Remembrance Day: It was a day created to remember the terrible events and sacrifices of the First World War ...so that none could ever be said to have died in vain. The farther away we get from the World Wars, the act of remembrance becomes no less important ...but has it become more of a challenge?

How do you mark Remembrance Day ..and why?

Join host Rex Murphy, Sunday on Cross Country Checkup.

Watch replay of the live chat.

---

Guests and Links      Mail       Download mp3 (right click and choose 'Save Target As')    

---

Introduction

Today is Remembrance Day. Canadians across the country flocked to Remembrance ceremonies to pay their respects to those who fought and died in several wars and conflicts dating back to the First World War. It was there that the idea of Rememberance took hold 94 years ago.

At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918 the guns fell silent. The Great War was finally over. It was the first war of a modern age when technology took precedence and the art of killing reached new and terrible heights. All told it caused 16-million deaths and 20-million wounded worldwide. Canada alone lost 65,000 ...many more horribly injured. That war left a scar of a memory that was impossible to remove from the minds of those who had fought or in some way come in contact directly through the loss of a loved one. But forgetting was not the goal. It was decided then, that an event such as the First World War should never be forgotten to honour the sacrifices of those who fought.

It was sometimes billed as the "war to end all wars"... but only twenty years later, Europe and the world convulsed again as Hitler's machine marched over Europe. Six years later, sixty-million lay dead died worldwide ...46-thousand Canadians ...and again many more maimed, scarred and injured. After that, for Canadians came Korea, Cyprus, then Bosnia, and most recently Afghanistan. All far flung places where Candians served and died.

The act of Remembrance was one conceived outside of politics as a simple gesture of humanity ...respect and thanks to fellow citizens, relatives, neighbours who paid a terrible price for serving their country. In Canada during the 60s and 70s it fell out of fashion with many ...but withstood time to slowly come back into favour. Recent polls suggest Remembrance Day has become more important to Canadians. Perhaps it is the rekindling of a spirit found in the later sacrifices of Korea, Bosnia and most recently in Afghanistan. Renaming highways as the "Highway of Heroes" is part of the same spirit. Perhaps it is the new familiarity with people of this generation who never came home.

We want to hear your thoughts on Remembrance Day.

Have Canada's experiences in Afghanistan rekindled the need for remembrance? What does Remembrance mean for you? What do you think about on Remembrance Day? Do you have personal connections to people who lost their lives in conflict or who returned forever changed?

Perhaps there are immigrants among you with your own memories of war -- more recent ones -- and if you too struggle over the question of how to remember those wars.

How do we pass on ideas such as remembrance to the younger generation? How important is it? What are the different ways in which the idea is kept alive in a way that unites Canadians? Today we have guests who each maintains the theme of Remembrance in their own particular way whether it be through education, memorials, music or poetry. What about you?

Our topic today: "Has the act of remembrance become more challenging, the further we get from the World Wars? How do you mark Remembrance Day ..and why?"

I"m Rex Murphy ...on CBC Radio One ...and on Sirius satellite radio channel 159 ...this is Cross Country Checkup.

---

Guests

• Clint Lovell (radio and chat)
  History teacher at Eastview Secondary School in Barrie, Ont., and organizer of the Remembrance Project
  
  
• Julia Hopper (radio and chat)
  Student at Eastview Secondary School, Barrie, Ont.
  
  
• Eric Beck Rubin (radio and chat)
  Lecturer, Faculty of Architecture, University of Toronto.
  
  
• Barry Callaghan (radio only)
  Author and editor publisher of Exile Quarterly, co-editor of We Wasn't Pals: Canadian Poetry and Prose of the First World War.
  
  
• Maestro Roberto Minczuk (radio only)
  Musical director of the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra and principal conductor of the Brazilian Symphony Orchestra in Rio de Janeiro.

---

Links

CBC.ca

• Remembrance Day: Lest we forget
• Lest we forget: The origin and history of Remembrance Day

The Historica-Dominion Institute

• Remembrance on Rise as More Canadians Plan to Attend Ceremony and Observe Silence than in 2010
• The Memory Project

Veterans Affairs

• The Seventh Book of Remembrance... In the Service of Canada
• Remembrance... History

Canadian War Museum

• Canada and the First World War

Royal Canadian Legion

• Remembrance

Toronto Sun

• Afghanistan vets still not part of National War Memorial - for now

Ottawa Citizen

• Growing number of Canadians plan to attend Remembrance Day ceremonies: poll
• Remembering soldiers of all wars, by Janice Kennedy

London Free Press

• Remembrance Day has special meaning for former Afghan translator

Canada.com

• The 5 types of Remembrance Day controversies popping up across Canada

CTV Edmonton

• Schools preparing for Remembrace Day but some Edmonton students will opt out

---

E-mail

In the fall of 2010, my parents, in their early 70s, invited the entire family to travel to France to visit WWI and WWII sites. Three generations of us (17 people all together) visited Vimy, Juno Beach and a number of other sites where my maternal grandfather fought and was wounded during WWII. The children, teens and younger, were all struck by the courage it would take to fight in trenches or land on a cold windy beach to enemy gunfire. The men injured and killed were not much older than my teenage son. This was a profound experience for the whole family and we will forever mark Remembrance Day with more gratitude and reflection than we ever could have prior to this trip.

