Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Things that occur to me while reading newspaper letter sections
Has there ever been a war in which Canadian troops were fighting for anything even vaguely resembling Canadian citizens' right to vote? Because you can be damned sure that this argument - that not voting dishonours the memory of our fallen soldiers who fought for our democratic rights - will get trotted out any time voter turnout does. Canadians have fought some just wars - World War II was an eminently just war fought for a mixture of just and unjust reasons, and I happen to cautiously file Afghanistan under the "just" heading as well - and some unjust ones, but were there any in which our right to vote was even indirectly threatened? Hell, you can make the argument that the War of 1812 was essentially a war in which Canadians fought against the right to vote, though I don't suppose that was a primary motivator.
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I think a very weak argument could be made for World War I, World War II, and the Korean War being about defending the Canadian right to vote.
World War I: if Germany had been able to defeat the U.K., and since Canada was technically still under the authority of the U.K., enjoying self rule by permission of the U.K., a German takeover of the U.K. could have legally (though unlikely in practice) resulted in the German constitutional monarchy controlling Canada and Canada become administered by the Kaiser and the German Reichstag. This assumes at minimum that (a) the U.K. would not have made peace after Germany defeated France and Russia/U.S.S.R., (b) that Germany would have bothered to invade the U.K., and (c) that Canadians would have submitted to German rule rather than denying the legitimacy of it.
World War II: Germany and Japan had roughly planned out which parts of the world each would take over as they conquered the world. I think Canada was split on an East-West line between German and Japanese spheres of influence, but I don't remember. An argument could be made that if Germany and Japan had not been stopped, they would have eventually conquered Canada and we'd have lost our rights to vote absolutely under Japanese rule, and lost meaningful rights to vote under the German one party state. This assumes that (a) Japan and Germany would not have been defeated without Canadian help (in the case of Germany, this may be a reasonable assumption), and (b) that Japan and Germany would have ever been able to get to the point of invading Canada.
Korean War: If one views the Korean War as stopping the dominoes of communism from falling, then one might accept the argument that if the communist forces weren't stopped in Korea, they'd have spread to Canada one day and we'd have lost our rights to vote. This argument assumes (a) that the domino theory was correct, (b) that Korea's fall to communism was a case of the domino theory being played out, and (c) that Korea would not have been stopped regardless of Canadian involvement.
I think the WWI and the Korean War examples are far to weak for any reasonable person to believe. The World War II scenario had some merit in my opinion, but it is still a stretch.
- Mustafa Hirji
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