CALLING OUT THE GREAT VETERAN PRETENDER

By Sean Bruyea and Robert Smol

For the last 90 years Canadians have looked upon the Royal Canadian Legion as the living embodiment of Remembrance Day, keeping the memory of our veterans’ sacrifices alive. Likewise, successive governments have recognized the Legion as the primary institutional stakeholder when it comes to setting policy for veterans.

Today, however, this alleged veteran organization has devolved into an institutional lie. In spite of the deference it continues to receive, the Legion is now little more than a social club consisting primarily of civilian wannabe and “wish-I-had-been” soldiers imitating the façade of military life and sacrifice.

So it should not come as a surprise that, in recent battles with Ottawa over veteran benefits, the Legion either found itself lost in the fog or, worse, siding with government. Meanwhile, various municipal governments grant tax-free status to several Legion branches.

The Canadian public, which almost universally welcomes Legion uniforms at public events, needs to know the truth about what the Legion has become. More importantly, modern veterans like us owe it to the Legion’s battle-scarred founders to refocus the Legion back to its founding principles as an organization of veterans standing up for other veterans against government neglect and intransigence.

It never fails to shock uninformed members of the public just how unmilitary and veteran-less the Legion has become. At one time, approximately 50 per cent of Canada’s more than 1 million Second World War veterans belonged to the Legion. Currently, there are nearly 700,000 serving and retired Canadian Armed Forces personnel. As of October 1, 2015, the Legion had 265,000 members. Of those, more than 200,000 never served in the military! This is contrary to the Legion’s specious claim on its website that its membership “includes approximately 100,000 Veterans.”

The truth is, online documents show military veterans are lumped into a category of 64,000 “Ordinary” members. However, this category also includes militaries of allied forces and all NATO nations as well as war correspondents, YMCA, Knights of Columbus, firefighters and forestry services who served in wartime. Coast guard, provincial and city police services also qualify. Of the estimated maximum 35,000 to 50,000 military veterans in the Legion, more than half are likely WWII veterans. That leaves approximately 17,500 to 25,000 who might be post-Korean War veterans or less than four per cent of all CAF veterans and only 10 per cent of Legion membership. The bottom-line: the Legion apparently doesn’t care enough about veterans to know how many veterans are Legion members.

Look around. Any adult walking the street qualifies to be a uniformed, marching, medal-bearing, saluting, colour-carrying member of the Royal Canadian Legion. Legion membership is open to any “citizen of Canada, or a Commonwealth or Allied country” who is of “voting age” and “agrees to abide by the Royal Canadian Legion Constitution, rules and General By-Laws.”

The result: failing to understand the military culture and sacrifices is endemic in an organization which, with increasing illegitimacy, has a legal monopoly on all images of poppies related to remembrance and sacrifice. For all its grandiose rhetoric about being “Guardians of Remembrance,” the Legion’s overwhelming civilian membership does much to imitate, trivialize and therefore dishonour sacred symbols of military service.

Unlike any other Commonwealth nation, Canada’s Legion awards medals for administering the affairs of the Legion, including recreational activities for the elderly. Legion medals include a Meritorious Service Medal and a Palm Leaf. To an uninformed public, these Legion-exclusive “medals” can be easily mistaken for bona fide military service medals. And one can purchase only from the “Guardians of Remembrance” poppy earrings, umbrellas, tea towels, toques, mitts, and poppy puppies, giving the appearance more of a commercial monopoly than a sacred responsibility.

To add denial to dishonour, the Legion, in its last National Convention, voted not to allow its minority military veteran members to wear their specialist badges such as paratrooper wings and submariner badges. These distinctions are rightfully worn with pride to identify hard-earned specialized skills that often carried them through combat. Yet the same Legion delegates voted that all its members could wear a forget-me-not flower pin to commemorate the Battle of Beaumont-Hamel, although the tragically few Newfoundlanders who actually fought and survived that horrible First World War engagement have long since passed.

Community focus at the cost of veteran advocacy

Why did the Legion turn out this way? The Legion has admitted a prevalent “grumpiness” to potential new members. However, institutionalized age discrimination and the self-destructive veteran disease of one-upmanship are at the root of the problem. WWII and Korean War veterans during the 1950s through to the early 2000s saw CAF service as inferior. For much of this time, younger veterans could encounter a culture wherein the only true ‘veteran’ worthy of Legion support and recognition were those who served during ‘real’ wars, recognition restricted to two World Wars and, begrudgingly later, Korea. Conveniently ignored was the fact that many World War veterans never actually experienced combat.

