War and Remembrance

The Reading List for 11 Nov 22

In Newfoundland and Labrador, we have replaced the history of what actually happened in the past with a handful of caricatures that are entirely about today.

Even though events in the past and what our ancestors did still influence what is happening today we have cut all meaningful ties to them as they were. Instead we have historical fiction of one kind or another. Like Abraham Lincoln: Vampire hunter or Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

The First World War is a big part of the fiction. A new mythology has grown up around it to the point where it blocks out other events of the past. Beaumont Hamel alone obliterates even our collective memory of the Great War.

It is worse. In the House of Assembly recently, a ministerial statement about Remembrance Day ignored entirely the Newfoundlanders and Labradorians who served during the Second World War, not to mention Korea, and more recently in the former Yugoslavia, the Middle East, and Afghanistan.

This is how our fictionalized past harms people alive today - veterans, their families - and harms us all collectively. We forget people who are alive today, whose experiences deserve to be respected, remembered, and honoured. That isn’t what Remembrance Day (November 11) or Commemoration Day (July 1) were supposed to be about. That isn’t what was supposed to happen. It isn’t what we say is happening.

The reading list for today will include some things I have written before on remembrance as well as some books appropriate for the day. This won’t fix the problem we have in Newfoundland and Labrador in our relationship to the past but it may help give you some new perspectives or remind you of some things you have forgotten. And if that happens on a personal level, then we are still keeping faith with all those who went before us. We are keeping Remembrance Day as they would want it to be.