08) REMEMBRANCE DAY AND THE 99%
Excerpts from a Remembrance Day 2011 commemoration at the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians' hall in Toronto, by David Abramowitz, Co‑President of the United Jewish People's Order of Canada
My attitude to Remembrance Day has changed over the years. At school we were indoctrinated to honour those soldiers who died protecting our freedom ‑ truly a noble cause where it applies.
But as I matured I began memorializing all those innocent civilian relatives of mine, killed in the first and second world wars. During WW 1, in Poland, my dad's father died in 1916 (when dad was 9) and his mom in 1917 when he was 10 ‑ an orphan in war‑time raised by older sisters who delayed their weddings to help the three youngest become somewhat self sufficient. My dad, at age 13, was a tailor in a union shop! But, as a child, I always felt that WW 1 had robbed me of my paternal grandparents.
In my mother's family, tragedy struck in 1918. Zlotchev, where my grandparents came from, (then part of the Austro‑Hungarian Empire) was under siege by the Austrian army fighting the advancing Polish army. My grandparents only lived a few kilometers away, in Olesko, known locally for its famous Olesko Castle on whose surrounding hills my mother and her childhood friends played. Word reached my mother's father that Jews in Zlotchev were being attacked particularly severely by the Poles ‑ a pogrom ‑ in addition to the war.
My grandfather went to help the Jews, only to return a few days later (the end of October) with significant wounds in his leg. Gangrene set in, incurable in those days, and he died on November 11, 1918, Armistice Day, when my mother was 11 years old. The Poles won the war in that region, so it became part of Poland which is what my mother left when she came to Canada in 1928 and joined the Toronto Ukrainian Labour Temple. Thus I no longer had three of my potential grandparents.
During the mid-1930's my mother, her sister and two brothers applied three times to bring their mother and her youngest daughter to Canada. Each time they were told to try again in a few years, the last time in 1938. We now know that Jews were routinely denied Canadian immigration as a government policy in the mid to late 1930's. Irving Abella and Harold Troper wrote a book about it called None Is Too Many.
World War II intervened and some in my mother's family in Canada became soldiers. What we didn't know was what happened to the youngest sister, Rifke, and their mother. The aunt I had never seen, Rifke, had become a nurse and worked in a Kyiv hospital. In 1941, she was killed when the Nazis bombed the hospital. My grandmother, an orthodox Jew, with no immediate relatives around her (Olesko and Zlotchev were not nearby), decided to help defend Soviet Kyiv and joined the Home Guard. She would have been 61 or 62 then. She was given a "gun", possibly a rifle, was taught how to shoot it and was sent to defend Kyiv.
During her vigil she noticed Nazis storing arms in a bombed out building. Somehow she acquired two grenades and went near that cache of arms. With the first grenade she partially blew up the building and finished the job with the second. She apparently didn't duck and was shot from behind by a hidden Nazi sniper. As she lay dying from loss of blood a soldier, wounded at the front, and in Kyiv for rehabilitation before returning to the front, witnessed this and went to see if he could help. This sounds like fiction, but he was from Olesko, knew my grandmother and her family; his sister went to school with my mother! He stayed with my grandmother while she told him the story I've just relayed, till she died from loss of blood. He wrote of this "miraculous meeting" to his sister in Toronto, who by chance saw my mother in a supermarket and conveyed the story to her for the first time. I was to never know any of my grandparents ‑ because of war.
Today, the loss of my grandparents and their families would simply be depersonalized and called "collateral damage". Thus the capitalists, who are responsible for the wars in the first place, have desensitized several generations from seeing and understanding the true cost of war on all humanity.
But are we reminded of the millions of innocent civilians who have been slaughtered so brutally by wars in the 20th century alone? A few brave journalists and societal observers/commentators have written about it, though these issues are not widely reported upon. Even General Romeo Dallaire wrote about the travesty of the genocide in Rwanda in Shake Hands with the Devil, and how we could have but failed to prevent or stop it. But innocent civilian casualties go largely played down (or rather I should say suppressed) by our capitalist‑controlled "free press". Rupert Murdoch's media "manipulations" come to mind most recently; but other generations had their own charlatans misinforming civilian society. In the first half of the 20th century it was William Randolph Hearst ("give me the pictures and I'll give you the war" he said as he financed Franco in the Spanish civil war); most recently, on TV, it's the FOX Network.
