Remembrance Day, Veterans Day

Earlier this morning I was humbled to stand next on stage to Norm Kirby, a Canadian veteran who landed on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. At the end of the war when he marched into The Netherlands he was at age 19, a platoon commander. Shortly before he spoke I got to deliver my speech, focused on freedom and why we should keep remembering. I give it to you here in its entirety:

Today I will take my children to the Remembrance Day ceremonies, just like my father used to take me to the remembrance ceremonies in The Netherlands where I grew up as a child. The memories of those are vivid: a sober ceremony, some music, a speech by the mayor, veterans and survivors placing some wreaths in front of the statue on the square and a silence of two minutes followed by the national anthem. But as opposed to Canadians, our day of remembrance is May 4, the day marking the eve of liberation day; the day Canadian troops liberated the North and West of The Netherlands sixty-two years ago. But there is another more major difference between these two days of remembrance: most of the victims we commemorated weren't military, but civilian.

I remember one time, I must have been about ten years old that I was standing next to an older man who was there together with a younger man who I had seen before in our hometown. The younger man was probably somewhere in his thirties with very dark, black hair and, as it seemed to, somewhat mentally challenged. The older man started talking to me and I could not really follow what he was saying as I was trying hard to pay attention to the unfolding ceremony. So, all I did was smile to the man, nodding yes, and in effect politely ignoring him. As time went on it became evident that he was talking about the mentally handicapped younger man standing next to us. He probably had come to the conclusion I wasn't paying any real attention so in order to grab it he all of a sudden cut right to the heart of his monologue and pointed to the younger man. He then said something to me I will never forget: "they made him watch the execution of his parents". Somewhat embarrassed, I turned to the man and immersed myself in the life story of one of the few Dutch Jews who had managed to survive the Second World War.

And so it was in many Dutch households, where stories of suffering and survival were kept alive by a generation that had lived through five years of war and suppression. My own family also provided its wartime narrative. There was the story about my grandfather who ended up in Buchenwald after he and a few enthusiastic would-be resistance fighters had naively compiled list of all the members of the team. That typical Dutch effort to get organized ended terribly when the list with names inadvertently fell into German hands. Or how my own father during the last few months of the war was forced to hide in a closet, while the streets were swarmed with Wehrmacht rounding up young men to work in Germany's rapidly collapsing war industry. They were all stories that formed an integral part of the identity of our family, oral history in its purest form, delivered on to the next generation at the dinner table and at family parties. And in the days leading up to and after the May 4 commemorations they were usually recycled, often spiced up with long forgotten details.

So, after these Remembrance Day services had ended my father and I would casually stroll back to our house, leaving behind a square filled with floral tributes to the fallen. He would tell me that none of the unborn would ever realize what freedom really meant. In my childlike enthusiasm I firmly rejected this notion, but subconsciously I knew he was absolutely right. Not until you have experienced what it is to see entire families disappear from your street or to sit on a darkened attic for days on end to avoid capture, deportation and death, can one come to realize the true value of freedom. My generation learned to take that freedom for granted, use it, abuse it or at times even spit on it.

As the generation of my parents passes on, the ones born in the first few decades after the war will be the last generation to have had some sort of direct link to the world war that ended in 1945. Both in Canada and Europe that generation is somehow tasked with preserving the memory of what it means to lose freedom as best as it can. That is why today I will take my children to Remembrance Day. So that they understand directly why Canadians landed on Juno Beach and why people from both sides of the Atlantic connected through mutual, if very different, experiences of totalitarianism. And yes, they will hear me talk about what happened to their grandfather, their great-grandfather and that poor little black haired man who now most likely will have reached middle age, still tortured by the brutality that he was made to face as a child.

There is of course more than just the spoken word, as today we gather around the more physical legacy presented by war monuments. One of the most impressive can be found in Amsterdam where former Dutch resistance fighter and poet H.M. van Randwijk's succinct words immortalized the essence of losing freedom and the importance of remembering:

A people that bows to tyrants

Will lose more than life and belongings

Then, the lights will go out

The Bush 'Regime'

One of the baffling things about this White House's routine is how it violates one of the most basic business premises which I would summarize as "where leaders go, others follow". However if George W. Bush goes to bed at 10 PM sharp, there aren't many of his staff members following as most are expected to burn the midnight oil, which they unquestionably do. That is a marked difference from the round-the-clock chaotic Clinton years and one wonders how this apparent distance between the CEO and his team does not seem to affect team loyalty.

Early-to-bed, punctuality, simplicity, no alcohol, relentless physical exercise, that sums up what we would call the Bush regime. It is one of the key points from Robert Draper's Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush. Draper's book is an early assessment of this president and it follows its subject from the early days in Texas to the present day troubles of balancing domestic pressures with fighting a war in Iraq. The casual style gives the book the feel as if it is an extended Vanity Fair entry with lots of remarkable anecdotes without answering any real questions the reader might have. Although there are attempts, 'Dead Certain' hardly addresses the deeper motivations of its subject so what we end up is a trove of material making it a book of reference for a real biography that will be written once Dubya has retired at his Crawford ranch.

Still it is a very worthwhile read. From a historical perspective there are two chapters that stand out. One describes the pre-nomination battle in the state of South Carolina where John McCain's name and reputation were dragged through the mud by Bush's highly motivated ground troops. Although it does hardly give an insight about the extent of the candidate's involvement in these brutal tactics, it gives a few useful pointers as to how you can turn around the momentum during a primary campaign. The same level of analysis is devoted to Katrina, the aftermath of which is routinely described as if it was one of Bush's own making which it evidently was not. But it does provide an interesting case study of present-day disaster management and how the White House sought to manipulate public sentiment.

Throughout Draper's book - which is invariably described as being unbiased - the reader is left with a fairly favorable picture of Bush as a well-meaning, focused if somewhat unprepared leader who is not nearly as conservative as his opponents make him out to be. Draper is creating not any real distance between himself and Bush, but more importantly between Bush and less pleasant events that some believe have the president's imprint on it. Draper leaves the reader feeling that Bush is a well meaning actor, often caught in unfortunate administrative turf wars. Admittedly, I did not like Bush when he launched his campaign in 1999, liked him after 9/11, began to dislike him starting in 2004, but Draper has somehow managed to me taking a liking to the guy again.

The somewhat lame conclusion that Bush's virtues are pretty much the same as his vices feels like Draper was in a hurry to get his book to the printer. The material could have yielded a far more thought provoking end. One for instance is that the deferential treatment Bush receives from his team to a point where vital information is not being shared with the boss is possibly one that has created serious dysfunction and some disastrous policy results. The fact that the chief leaves the office at night well before the rest of the team may not appear to be a big deal, but it highlights the fraught dynamics of the Bush White House. If you like presidential history, endless anecdotes, magazine style narrative and an invitation to draw your own conclusions, Draper's book should be yours.