Le Jour du Souvenir

Today 11 November is Remembrance Day in Canada.

Here are some photos of the day in Ottawa. This year the Princess Royal, H.H. Princess Anne and her husband Admiral Tim Laurence were presiding the ceremony at the National War Memorial with
H.E. the Right Honourable the Governor General David Johnstone, Commander in Chief. The crowds are said to have been the largest in living memory for an 11 November, no doubt a response to the events of 22 October in Ottawa and 21 October in Quebec.

May 21, 1939 The National War Memorial is inaugurated by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother.

November 11, 2014 very large crowds at the Remembrance Day Ceremonies at the National War Memorial in Ottawa

The Governor General as Commander in Chief shaking hands with Veterans at the National War Memorial in Ottawa.

Soldiers of the Princess Patricia Canadian Light Infantry Regiment, wearing their Afghanistan Campaign Medal.

The Princess Royal, H.H. Princess Anne with the Governor General at Rideau Hall in Ottawa. She is examining a military medal she has just received.

This evening the tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the National War Memorial covered with poppies and flowers from Canadians as is the tradition each year. 

In the vaults of the Canadian War Museum

Today as a thank you to the volunteer guides of the Summer Program on the paintings of the First World War we were invited by the Coordinator of Volunteers of the Canadian War Museum on Le Breton Flats to an exceptional visit, a very rare event, to go underground to see where all the 84,000 artifacts of the Museum are kept and curated.

We were a small group of 12 people composed of volunteers from various other National Museums like myself who had come to help out with the Exhibits Witness and Transformations (1914-1918).
I was expecting a short visit maybe 30 minutes, sort of a general tour, we got a 90 minute tour to various rooms where various artifacts are kept in well humidified and temperature controlled rooms, look after by a staff of dedicated and knowledgeable people some of which are themselves volunteers with expert knowledge in one field or another.

We first went to see the room where the Lord Beaverbrook Canadian War Memorial Fund paintings are kept. We were able to see some pictures which were not part of the exhibit this Summer.

The Flag by John Byam Shaw, 1918. A dead Canadian Soldier wrap in the Flag of Canada at the time lying at the foot of an Imperial Lion (Britain) mourned by Canadians. A very large canvas, it has not been exhibited since 1919 when it was shown at the Royal Academy in London as part of the Canadian War paintings.

We were able to look through the collection. We then went to another room where 2 artists were preparing a diaporama of the battle of Passhendaele in Flanders, Belgium for the new exhibit which will open in November. They were working on figurines of soldiers in the 30 mm and 5 mm scale, amazing work they are doing. Recreating battle scenes in great detail. They have to hand paint each one by hand, incredible work.

Then on to the paper room where posters and sketches and small aquarelles are kept all in special boxes on shelves, again in a temperature controlled room. A lot of the drawings made by Canadian soldiers which were shown at the exhibit Witness have now been put away and will probably not be shown again for 40 years. Meaning I will never see them again in my lifetime. The paper used by the soldiers is 100 years old and all the artwork is very fragile, in most cases the paper used by the soldiers on the battlefield was not good quality, in many instances it was letter paper or scrapes of cardboard or scraps of cigarette cartons, whatever they could put their hands on. But such beautiful art work they did to express what they saw and how they felt, often with great humour despite the danger and death all around.

We then went to the weapons room, it was full of cannon balls, bombs of all kinds, torpedoes, a small submarine, World War one gun carriages, saddles for horses, etc... We got a short course on the difference between a Howitzer which has a short neck and a cannon which has a long neck. Then one person asked about how you load a cannon and how you put the fuse on the shell. So we got a demonstration, and I learned that you first fitted the fuse on top of the shell, then put the shell into the cannon and then this tubular pillow like device which explodes when the cannon is fired propelling the shell forward. Depending on the size of your cannon you could fire a shell up to 2 Km or more in distance.

Then someone asked if they could see the Sherman Tank, I like many people have heard of the Sherman Tank but had never seen one. There it was, it is about a third the size of a regular tank of today. Still it is pretty big and the model we have is a 1939 tank manufactured in Montreal. It is powered by gasoline and makes an incredible noise when the motor is started and lots of exhaust fumes.  Apparently it is difficult to start and you have to crank it by hand like the model T Ford.