As a result, younger ex-service men and women who may have endured full-blown combat operations in places such as Cyprus, the former Yugoslavia, Kuwait, and Afghanistan were not seen as bona fide veterans. No doubt history will record the 50 years following the Korean War as a lost opportunity for the Legion to help CAF veterans — the leading edge of whom are now well into their 80s.

Instead, the Legion opted to offset its declining and dying veteran membership with a new “community-based” focus. From a policy perspective, this meant shifting efforts to charitable work in support of local communities. Administratively, this meant opening its membership and, ultimately, its executive positions, including its Provincial and National Commands, to civilians.

This ageism and rampant superiority complex combined with the rapid devolution of the Legion into a civilian-led and -managed organization left little to no incentive for younger veterans, such as ourselves, to join. And frankly, whenever either of us are invited to a Legion function and can overlook the “grumpiness,” we see little shared experience and knowledge of the military that would make us feel like we belong.

Selling out Modern Veterans: Legion support for the New Veterans Charter

By far the single most tragic and costly end result of this military devolution of the Legion can be seen in its open support for controversial veterans’ benefits that were rammed through parliament in 2005 without a minute of debate or a committee of elected officials to study it. This legislation, commonly known as the New Veterans Charter, replaced lifelong tax-free monthly pensions for military injuries with highly inadequate one-time lump sum payments. It has been a lightning rod for veteran disaffection ever since.

Veterans still scratch their heads wondering why Legion National President Mary-Ann Burdett signed a blank cheque to government while proudly proclaiming to a Senate committee: “There should be no doubt whatsoever that the Royal Canadian Legion fully supports this initiative … we want this legislation.” Yet, astute concerns articulated by the Legion’s largest provincial command in Ontario just one year later were ignored in the national headquarters’ public declarations.

Why did all this happen? Only an organization acting as a true advocacy group for veterans would have the political chutzpah to sacrifice its popularity among politicians for doing what is right by its principles. In 2005, the Legion was no longer this form of organization.

In the meantime, organizations with a fraction of the membership (such as the rapidly growing Veterans Canada) are perceived as carrying equal or more clout in defending the rights of injured veterans to an often-insensitive federal bureaucracy.

What Needs to be Done?

If there is a glimmer of hope it would be that there is a groundswell of civilians and veterans in the organization demanding that the Legion make itself more responsive and accountable to the veteran community. In 2016 some brave and thoughtful members of Legion Branch 15 in Brampton, Ontario conducted an online survey where 96.6 per cent of the 1,606 respondents identified as veterans or serving members of the CAF. Of these, 75.8 per cent were not Legion members. An overwhelming majority of this group claimed the reasons why they will not join is that the Legion “is out of touch with the needs of today’s veterans” and “the Legion has too many non-vets in executive positions.”

Among the recommendations put forth by the respondents is elimination of the term “New Veteran” as it promotes segregation, elimination of Legion “medals” and the seemingly obvious, but sadly necessary, demand that the Legion not support “any legislative action that is harmful to veterans.” Not surprisingly, some in the national headquarters appear to have largely dismissed the survey, claiming it is unscientific.

To reverse this membership stampede out the door, the Legion has to regain trust with not just its own members but the wider veteran community. Openness and transparency is a beginning. Headquarters salaries are paid for by membership dues. For Legion branches struggling to make ends meet just to stop the roof from leaking and keep the lights on, subsidizing such exorbitant salaries with membership fees must be disheartening. There is no privacy law that prevents disclosing the salary ranges or the actual salaries of each position in the national headquarters. Likewise, such salaries need to be dramatically curtailed. It just doesn’t look good when the Legion depends upon the sweat of volunteers that are represented by a highly overcompensated national leadership.

In addition to opening its books, the Legion has to stand up to government far more aggressively when it comes to veterans’ benefits. It needs to aggressively focus on and incorporate its founding principles — namely, to “secure adequate pensions, allowances, grants and war gratuities for ex-servicemen, their dependents, and the widows, children and dependents of those who have served, and to labour for honourable provision being made for those who, in declining years, are unable to support themselves.”

No doubt this can only be realized if the Legion takes the government to task at every level and opportunity for its failed policies and neglect of veterans. Certainly a Royal Canadian Legion doing its job will no longer be so popular with politicians who will surely seek refuge from Legion members rather than frequent photo ops. Perhaps a veteran-focused Legion might even lose its tax-free status. But at least the Legion can then stand proud and say that it remained true to the memory of its battle-scarred founders.

