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Comment by throwawayfire | Hacker News Reader

> I think it is a pivotal moment for this generation to show what our principles are, if we have any.

It's already known that this (political) generation doesn't have these principles. Government contracts rarely consider anything beyond the cheapest offer. Corporations are obligated to maximise their profit above all other considerations.

It's the West's (including Canada's) morals that have got us here - we simply export our bad behaviour to other countries, so that we don't have to see it.

Overall, nobody is going to stop importing clothes made in China, because there isn't sufficient industry elsewhere in the world. We closed it, and exported it to China, because it was cheaper.

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I think of my grandfathers, one who was in world war 1 and 2, and the other in world war 2, and their whole generation marching off to war to put their lives on the line to stand up for what is right, and I can't imagine anybody I know doing that unless they joined the military out of high school because they didn't have any better options.

edit: I can't reply for some reason. (oh it's because parent is flagged). If there was resistance in Canada to going to war in world war 1 and 2 it isn't part of the history that is taught to us. I imagine since there was no draft in Canada only the willing went.

Did a whole generation really just "march off to war to put their lives on the line"? While of course there were people who volunteered, in the USA the majority of soldiers fighting in World War II were conscripted – they went because the state told them they had to go. And there was still a lot of isolationist sentiment and reluctance to get involved in the war in Europe even after Pearl Harbor. Are the figures not similar for Canada?

It doesn't matter, because history is probably one of the most effective forms of social control. Think about how complicated modern day events are and how difficult it is to shift through the mountains of perspectives to understand the whole picture. Now throw in decades of time difference with fragmented and hard to decipher primary documents, and you end up with a story that has to be interpreted by expert historians/storytellers, installed into the self-identity of generations of students, and used to shame individuals into matching the mythical sacrifices their ancestors supposedly took without any complaint. It's miles ahead of organized religion in terms of persuasiveness because any grain of truth in the historical story is magnified into the only possible truth without nuance or uncertainty. To go against the stories we tell ourselves is to go against all of society itself. If the body tells you to die in stomach acid because that is your role as an epithelium cell, and it's what generations of your ancestors have done, what can you do but die doing your job?

There was a point where I really enjoyed reading histories. Then I dug too deep and found too many inconsistencies, and I realized that if I were to track down every detail to the end I would go mad or worse, be a history PhD. The only way I could recover that original enjoyment was to treat every historical book as a work of fiction and marvel at how well they're able to hack its way into the social subsystem in our brain that allows us to form societies.

The war was pitched in Canada as "a duty to defend England, the throne and the motherland". This did not sit well with French Canadians, who inhabited the country since the 1500's and were heavily discriminated against by the British[0][1].

Still that didn't stop heroes like Léo Major[3]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_the_Parliament_Buil....

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_the_Acadians#:~:t....

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9o_Major

In Canada, the term to search for is not "draft", but "conscription". You will see that there is resistance to conscription regularly through the nation's history. (And it certainly used to be part of the history that was taught to us in Ontario.)

absolutely there is a resistance to conscription in Canada, but was there a resistance to going to war or did everyone sign up due to duty and social pressure to "do the right thing"?

The rest of the world didn't join world war 2 because of the atrocities being committed by Nazi Germany, they joined because Germany started invading neighboring countries.

Thanks for bringing this to my attention

>A major turning point in Nazi policy toward Jews was the coordinated attacks by the Sturmabteilung (or SA, the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party) against Jews and Jewish institutions and businesses throughout Germany and Austria on November 9-10, 1938 – an event known as Kristallnacht or the Night of the Broken Glass, due to the large amount of shattered windows at Jewish properties in its aftermath. At least 91 Jews were killed in the violence, and 30,000 were arrested and interned in concentration camps (but not extermination camps). Over 900 synagogues and 7,000 Jewish businesses were severely damaged or destroyed.

https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/holocaust-remembrance-day/whe...

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