Kelly
Ottawa, Ontario

My dad was a RCAF bomber pilot. They had to ditch in France on the way back from a bombing run in German. All the crew survived, but spent the rest of the war in a POW camp, 2+ years. Near the end of the war, he escaped during a POW camp relocation and after several  months made it back to allied lines. Ironically, my siblings and I were told little of his war time experience. However, with his grandchildren he was much more forthcoming.

During his life time, I cannot once recall talking about or participating in a Remembrance Day celebration, either at home or at an organized event. It was only through our kids (his grandkids) and their projects in their school where they researched and recognized Remembrance Day and our soldiers who participated in the various wars. Today, his great-grandkids are much more involved through their schools with Remembrance Day.

Schools and the education system have been very helpful in bringing the population awareness of and thoughts to remembering our war veterans.

We remember and celebrate all those military veterans of recent and distant wars, unfortunately, at the same time it paints governments position to send our citizens to war in a positive light, even those that the general population may not have supported, i.e. Afghanistan, support in the Iraq war (naval patrols of the Gulf).

Remembrance Day needs to bring the population to remember and celebrate those veterans that fought and at the same time, but also refocus our attention to why we go to war. We Canadians, need to clearly know and understand under what conditions and which situations we should ever consider going to war.

Bob
Penticton, British Columbia

My uncle, Gow Harvey, was in the air force in WWII. He was navigator in a Lancaster Bomber which was shot down over Germany. He was the only one to get out and his crew all died when the plane went down in flames. A few years ago, he came to his kids, nieces and nephews and asked them this: He had two friends who died in that crash and he found out that their families had died out. So he told us that all these years, he remembered those two chaps on Remembrance Day and would we now "take that torch" and remember them. He died a few years back and now I and my two daughters remember his crew members and, of course, him, on Remembrance Day. Brings me to tears every year.

Leslie
Lethbridge, Alberta

On Remembrance Day we try to remember something that few of us have experienced directly. Walking through a military cemetery is as close as I have been to the horror of war. I visited a war cemetery in Normandy France. With military precision, five thousand white gravestones, equally spaced, fill manicured lawns, row after row after row. Gravestones are a kind of record of history by the numbers. Their inscriptions are heart-breaking.

Every year we remember. We tell students that we must learn history in order to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. Yet we do not seem to learn enough to avoid repeating the same method of resolving conflicts.  History text books focus on the political or economic causes of war instead of its devastation. Buildings crumble, bodies pile up, armaments proliferate, century after century.

Near this cemetery is the museum housing the thousand-year-old Bayeux Tapestry which depicts, in seventy metres of embroidered scenes, the Battle of Hastings, two power-hungry men sending soldiers into battle. In the tapestry’s border are rows and rows of nameless maimed civilians and dead soldiers under the hooves of the horses that bear the victorious William. His fame lives on. We remember the names of Churchill, Eisenhower, Stalin and Hitler, men sheltered from physical harm even as they sent thousands into battle. Where are the stories of the wounded, the bereaved, the too-soon dead?

An inscription in an older military cemetery reads "I fought and died in the Great War to end all Wars. Have I died in vain?"

How will we answer today?

Tanya
Mallorytown, Ontario

My family is a military family and on NOvember 11 and the week leading up to November 11, family members talk about our parents and all family members who served, both in war and in peace; we post old photos on our FaceBook pages, we share stories, photos, documentaries, poems and memories. We visit our parents' graves, wear a poppy, and when possible, attend Ceremonies.

We also include in our stories, not only the call to remember those who served and fell, but the call of Never Again which our parents always included in the same sentence. It was a powerful lesson, taught by those who were there and experienced war, with simplicity and certainty.

Cathy
Miramichi, New Brunswick

Today when the girls were putting on their poppies to go to the Remembrance Day service Suki asked why we had to wear poppies. Hannah told her it was because soldiers fought for Canada. This is the simplistic view of what the poppy can and should stand for; a view that as she grows older she may find difficult to reconcile with her Japanese heritage.

I explained that the poppy was for soldiers on all sides of the war. The soldiers who Canadians fought against were no more evil then our own soldiers; they didn't want to kill people, they didn't want to die. I told her that Japan was in the war—this is something that, in this country, we don't talk much about—the war in the Pacific. I told her that the war was started by rulers not by soldiers and that soldiers had to follow the instructions of the rulers or would be killed by their own people.

She wanted to know why the rulers wanted to go to war. I showed her a world map and described the wide spheres of influence both Germany and Japan had in the early 1940s and explained to her that they wanted all the land they could get and so sent their soldiers to invade other countries.

She wanted to know if Baba and Jiji (her grandparents in Japan) were in the war. They weren't but their fathers were as far as I know. Many Japanese don't talk much about the war but I did have some conversations with my in-laws about it while I was in Japan. They were young children during the war and were evacuated to the country-side where they were reduced to eating bugs and grass due to lack of supplies. They showed me pictures of their fathers who were in military uniform. I was too polite or cowardly to ask what had happened to those stern-faced men. Men that would be forever linked to my family. Men whose crimes or bravery would never known to me.

It's odd to feel that some part of you is the enemy. That on Remembrance Day people are remembering their victory over your people. I hope that when people are remembering the sacrifices of their soldiers they also remember soldiers are commanded by their political masters.
 
Lois Ann
Guysborough, Nova Scotia