Remembrance Day, 2009: What are
we Remembering?
By Howard Rotberg
In our current world of cultural and moral relativism where we are supposed to believe that we should tolerate and respect every culture and every belief system equally, Remembrance Day is more and more the last bastion of traditional patriotism.
When we remember the soldiers who gave up their lives, or were disabled, for the maintenance of our way of life, our liberal democracies and our freedoms, we necessarily hold that our way of life is superior to those whose totalitarian illiberal governments forced the necessity of war upon us.
Cultural relativists would have us believe that Tolerance is the new primary value, and that if all peoples are equally deserving of respect, pacifism is so obviously more moral than war, since if everybody is like us, who would bother to attack us, and even if they did, submission to their values would, according to the relativists, be a lesser evil than fighting them.
In my new book, Tolerism: The Ideology Revealed (Mantua Books), I suggest that adherence to a tolerant worldview has now passed beyond mere respect for the idea of diversity – and become an ideology that holds that we must have, not only a sympathy but an indulgence, that is an excessive leniency, for beliefs or practices conflicting with our own. At times, I contend that this ideology contains not only an undue tolerance of the illiberals, but a disturbing element of self-hatred, cultural masochism, and delusions about the difference between social tolerance and political tolerance. I explore the issue of what limitations should be placed on Tolerance and whether Tolerance should be trumped by Justice.
To understand the full dimensions of what Remembrance Day
must be in 21st century
First of all, are we in Remembrance Day mourning all soldiers of every state, or only those who proudly represented liberal democracies against such forces as Nazi Germany?
I used to live in Kitchener-Waterloo. Some years ago, the remains of Nazi soldiers
who had died in POW camps in
The Kitchener Germans protested that this speech “missed its mark” because in their view the ceremony was for the purpose of remembering all victims of war and political persecution anywhere “and our compatriots in particular”. (emphasis added)
And so, a ceremony attended every year by local mayors,
members of the legislature and parliament is meant by its organizers to
remember and honour Nazi soldiers. Are
we comfortable with this? Are we
comfortable that nearly as many people attend this remembrance ceremony as
attend the Remembrance Day ceremony at the cenotaph in downtown
Then, since 1995, UNESCO, the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization has sponsored a Day of Tolerance on November 16th each year, again an interesting counterpoint to Remembrance Day on November 11th. On the UNESCO website is stated that the day “affirms that tolerance is neither indulgence nor indifference. It is respect and appreciation of the rich variety of our world's cultures, our forms of expression and ways of being human. Tolerance recognizes the universal human rights and fundamental freedoms of others. People are naturally diverse; only tolerance can ensure the survival of mixed communities in every region of the globe.”
It sounds so nice. But why must we in the liberal democracies “tolerate” beliefs and cultures that rob individuals, women, gays, or minority religions from all human rights. Shouldn’t we be encouraged to speak out against such human rights abuses, rather than tolerate them? I do not suggest we militarily free every oppressed group in the totalitarian parts of the world, but why is there a day to celebrate the rich variety of oppressive regimes?
UNESCO, by the way just elected a new president. A Bulgarian parliamentarian overtook a large lead by the frontrunner, Egyptian Culture Minister Farouk Hosni. Just to give an understanding of the absurdity of UNESCO-sponsored days of Tolerance, Hosni, who was the favorite to win, is a well-known supporter of cultural repression. As stated by Mona Eltahawy in the Washington Post, Hosni “has alienated many Egyptians by suffocating cultural and intellectual freedom while giving a leg up to religious zealotry.” She cites numerous examples of his preventing freedom of expression. Then, in May 2008, he stated that he would “burn Israeli books” himself if he found any in Egyptian libraries.
Mr. Hosni tried his best to satisfy international
concerns. He wrote an article in the
French newspaper Le Monde, where he apologized for the comments and said he
would be willing to deal with
And yet, this modest apology led to a backlash among
Egyptian intellectuals, who argued the culture minister was not abiding by the
cultural limitations established by Egyptian institutions concerning
normalization with
So, this resulted in 15 prominent Egyptian intellectuals, including
professors of literature, history, and international law, and prominent
journalists, to write an open letter opposing
Mr. Hosni’s election to head UNESCO.
His apology for his book burning remarks and his willingness to deal
with Israel in the course of his duties, caused these intellectuals to write: “It is needless to emphasize that this
character with such dreadful history is not fit for such great position that
requires high levels of morality and integrity, as well as unrelenting support
for human dignity and ethical transparency.” And so, the chances of Mr. Hosni being the
first Arab to head UNESCO were scuttled as much by hardliners in his own
country as by western concerns. But in
the end, Hosni, as is usual in the Arab Middle East, blamed the Jews. An article by Hadil al-Shalchi in The Huffington Post states that Hosni
blamed a conspiracy "cooked up in
The point is that commemorations of Tolerance headed by intolerant people,
or commemoration of Nazi war dead by people who get upset that the Holocaust be
mentioned are all commemorations that are meaningless, in any positive sense. As
One more example of the relativist undermining of
remembrance will suffice: Canadian
Professor Anne Bayefsky, writing on January 27, 2005 in National
Review Online points out that the United Nations commemoration of the 60th
anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz made sure that there were no actual
Resolutions coming out of the ceremony, so as not to offend the Arab states,
which boycotted the event (the auditorium was half empty). Of the 41
speakers at the event, only 5 dared to mention the word, "
Bayefsky notes the irony of the constant repetition of the mantra "Never Again" when we fail to give primacy to discussions of what that means in the contemporary situation for the Jewish state: "Jews everywhere are indebted to the willingness and ability of Israelis to live and breathe self-determination. When contemporary political issues are set aside and an affirmation of the centrality of the Jewish state's well-being is not key to a commemoration of the Holocaust, 'never again' is an empty phrase."
And so we return to Remembrance Day, 2009 in
Howard Rotberg is the author of The
Second Catastrophe: A Novel about a Book
and its Author (