And the top 1% couldn't care less. They have what they want so let the rest go to hell. And there is no single leftist movement which now can provide inspiration and guidance to the masses.
In the movie Network the broadcaster ranted "I'm fed up and I'm not going to take it any more!" It's taken 30 years or so but the public, the other 99%, are awakening and beginning to take up the cry. Among them are conservationists, environmentalists, opponents of agri‑business and large conglomerates, and many, many people disgruntled with their indebtedness but no idea how they will escape it. Students with huge university loans have no job prospects to pay them off. Families in mortgaged homes with cars bought on credit where the breadwinner(s) have lost their jobs as corporations moved their operations "south or offshore" to save on salaries and make more profit. And their greed denies them the decency to share some of their cost savings by lowering prices.
So this year, on Remembrance Day, I also thought about those who are at war with the 1%, with the rabid capitalists, even though many may not realize it ‑ yet. I mourned for more than 100 of my father's family and more than 70 of my mother's who died in the holocaust. I was grateful that all my enlisted family members returned home safely. And I mourned for all those recently killed Canadian soldiers who thought they were fighting to preserve our freedom.
Canada has many black marks against it in this regard. Of the 80,000 Ukrainian Canadians during WW 1, all of whom were declared "enemy aliens", 6,000 were placed in 26 prison camps, starved, and many used as slaves to build the infrastructure of Banff National Park, its hotel and other projects. The description of their prison camps sound as if the Nazis used them as a model for their later concentration camps. The denial of basic freedoms to Chinese immigrants so vital in building our railroad, charged a huge head tax and denied the right to bring over their families ‑ this wasn't freedom. The internment of thousands of Japanese Canadians during WW II, their property, as the Ukrainians before them, confiscated without compensation and their resettlement to their home regions prohibited ‑ how could we call this freedom?
When I hear our politicians talk about our wonderful country, though in some contexts it still has some merits, I want to paraphrase Churchill by saying, "Some Freedom! Some democracy!"
When our founders came to a Canada that discriminated against many of its "foreign workers," as Conservative leader Tim Hudak called them during the last Ontario election campaign, I thought very little had changed. Your organization's founders and mine, in combination with other progressive ethnic organizations, had to campaign long and hard to be able to have the right to legal unions and the right to collective bargaining, pensions for the aged, for single mothers, for the disabled, the right to universal healthcare and so on. And now they're all under attack not only by the 1% but by their representatives in our federal government.
Our battles aren't yet over as the struggle to retain and improve our social safety net continues. It's not for us but for those who, inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement, are now occupying many major city spaces in Canada, the U.S. and world-wide, and from which some are now being forcefully removed.
We must support them; join with them in their demonstrations; and, as some of us may find it difficult to march with them, let's meet them at their destination and mingle amongst them. Help enlighten those with whom we come in contact, and prove to the 1% that this isn't just a movement of a disgruntled bunch of youngsters blowing off steam. Let the cameras record that it's a movement of all, young AND old, who want a truly free, peaceful and prosperous world where ALL are entitled to a decent piece of the pie ‑ and until that happens that the movement will build (above or underground) till, in one united voice it says, we say, "We're all really mad, and we're not going to take it anymore."
Our campaigns of the past have to become a part of the foundation of this emerging international movement.
And should some in this movement also become victims of the "war against the masses", on future Remembrance Days, we will also remember their sacrifices, just as we legitimately remember those veterans who fought against fascism, dictatorships, genocide, oppression, slavery, capitalism, bondage, racism, anti‑Semitism, homophobia and the like. Then their sacrifices will not have been in vain. Then we can proudly say we have done our share to make this a better world where justice and democracy will also be the victors.
(The above article is from the December 1-31, 2011, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)