There was also a very large German Gun manufactured by Krupp in Essen which is being restored and which will be part of the exhibit in November. We were shown deep indentations in the metal of the gun, this was made by shrapnel which killed the crew manning the gun.

We did not see the room where uniforms and flags are kept that in itself is also very interesting. All in all a good visit and I am very happy to have seen something that is not open to the public and can only be accessed on special permission.

www.warmuseum.ca

Sex, Power, War, Existentialism and one painter

For the last few months I have been working as a volunteer-interpret in the Summer Exhibit of Canadian War Art created by Lord Beaverbrook during the Great War 1914-1918.

Of the more than 400 Canadian paintings in the collection and numerous bronzes about the First World War, two exhibits have been put together. One is called Transformations and the other Witness, as the title indicate Witness is about Canadian soldiers at the Front who witnessed the war and left to posterity paintings and sketches of what they saw and experienced. The other exhibit Transformations is about two men who could not be more different one from the other, A.Y. Jackson and Otto Dix. Both painters and both soldiers during the war, one quickly became a War Artist in the employ of Lord Beaverbrook's program of the Canadian War Memorial Fund, the other a German soldier who fought for 4 long years as a machine gunner and painted to keep his mind off the horrors he witnessed every single day.

Copse in the evening, A.Y.Jackson, 1917

Dead Sentry, Otto Dix 

My dilemma if I can call it that is about how to present both men and draw comparison if possible on their differences and similarities. If A.Y. Jackson is fairly un-complicated, leading a quiet and long life painting landscape in a style that will not change much in 75 years. A man who went along with the Official Propaganda of Ottawa in Wars and in Peace, never rocking the boat, always accepting to be the agent of Officialdom, who became famous in his lifetime and immortal in the mind of Canadians, living in a stable and prosperous country. This is fairly easy to explain to visitors and it verges on the boring. Jackson's popularity ensures that you do not need to say much, visitors already have an opinion of the man, like most visitors remark, this is one of the Group of 7 Painters right? NO it's not the group of 7 yet, we are speaking of a time well before all that. In most cases people know the name but not the painter.

What I make a point of explaining is that this collection of Canadian War Art (1914-1918) and the team of Canadian painters hired and paid for by Lord Beaverbrook, allowed people like Jackson, Varley and Lismer to become famous and form after the Armistice in 1919 the Group of Seven. Without this idea by Beaverbrook we would not have an archive of Canada's war effort and this also gave a tremendous boost to the development of Canadian Art and painters.  Suddenly there was amongst Canadians this understanding that we also produced art, no need to look to Europe. Recognition came of a new exclusively Canadian School of Painting.

On the other hand Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix (1891-1969) is a very complex person, brutally honest to the point of embarrassment, with views and opinions and an ever changing painting style. Living through two World Wars, Nazi dictatorship and the Cold War, dying in 1969 a disillusion man thinking that Death was the only Victor in the end.

Victory of Death, Otto Dix

How to explain Dix to visitors, when visitors know so little about him and German history in general outside of the usual platitudes we have been fed for the last 70 to 100 years. Not to mention the philosophical aspects of his painting style taken from the writing of Friedrich Nietzche and early theories of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud on the mind and human behaviour.  How do you do this in a few minutes trying desperately not to confuse the audience and keep their attention. More than one visitor mentioned they had seen the movie ''The Monument men'' as if this was a testament to their knowledge or lack there of. The fact that many visitors are already thinking 1939-1945 Second World War, you must constantly bring them back to the fact that we are speaking of the Great War and not of events closer to them. Most have forgotten that there was a war between 1914-1918, there are no movies with Hollywood starlets to explain it all.

Otto Dix requires that you ask yourself questions, something the public is not always ready or willing to do, after all they come to the museum to be entertained not to reflect on life and its meaning or lack thereof.  Also the act of going to a museum for many is foreboding, it is not that people are not interested, no, but they do feel insecure about what they know and do not know. Many realize they do not know much about anything.

