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Written by: Tyler Shipley

Every year at this time, the Canadian ruling class insists that wearing a poppy to commemorate remembrance day is not a political act, but an act of common sense and decency. Any pushback against this is framed as ‘disrespect’ to soldiers who gave their lives for our freedom.

If true, this would be powerful and compelling. No reasonable person would show disrespect to someone who jumped in front of a bullet to save their life. But what if the bullet wasn’t aimed at you, and that hero didn’t jump, they were pushed into the line of fire by someone else? Surely that would change the way you would remember?

The official Remembrance Day is, ironically, not about remembering at all. It is the ruling class trying to make us forget what really happened in the First World War (and which caused people to create the slogan “lest we forget” in the first place.) That their plea has been so perverted is the real disrespect.

This article briefly tells the story of the First World War from the perspective of the working classes who were thrown into fire, whom we were supposed to remember. More detail is available in Canada in the World but the definitive book on the subject is The Vimy Trap by Ian McKay and Jamie Swift.

One caveat: some will respond to this by asking “what about WWII? What about the Korean War? about peacekeeping? about Afghanistan?” Those are all addressed in Canada in the World, and needless to say that the mythologies built around all of those events need similar rethinking (after all, its great that Canada fought against Hitler, but why did Canada spent so many years supporting his rise?)

Still, the symbols and history of Remembrance Day were established after WWI and remain very much anchored in that experience. The date, the poems, the poppies, the emphasis on Vimy Ridge, they all harken back to that time, hence the focus here.

A War Of and For Empire

The First World War was not about freedom, democracy, human rights, it was about empire. Germany was a rising capitalist empire that needed to expand but Britain, France, the US and the other western European powers had carved up the globe for themselves. The war was about who should control Africa, Asia, and especially the oil fields of the Middle East.

The European ruling classes - many still monarchies - lined up behind the power they most trusted to be the centre of world capitalism: the old British Empire or the rising German Reich. (As it happened, it was the US that would ultimately inherit that role.) War itself was sparked less by the assassination of Franz Ferdinand as by the near completion of the Berlin-Baghdad railroad.

Seventeen million people would die in four years of misery, much of it spent in cold, damp trenches infested with lice and rats and the pervasive smells of death and feces. The 53 million who survived the war were left with permanent injuries, PTSD, and poverty, returning to a society that made no provision for the poor.

Many of the men who died in the First World War were from the colonies. People from Africa, India, Indochina, and elsewhere, conscripted to fight for the very empires that were occupying their lands. These soldiers were often treated as cannon fodder, sent to the front to absorb the greatest amount of fire/death, and they are often forgotten in war remembrance. (Ironically, the war was to be an important catalyst for the anti-colonial struggles they would later wage.)

Canada’s Great War

The Canadian elite viewed the war as a wonderful opportunity to curry greater influence within the British Empire. PM Robert Borden, in a bit of cringeworthy imperial pageantry, declared Canada, “ready, Aye, ready!” and proclaimed the “cause of freedom” to be at stake.

This was false on multiple levels but Borden knew this; WWI was a test case for modern propaganda as the elite built nationalist narratives to counteract growing international working class solidarity. With modern, industrial war on the horizon, winning would cost bodies. The masses would have to be mobilized to fight for the flag instead of against it.

Imperial Germany had neither the will nor the capacity to launch an invasion of North America. The Kaiser, like his British counterparts, wanted greater access to the resources and cheap/slave labour of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Whomever won the war, those people would remain conquered by one empire or another.

All the same, the Canadian elite threw working class lives into the fire. One in every sixteen Canadians would be mobilized and 60,000 killed to ensure that British and French capital continued to violently reap profits from Algeria, India, Vietnam and elsewhere. Hardly a gallant cause.

After an initial surge of popularity, most Canadians came to hate the war and Borden could not generate volunteers. So working class men were conscripted, leading to massive protests and unrest in Canada. Police killed four such protestors in Quebec City, including a 14-yr old boy, in 1917.

So, clearly, the war wasn’t about freedom, and a lot of people died for the profits of the rich. But shouldn’t we still remember those working people who died? Of course, and the best way to do that is to listen to them, and not the rich people who tried to speak for them.

Generals Die in Bed

Most veterans of the First World War did not return home feeling patriotic and proud of what they accomplished. They were angry at the generals, the politicians, and the capitalists who had put them through such hell. Many returned home as revolutionaries.

