A symbol of the defence of freedom can't be displayed in Canada on a website where Canadians exercise their freedom of speech.
Remembrance is impossible when the Legion has already forgotten.
The real political division in society is between authoritarians and libertarians.
The fancy word for it is revanchism.
People who study words and language call it a borrowed word, meaning that we use it in English but got it from the French word. In this case, it is the French word for revenge.
People familiar with history are most likely to associate the word revanchism with the struggle between France and Germany that lasted from 1870 until 1945. The Prussians defeated the French in 1870 and took two territories – Alsace and Lorraine – that many in France wanted back.
Desire for revenge for regain of the lost territories was an important aspect of French policy against Germany at Versailles in 1919. The tension between the two countries lasted until, after another world war, Germany was simply destroyed as a single country and France got the territories back.
"Newfoundland and Canada, separate countries for so long, exist as two solitudes within the bosom of a single country more than 65 years after Confederation. They do not understand each other very well. Canadians can be forgiven if they do not know much about Newfoundlanders beyond caricatures in popular media, let alone understand them. But Newfoundlanders do not know themselves. They must grapple daily with the gap between their own history as it was and the history as other Newfoundlanders tell it to them, wrongly, repeatedly.
These solitudes are not fragments of the past of no consequence in the present. They are not without shape and substance in the world today. People who think of themselves as eternal victims of conspiracies will see conspiracies everywhere and act accordingly. For some Newfoundlanders, the British bogeyman of 1914 became the Canadian and British bogey of 1949, and the Quebec bogey in 1969 at Churchill Falls, or the bogey of Ottawa and offshore resources in 2004. A century after July 1, 1916, the result of these two solitudes is a relationship between Newfoundland and the rest of Canada that may well be more distant than it ever was, but certainly is needlessly so."For the full thing, buy the single issue or subscribe.