Melancholie, Otto Dix

Many of Dix paintings have a sexual and violent overtone, speak of regeneration and hope, of death and war. Existentialism plays a part in his work, it is not possible to look at a Dix painting and not think about the meaning of Existentialism. Dix sees himself as an acting, feeling, living human individual. As he said himself I paint for the common man not the well thinking bourgeois or the profiteers. His Existential Attitude comes from a sense of confusion, of disorientation in the face of an apparently meaningless and absurd world in which he lived and we lived in the XXth Century.

He will enter the First World War as an enthusiastic Patriot, defending the Great German Empire, but being a Machine gunner, having the ability of killing hundreds in a matter of a few minutes will quickly turn him into a fierce critic of a society and world gone mad, full of lies and cynicism. Dix will come to feel he is the tool of the powerful, the Capitalist, the War profiteers, seeing so many of his comrades killed or left to die in the mud, picked at by rats. So horrified he was by the spectacle of war that like many ordinary soldiers, he came to hate those in charge of the War. A feeling shared by British and Canadian Soldiers alike. Then returning home to a Germany in crisis, poverty everywhere, a society in crisis, he decides to denounce the hypocrisy he sees all around him. He will make powerful enemies in German Society.

Lust murder, Otto Dix a painting he offered to his wife Martha. This painting hanged in the family dining room of their home in Hemmenhofen am Bodensee.

Victims of Capitalism, Otto Dix, 1923.

Here we see a prostitute disfigured by venereal disease and a veteran with a wound. The message being that capitalism profits by using the bodies of others.

The wounded veteran, Otto Dix. 

Wounds from shrapnel in WW I were more devastating because the piece of metal were large, this type of wound was common.

A.Y. Jackson will paint landscapes of the war on the battlefields but as he wrote to friends, ''I will not show the horror of battle and the dead'', he did not want to, he explained that it was not up to him to explain the war, he was paid to paint it for a future archive. Arthur Lismer and Frederick Varley had no such reserve, they will use their art to criticize often callous and remote Politicians in Ottawa and the General Staff in London. Their art work is so controversial that it is still in storage to this day at the Canadian War Museum.

Visitors also look for poppies that red flower weed that grows in fields everywhere in May and June. Jackson does not use them in his paintings, he paints red Maple Leafs. The visitors are looking for something comforting and easily recognizable in this exhibit. Many simply say, Oh they were so young, it is so sad, but they do not go beyond that in trying to understand the meaning of these paintings.

For Canadians the poppy is a symbol of remembrance but not for the rest of Europe with the exception of France and Britain. For the Germans the poppy is an erotic symbol and when Dix paints deep trenches with poppies growing on top what he really is painting is a woman's genitalia and the poppies are a sexual symbol of arousal. Now how do you explain that to the visitors who are asking. A delicate situation for sure, the image is one of war and death and here is sexual imagery.
Sex and Death, Power and Death, Re-birth the cycle of life, not an easy topic to broach with any museum visitor who thinks, oh I am going to see War action paintings. In fact I have noticed that most visitors will not look at the Dix paintings and concentrate on the more palatable A.Y. Jackson, maybe because he confirms what they know or have been told. Otto Dix said once, I did not paint war  pictures in order to prevent war, I would never have been so arrogant. I painted them to exorcise the experience of war. All art is about exorcism.

Flanders, Otto Dix

Throughout his life Dix will return to this imagery time and again, in his portraits he will emphasize the grotesque, the ugly in his subjects even when is subjects are known to have been very handsome. All in keeping with his rejection of the Conservatism Petit Bourgeois attitude found in Germany after 1919, the many failures of the Weimar Republic and also in opposition to National Socialism ideology who as of 1933 will put Germany again on a war path. His subjects male and female are depicted as wasted and pathetic, leading a self-destructive life full of random violence, an analogy to Germany at the time. But also Dix said, I paint the beautiful and the ugly because that is the reality of life, both are present in our world.