It is no coincidence that socialist/communist revolutionary movements swelled towards the end of the war; such revolutions were successful in Russia, Germany, Finland, Hungary and nearly in Italy, Spain, and elsewhere. This was true, albeit to a much lesser extent, in Canada too.

Canadian soldiers mutinied twice when Canada tried to invade Russia in 1918 to crush the Russian Revolution. “On y va pas,” shouted an angry soldier, as generals fired shots at his feet in Victoria, BC. They were marched to the docks at bayonet point.

Many veterans joined labour unions and strikes like that in Winnipeg in 1919, expressing solidarity with German communist leader Karl Liebknecht and the Bolshevik Revoltion. Even those who did not become revolutionaries returned to Canada disillusioned and disgusted by what they had been put through. Group of Seven member Fred Varley expressed his view of the futility and horror of the war in paintings like “For What?”

The anti-war mood in Canada after the war was so strong that the typical nationalistic praise of the war effort had to be subdued. Remembrances in the 1920s and 30s were not just solemn, they were often explicitly anti-war. Instead of celebrating ‘heroes,’ they mourned ‘victims.’

Canada’s most prominent war memorial was built in that spirit. Walter Allward, the sculptor responsible for the Vimy Memorial (1933) consciously designed a monument to peace. The images he created did not celebrate the courage of the soldier but crystallized the stupid cruelty of the war.

The mood was so anti-war that the elite had to allow it some room. Books like Charles Yale Harrison’s Generals Die in Bed were hugely popular, highlighting the way that class shaped the injustice of the war: wealthy generals die in bed while poor kids are slaughtered in the trench.

Even mainstream newspapers had to reflect, for decades, the staunch anti-war sentiment of Canadian society, despite the fact that their editors were often aggressively pro-war (like JW Dafoe of the Manitoba Free Press, who called WWI “the most romantic page in our national history.”) Letters to the editors hammered this point repeatedly, as veterans and their families lambasted the war and the class system it upheld.

This was highlighted by a series of war photos published in 1934. Under a photo of “damaged Canadians” and one German soldier, the Toronto Star caption read:

“There seems to be little hate here. But of course these are just common front line soldiers. Every mile you went back of the line, the hate grew stronger, until at last, when you got right back to civilization, you found hate in its pure essence. These boys called him Jerry. Back home, they called him ‘the Hun.’”

Indeed, for all the patriotic fervour that the elite tried to drum up in 1914 (as they do to this day) the greatest threat to the war effort was the fact that working class soldiers would realize the enemy was not the German but the general. Front line truces, like the famous truces on Christmas Eve, were common and heavily punished.

Vimy Ridge and the ‘Birth of a Nation’

Of course, this memory was not what the elite had in mind. They needed to be able to sell us whatever new war would be necessary for capital (and there were to be many) so they tried to create a counter-narrative. Canada’s most conservative, pro-Empire voices set to work.

One of their primary focus points was Vimy Ridge, a battle they constructed as gallant and glorious, described by John Buchan as “the birth of a nation.” In fact, military historians consider it an insignificant skirmish within the Battle of Arras, the Germans retreating to take up a different position.

But this charge up a hill into certain death has been canonized as a turning point in Canadian history. Our memory of Vimy Ridge would more logically be to remember that rich, powerful men sent poor people to their slaughter for absolutely nothing. Anger at this injustice, rather than patriotism, would be an apt remembrance.

Anger, maybe, at the men who tried to twist this class murder into something reverent? At John Buchan, later the Baron of Tweedsmuir, who told us we were collectively born during the slaughter at Vimy Ridge to protect his investments? (Buchan, of course, wasn’t there to see it.)

Anger at John McCrae, author of “In Flanders Fields,” the poem immortalizing the poppy in our memory? McCrae betrayed his fallen comrades when he glorified a war which, according to his diaries, he had “ached for.” McCrae also supported conscription, hoping it would “stab a French-Canadian.”

Anger at PM Borden, who used the war to justify criminalizing workers’ organizing while wages were forced down, censoring the press, shutting down foreign language newspapers and organizations and throwing people into concentration camps.

A day set aside to kindle our remembrance of that anger - anger expressed by many of the men who died or survived at the front - would be a worthwhile project. The working class has no nation and nationalism has only ever served to pit us against one another. We should rightly be angry at this manipulation, as so many people were a century ago. We deserve a day to remember that anger.

Remembrance Day is not such a day. It (and the relentless plastic poppies produced by convict forced labour) is about forgetting what the veterans of WWI tried to warn us: imperial wars enrich the rich and impoverish the poor, at great and bloody cost to the poor.

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