chaplain made me grate my teeth. Nothing to do with him personally – he’s actually a very nice guy and apparently good at his job. The reason I was grating my teeth (for the second year running) was because of a quote that the padre used (for the second year running), paraphrasing words allegedly but apocryphally attributed to Father Dennis Edward O’Brien, a Sergeant in the US Marine Corps:
It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us the freedom of the press.
It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us the freedom of speech.
It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, who gives us the freedom to demonstrate.
It is the soldier who salutes the flag, who serves beneath the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protester to burn the flag.
This is part of the great narrative that our militaries (and by our, I mean the western world and their extensions, e.g. anybody who trained at Sandhurst) build their legitimacy on. To a large extent it’s the product of the two World Wars – the First lending us a more romantic view of dying for one’s own country than had ever been felt before (partly because the very idea of dying for your country in the modern sense was quite new), the Second giving us a get-out-of-jail-free card for any future atrocities that might be committed simply because Nazi Germany was so clearly a wrong ‘un.
This miltitary narrative certainly isn’t built on colonial hijinks such as the suppression of the Mau-Mau uprising in Kenya, politically-motivated escapades such as the Falklands War or counter-productive “humanitarian interventions” such as Kosovo. However the myth is carried through into those episodes, giving the military something to reassure itself that all is well even when things are going wrong, and also providing the backdrop for civilian discussions about how the military should be used.
So, back to the quote that set my teeth a-grating. I don’t begrudge the military their narrative – everybody needs one just to get through the day, and this narrative at least has the benefit of being positive – but they need to be careful saying things like that in the presence of civilians against whose experience it jars so completely. I like working with the military, but it’s a very specific sort of military that I like working with – the sort that really believes the words of this poem.
I’d love it if the words of that poem were true, but they’re not. The truth is that, for the vast majority of recorded history, the military has been the tool of oppression rather than the defender of freedom. True story. Those freedoms have had to be wrenched from the jaws of the military at great personal cost, and I count myself lucky that I live in a country where the military is checked by civilian balances, where it willingly agrees to those balances, and where it has fought to protect those balances.
This is something solid to hold on to each Remembrance Day, even for a pseudo-pacifist like me, who likes to use Remembrance Day to remember all those who have died in war – on every side, soldier or civilian. Obviously I’m biased towards people who died because they agreed with me, but I assume that I don’t have to excuse myself that. Nor should I have to excuse myself for disagreeing so strongly with the padre’s words, or for working with the military to ensure that, over time, those words become increasingly true. In the meantime, I stand in the back row, teeth grating noisily.
Tags: Remembrance Day