Today, in Canada, is ‘Remembrance Day’ (November 11th) but my fear is that it MAY be serving  more to bring about ’selective forgetfulness’.

I do not believe it ‘subtracts’ from the respectful intentions of our remembrance to ‘add’ to our ‘remembrances’.

Should we forget the mothers and sisters of those young German boys who couldn’t bear to see their mother starving or their sisters turning to prostitution, humiliated indirectly or directly by the insensitivity of the people ‘in power’ in the world, having been made ‘the latter’s prisoners’ by the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles ending WWI?

Their mothers and sisters know that their love and caring for their families made them prey to radical calls to action against those powerful others, a calling which saw many of them pay the ultimate price, their own young lives.   Their mothers and sisters know that they were ‘the collateral damage’ of retribution aimed at their fathers.  Everyone knew, at the time of the Treaty of Versailles, that the ‘innocents’ were going to pay the price.  Journalists of the era captured this overt injustice in cartoons such as the following;

'evil nazis' - result, or cause, of global dissonance?

'evil nazis' - result?, or cause? ... of global dissonance?

Harold Nicolson, a British delegate at Versailles, declared the treaties ‘neither just nor wise’, and called the delegates ‘very stupid men’.   But Winston Churchill believed that the treaty was the best that could be achieved, and that  (more…)