TEACHING THE KOREAN WAR IN CHINA

BY Matt Moir

It’s a sunny April afternoon and I’m standing at the front of a Grade 10 Canadian history class in southeast Beijing.

My Chinese students, about twenty-five 16-year-olds, are sitting in their seats as I begin to introduce the broad outlines of the Korean War. In terms of detail, I don’t get very far — the troops tasked with defending Seoul from Pyongyang hadn’t even yet landed on the Korean Peninsula — before a hand belonging to a clever, serious boy with the English name Jason, raises.

He informs me that the Americans — and, presumably, their allies — didn’t in fact arrive in Asia to defend South Korea from North Korea, but to launch an aggressive war to subdue China. I ask Jason to expand on his ideas, and he says that the United Nations force, which included 26,000 Canadians, was eager to invade his country, occupy the very capital whose cityscape stretches out just beyond our large classroom windows, and dismantle communist China. Several students nod in agreement.

It goes without saying that Jason’s version of the Korean War is not reflected in Canadian history classes.

To be sure, no one should be naïve enough to think that nation-states, including Canada, don’t construct self-serving historical narratives, or that those narratives aren’t reflected in history classrooms. But most educators would, I think, agree that provincial curricula do an admirable job critically interrogating many historical injustices — the Chinese head tax, for example, or the internment of Japanese-Canadians.

That’s not to say there isn’t room for improvement. There is no shortage of disgrace in Canadian history, and it’s a fair point that curricula might be able to do a better job reflecting underrepresented voices and viewpoints.

But it’s hard to see where or how the Korean War fits into those types of debates. I’m not aware of any Canadian material anywhere that frames this country’s involvement in the Korean War as an act of imperialism, of villainy. Why would it exist? Canada’s Army, Navy and Air Force fought under the banner of the United Nations, with its almost definitional sense of legitimacy.

But plainly there are interpretations of UN-authorized campaigns that are very dissimilar to the average Canadian’s, and the Korean War is clearly one of them. Not everyone views it as an honorable fight; quite the opposite, in fact. The Chinese curriculum identifies the conflict as the very definition of imperialism, according to Chinese students and teachers, as well as East Asia academic experts.

Whether that particular interpretation is valid — its ultimate source is the Communist Party of China — is, of course, another matter.

The demand for a Western-style education in the Middle Kingdom has grown significantly over the past several years, closely paralleling the growth of China’s middle class. Currently, there are nearly 600 international schools in the country, and some analysts predict that number will shoot up to at least 1,000 over the next several years.

I teach at a large Beijing public high school with a small international program. That means that about 100 of the school’s 1,000 students spend half their day studying a Canadian curriculum, and the other half in the traditional Chinese system.

The program is small because it’s expensive; only families with significant means can afford to enroll their children. For those parents, though, the return on their investment is considerable. Graduates of the international program are awarded a Canadian high school diploma with all of the benefits that come with it, including the opportunity to gain direct entry into a Canadian university and, crucially, an exemption from gaokao, China’s infamous university entrance exams.

There are, unsurprisingly, substantial differences between the Canadian and traditional Chinese education philosophies. Each has its merits. The Chinese system relies heavily on note taking and repetition and, consequently, many Chinese students develop phenomenal memories and test-taking abilities. Canadian curricula, on the other hand, emphasize the importance of creativity and critical thinking skills.

In my experience, however, the most significant problem faced by international school teachers isn’t how lessons are delivered but the content of the lessons themselves.

Most foreigners in authoritarian China understand that it’s probably not a good idea to discuss the ‘Three T’s’: Tiananmen, Tibet and Taiwan. What are a little trickier to navigate, however, are issues that teachers might not know are controversial, or events teachers might not know are viewed very differently in China than in their own country.

I don’t think what I teach my students about the Korean War is particularly one-sided: the communist North Koreans, supported by the Soviet Union and China, wanted to control the entire Korean Peninsula, whereas the U.S.-backed South Koreans wanted the same. After the North invaded the South, the Americans and their Canadian, Australian and British allies came to help Seoul, and the Chinese stepped in to protect the North. A seesaw conflict ensued, and the two sides technically remain at war more than 60 years later.

The Chinese history curriculum’s coverage of the Korean War by no means resembles the North Korean brand of propaganda, cartoonish and vulgar. In fact, the Chinese curriculum reaches the same conclusion as Canadian curricula, it just takes a different path to get there. By that, I mean it recognizes the fighting’s oscillation, but it de-emphasizes the illegitimacy of the North Korean government, magnifies the authoritarianism of the South Korean government and casts the Chinese forces as the last line of defence against an enemy eager to dominate the Chinese mainland, according to the educators interviewed for this article.