In the period 1919-1933, he will describe himself as Mack the Knife, the Character of the Three Penny Opera of Bertold Brecht. The world he paints is that of the prostitutes, brothels, cabaret, the Demi-monde of Berlin, though he is a celebrated artist, his paintings hang in all major museums, he is a professor at the Art Academy in Dresden and is married and has several children, Nelly, Ursus, Jan and a daughter by his mistress of 40 years, Katherina. Difficult to reconcile for visitors.

 Otto Dix and his wife and children Nelly and Ursus, 1927

Nelly Dix, daughter of the painter in 1940

Another question often asked by visitors is why did Dix remain in Germany after 1933, why did he not leave like so many did.  I do not have to defend his choices, though he chose internal exile in Germany and he went to live near Lake Constance near the border with Switzerland, first in Randegg Castle and then in a villa in Hemmenhofen, leading a self-effacing life in a small village. He had a family, small children, he had all his paintings stored in Germany and money, He knew that leaving the Nazi regime would have taken everything he had, he would have been destitute with a wife and kids in a foreign land, a terrible prospect, we can empathize, however sone visitors are very critical of his decision to stay in Germany. Today 80 years after the fact it is easy to judge the actions of people like Dix. His career as a painter was destroyed as of 1933 and after the war in 1946 he will not be able to re-start his career though he will be famous, his painting style no longer in fashion.
I believe that most people even when faced with imminent disaster are not able to simply walk away from everything and this is what Dix would have had to do.

Of his family I have discovered that his son Ursus moved with his English wife to 40 Julian street in Ottawa and became an art restored at the National Gallery of Canada, he died in 2002 while riding his bicycle struck by a car.  His youngest son Jan live still in Hemmenhofen and manages the house of his parents now a museum. Katherina is also alive and lives in an apartment in Germany full of her father's paintings. Grandson Geoffrey Dix, a medical doctor, works at the Heart Institute in Ottawa.

Artists should not try to improve or convert. They are too insignificant for that. They must only bear witness.   Otto Dix

Art is given to us to prevent us from dying from Truth. Friedrich Nietzche

If Life is a comedy for Otto Dix it was a Grotesque Farce or as he probably would say himself, Life is Life and Art is Art.
So I continue my search on how to approach this subject and finding a clear explanation to Dix without scaring the horses on the public square.

Otto Dix Self-Portrait with easel

Talking about Syria

Yesterday, Saturday 24 August, which is still summer vacation time, in Europe most people are still at the beach, here in Canada people are also on vacation, thinking of other things and not looking at the ''hard'' news, we could read in the local paper that Stevie Harper was talking with Cameron of Britain and Hollande of France about Syria. I wonder what did the conversation sound like given that all 3 men have different agendas politically in 3 very different countries. Where they responding to the grumblings in the Obama White House? The US Government is itching for a fight with Russia after the Snowden affair, tempest in a tea pot perhaps?

Last week there were reports that a poison gas attack had taken place in Syria and that scores of people were dead and even more injured. Capitals were assessing if any of it was true. Suddenly French reporters started to present in their news stories detailed reports of poison gas attacks describing the symptoms of victims. None of these reporters where on site, no, they instead picked-up the detailed accounts from gossip heard on the Internet and pieced it all together. Allegations that 2 French reporters brought back samples, really? A bit like your Aunt Maud hanging the wash and hearing neighbourhood gossip over the clothes line.

Syria on Sunday agreed to having UN inspectors look at the alleged site of the attack, the White House says ''It is too late'', an almost Bush Era like response. So we will never know if there was or not a poison gas attack. Does it matter, the goal appears to be to get rid of Assad and give a blow to Hezbollah and Iran. I would counsel patience, let the UN team do its work and if it is demonstrated that poison gas was used then decide what to do. But before doing anything think of the consequences and what might happen next. Public Opinion is not pushing for a quick solution.

Again the media in general is more than happy to trumpet whatever the politicians will claim to be the reason for this attack. In the past 20 years the following reasons where given, #1 must eliminate weapons of mass destruction, #2 bring democracy to the region, #3 bring prosperity to the region, #4 educate girls (boys are never mentioned, they apparently do not deserve education), #5 Uphold human rights, #6 win minds and hearts, #7 Defending our National Interests.