There’s also more than a small dose of glory to the version of the Korean War’s history my students encountered in their Chinese history classes: the volunteer army — simple, committed revolutionaries — pushing back the world’s most fearsome fighting machine, pushing it back to the very edge of the Asian continent’s mainland.

I spoke to a Chinese history teacher about my students and their ideas on the Korean War. He told me that they must have been paying attention in their history classes because their beliefs — that South Korea and the U.S. instigated the war, that NATO was keen on invading China — mirror what he teaches his own students.

But he also said that all content in a Chinese classroom “must be taught with Marxism in mind.” He explained that most history teachers he knows don’t really believe much of what they learn in university nor what they end up teaching their own students. If they want a job, however, the party line must be towed.

Over the past several years, school boards from the U.S., to Israel, to Japan have been accused of using textbooks that whitewash inconvenient historical truths. Canada, too, hasn’t been spared controversy; Quebec’s Ministry of Education recently came under fire for a lack of cultural diversity in the province’s new history curriculum.

Debate among subject experts, parents, teachers and even students over curricula and textbooks is essential in creating a rigorous curriculum. Obviously, curricula and textbooks designed by bureaucrats in the employ of authoritarian China have a particularly robust illegitimacy.

Tao Zhang is a professor of culture and media at England’s Nottingham Trent University. He believes that history education in Chinese schools is a “huge problem” and that it stems from a political culture that is built on a foundation of anti-Western sentiment.

“It is immensely fascinating and frustrating to talk about the topic of school textbooks and education in China. Despite many changes, [like] big improvements in educational technology and the emergence of international schools and private educational institutions, the Chinese state education system suffers from continuing interference and manipulation by the propaganda and ideological apparatuses of the state,” says Zhang.

Propaganda plays a significant role in the way the Korean War is depicted in Chinese classrooms, according to China scholar Matthew Johnson, but so do academics with anti-Western views.

“There is a way in which the textbooks do reflect Chinese scholarship, which is to say at the level of scholarship, [the Korean War] is somewhat regarded as … American imperialism. In other words, the United States trying to impose through military means its political and economic will on East Asia,” says Johnson, a history professor at Grinnell College in Iowa, and an expert in East Asian history.

Chinese academic scholarship and high school curricula might have less overlap concerning the details of the Korean War; Johnson points to recent scholarship on prisoners and the elite politics of the war, noting that he’d “be surprised if those perspectives have made it into textbooks.” But scholars and textbook writers are in agreement when it comes to the broad strokes.

“History is seen as very important to maintaining national unity so it’s very important that there is a clear national perspective on historical events, and the framework for developing this perspective is mainly created by the propaganda department. To label it pejoratively by calling it propaganda isn’t necessarily my intention but I would point out the same authorities in China, who are responsible for everything from media control to the regulation of soap operas on television are … responsible for the regulation of textbook content.”

After completing several days’ worth of Korean War coverage, I pulled my student, Jason, aside for a conversation about what he was learning in my class.

He said he enjoyed taking the time to critically analyze historical events and being encouraged to develop personal opinions that might conflict with the dominant narrative.

In reference to the Korean War, he didn’t quite say that his mind had been changed, though he did mention our class studied aspects of the war he hadn’t been exposed to before. I got the impression he was ready to jettison some of the ideas he had learned in his Chinese history class.

But it’s impossible to say with any certainty. As I mentioned earlier, Jason is a clever student, and he knows who is marking his history exams.

SHARING A LEGACY: Future generations of amputees remember the sacrifices of veteran amputees

People often can’t help but smile when they see six-year-old Kamryn Bond lay a wreath with her friend, Shannon Krasowski, 40, at their local Remembrance Day ceremony. Although an unlikely pair, they are both amputees and are part of a legacy that goes back nearly 100 years.

Kamryn is a member, and Shannon a graduate, of The War Amps Child Amputee (CHAMP) Program. It was war amputee veterans returning from the First World War who created The War Amps in 1918, its Key Tag service in 1946, and later, the CHAMP Program. Since 1975, thousands of child amputees across Canada have received financial assistance for their artificial limbs through CHAMP and attended regional seminars where they learn about growing up as an amputee.

When Kamryn was 11 months old, both of her legs, right hand, and several fingers on her left hand, were amputated due to a respiratory illness. Shannon’s left leg was amputated when she was 13 years old due to bone cancer.

They met three years ago at their local Remembrance Day ceremony in Grande Prairie, Alberta. That year, Kamryn watched Shannon lay a wreath on behalf of The War Amps Operation Legacy, but ever since, it has been a tradition they share.

While growing up as a Champ, Shannon met many war amputee veterans and heard their first-hand accounts of the devastation of war. “They passed this legacy to us younger amputees and now it’s our turn to share their stories, so that we never forget their sacrifices,” she says.

Although Kamryn is still quite young, her mom, Dale, says it is important for her daughter to lay a wreath on Remembrance Day. “It builds the foundation for her to understand how much our war veterans gave up for our freedom.”

When Shannon was younger, she shared a close bond with one particular war amputee veteran. He gave her a lion statue because he said that she had the courage of a lion. Shannon says, “I have since passed this statue down to Kamryn to recognize her courage, and I hope that one day she will pass it down to another young amputee, who looks up to her.”

According to Shannon though, Kamryn is already a role model to many people. “Kamryn epitomizes what CHAMP is all about. She has such a great attitude and her positivity makes everyone smile. You can’t help but be in a great mood when you’re around her.”

Dale says that because Kamryn and Shannon are both amputees, they share a unique bond. “It’s important for Kamryn to have someone who understands what it’s like to be an amputee, especially as she gets older, because she will have questions that I won’t always know the answers to.”

Dale adds, “We will always be appreciative of the work of the war amputee veterans and the message they have left for young amputees like Kamryn to carry into the future. It is for this reason that she lays a wreath every year in their honour, and will do so for many years to come.”

Proud to Serve: A Wren speaks of her service in the second World War and making a difference

By the late Ann O'Brian (nee Plunkett)

It has been 50 years since I stood on this platform as head of Frances Ridley House. I can’t talk about all of the Second World War in just a few minutes, but I can talk of myself in the war. I am your token veteran.

I came to Havergal in September of 1939, the very month that war was declared. I was 14, full of excitement and patriotism; the whole country was instantly consumed by the war. The Great Depression was over so everybody could get a job.

By Christmas time of 1939, my father and three of my four brothers had gone overseas. British war guests began to arrive at Havergal, sent to the safety of Canada by their parents. They were wicked field hockey players.

At my house on that Christmas Eve, the doorbell rang. A telegram in wartime meant bad news. My mother opened it in terror; the president of Imperial Oil wished her a Merry Christmas in the absence of her son.

By the fourth year of the war my youngest brother had been shot down over Germany. His body washed up on the shores of the Zeider Sea. He was buried in Holland.

Another brother, a naval officer, had two ships sink from underneath him and then was bombed while in hospital. He was invalided out. Afterwards, on the streets of Toronto, he was often asked why he wasn’t in uniform. My eldest brother was wounded in Dieppe and taken prisoner.

When I was 18 I joined the Navy. I loved marching in the uniform. When the band played I could have marched all the way to Montreal. Once on parade my silk bloomers fell down. I simply stepped out of them and kept marching.

I was shipped to Quebec to HMCS St. Hyacinthe; it was the largest signals base in the British Empire. After six months of training I was a signaler, a wireless operator who could copy Morse code at over 30 wpm. We practiced eight hours a day.

The food was appalling and we slept 50 to a room in the barracks, but the good news was that there were thousands of sailors and, of course, they could dance. I got my dance training here at Havergal in the Assembly Hall at lunchtime.

Being a Wren was rather like being in school, with rules and regulations and officers telling you what to do. In naval terms, here is a sample: “Plunkett lay aft on the Quarterdeck.” That meant you had done something wrong and you were to be paraded before an officer or worse, before the captain of the base. I was paraded seven times.

Then the war really started. I was shipped to Vancouver Island, to HMCS Naden in Victoria. We began our secret work. No one knew what we did and we could not talk about it. We were copying Japanese radio signals transmitted in the Far East.

Our radio station was a wooden hut, in a field surrounded by barbed wire, deep in the country. We had Japanese typewriters, so we could not understand the signals. There were five radio stations on the West Coast between Alaska and California. We sent our messages to Washington by Teletype to be decoded. We worked watches at eight to four, four to twelve and twelve to eight; a week of each as I remember. I believe we were paid $30 per month, and supplied with our uniform and the ghastly food. We felt safe, cared for and vital to the war effort while in uniform.

Well, we know who won, so to end my story I came home, went to university, left to marry an airman who had jumped out of two Spitfires, and lived happily ever after.

May I leave you with a message? I believe that with privilege comes responsibility. Serve your country. There are a thousand ways to make a difference