I remember after the First Gulf War (1991) when Iraq under Saddam Hussein was forced to retreat and leave Kuwait, the Media announced that the USA had brought democracy to Kuwait because Kuwaitis loved Fast Food and Shopping malls, they were just like us, they want to breathe Freedom.

Of course Freedom, Democracy, Promotion of Western Feminist ideals and Education for girls are all good popular ideals to throw into the debate, the public can see that the goals are noble. We do not need to ask ourselves hard questions or understand that we are dealing with societies unlike ours and societies that are evolving under very different circumstances and a history very different from ours. In other words, we have little in common. What we want for them is not what they want, we did not ask them, we simply imposed our views on them. More and more it smacks of New Colonialism disguised under new words, slogans, colours and banners but is in fact the same old story. Colonialism did not die in 1960, it simply went into a slumber like Sleeping Beauty.

Intervention in Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Libya and now possibly Syria did not change anything to the lives of the people of those countries, it only made things worse, much worse.

Intervention in Syria is not to help Syrians, it is about getting back at Iran and it's proxy army Hezbollah. Many of whom are Canadian Citizens with families in the Greater Toronto Area, thanks to our blind and generous immigration policies. It is also to make a point with Russia's Putin, Syria has always been a pawn in Cold War Politics and it remains a pawn to this day. It's a cynical game between Russia and the USA. France also has a stake in the region as it sees Lebanon and Syria as old colonies. But France has been kept on the sidelines in the Middle-East by the USA and this creates a lot of friction between France and the USA.
The French are still trying to position themselves in this game. Let's not forget how in Iraq, France tried and failed to protect its Oil contracts with Saddam and how they sheltered for years in France the Ayatollah Khomeini going so far as to fly him on a special Air France flight to Iran in 1979. Britain also has an role or a hand in all this since Ottoman times. In such disputes the UK are the strong ally of the USA.

What I do not understand here is the involvement of Canadian PM Harper in this debate. A man who has repeatedly shown how little he understands in World Affairs, is he even interested beyond the photo-op? Canada has never had anything more than a small role in the Middle-East and in terms of Foreign Policy we have been fence sitters, refusing to take sides until recently when Prime Minister Harper decided that we would change course and put ourselves squarely behind Israël and support wholeheartedly Prime Minister Netenyahu, come Hell or High Water.

Again in what way does this enhance our Canadian National Interests is not clear. It does enhance the political profile of Mr. Harper and partisan politics is what he is all about. Canada did very well in Afghanistan and we did make an important contribution, what will be the lasting legacy of that intervention is uncertain at best. It is for the Afghani people to decide what they want for their future. It is clear though that we did not need to get involved, it was not a peace keeping mission as initially explained by Mr. Harper. We were not involved in Iraq our Prime Minister then, Jean Chretien refusing to go along with the USA.

In Libya, Canada was the master of the skies, our Air Force was stationed in Trapani, Sicily, again we did very well, though the final goal beyond getting rid of the troublesome Qaddafi and company was not clear. No one, who is knowledgeable about the ground situation in Libya expected democracy to blossom. The Libyans would be grateful we were told, really? The public had to be told that we were pursuing a peaceful and democratic solution in Libya. However politicians have used this excuse so often that very few still believe that our goals are noble, its all about power politics and influence, the public has become increasingly cynical of what politicians have to say.

I do not see Canadians in favour of our involvement in Syria, an involvement which would complicate our clouded Foreign Policy. Harper will have to explain how involving our armed forces or more likely our Air Force in Syria which is an expensive enterprise in difficult fiscal times as the Prime Minister likes to say, would be of any benefit. We are well on our way in 2013 in creating a new budget deficit larger than last year while our PM is trying to tell us that he is desperately trying to balance the books which he has not done in 8 years in power. What would we gain from such an intervention. I could see pandering to the Lebanese-Syrian Community in Canada and to the Iranian diaspora in a cynical political game for votes, beyond that not much.

We have to accept that trying to re-arrange the world order by massive military intervention is not a solution. Some conflicts no matter how horrible and devastating in far away lands are none of our business. The idea that we have an international obligation to intervene is bunk. Sometimes conflicts exist for reasons beyond our understanding and I would advocate in such case the Chinese approach, not to meddle in the internal affairs of other countries, especially when it does not threaten our Sovereignty and or our vital National Interests.















  

reporting and social media

Modern media outlets face many challenges one being with the Internet news travel fast, much faster than before and the enormous amount of news being seen at any given moment in the world is more than any human being can reasonably absorb. Meaning that any journalist must produce and be on his or her proverbial toes all the time. Some journalists here I follow in Ottawa are on Twitter all the time, they report what they hear and comment, though in 140 characters.

So editors decided to report only on news that will be of most interest to its readers. Per example hurricane Sandy travelled a very large distance and crossed and touched many countries, in the end all you heard was how Sandy had devastated New York City. What it did elsewhere in the Caribbean or in other US States or cities or even how it ended up in Canada was barely mentioned.
An almost universal decision was made to talk only about NYC because most news readers could understand the story quickly. Do editors talk to each other or merely follow what the other guy is doing. It seems that quickly is also the operative word in the news nowadays, this leads to often to factual errors and other mistakes, hard to correct once the story is out.

In the Arab Spring context, editors and journalists have labelled the different parties, in the arab world they are usually called rebels or militants, the word terrorist is not use because the rebels or militants fight an established authority in their own country. They would be terrorists if they attacked foreigners.
However there is no time for context to explain how or why this happened. Take Nigeria where groups have planted bombs and attacked civilians, these incidents are described as a fight between Muslims in the North and Christians in the South, in reality it is about land distribution, property rights and perceived injustices, the religious part of it is another issue not necessarily connected to this economic one. It would be too difficult to start explaining to the public at large the economic discrepancies of a country like Nigeria, so the media stick to the easy religious explanation though it is not factual.

The civil war in Syria is another example, a minority the Alawites have ruled Syria for 45 years and run the country like a mafia fief, ruining the economy in the process and setting the country up as a haven for various violent groups who could use their base in Damascus with impunity. Syria a transit point between Iran and Lebanon. Such detailed explanation of the situation would be too complicated and most news readers barely know where Syria is on a map.

This approach makes serious or grave news trivial matters. Everything is so quick and so simplified that our basic understanding goes out the proverbial window and the average person starts to think in terms of black and white issues. Also it de-humanizes the persons involved in such conflicts, they are so far away from us and we have such little understanding of them that generalities start taking precedence over hard facts. One fanatic becomes millions of fanatics or an entire countries population can all be put in one bag because it is all the same, an example Iran, all Iranians must be fanatics given the government they have, final conclusion is, they are not like us.

We now have the situation with Gaza in the middle-east which to me geographically would be more accurately described as the Near East but the media has made the middle-east a grab bag of all the countries from Morocco to Iran, easier for simple folks to understand. Leading a lot of people to automatically assume that Turks and Iranians are also Arabs because they are Muslims. A bit like saying that all Catholics are Italian. Forgetting that in all those countries in the grab bag that is dubbed the Middle-East you have ancient Christian and Jewish populations, though small still they are there and have been part of the fabric for a long time. Yes there are Palestinian Christians and Iraqi Jews and Christians and Egyptian Jews and Christians. But the media will not talk of this so as not to confuse the basic simplistic message of good against evil. Thus instead of informing the media spreads ignorance and stereotypes.

Here is Canada we have a similar situation, the media has always divided the country between the English and the French. Very simplistic but so much easier to do, spreading stereotypes and falsehoods all around. It continues to this day, despite the fact that we are now a multi-ethnic and multi-lingual nation. There is nothing quite like a good stereotype to get the readers agitated and confused.

So in the latest reporting on the eternal conflict between the Israeli government against the Palestinians, they became Militants or is Hamas the Militants, what does the word militant mean? The Libyans are described as rebels to this day despite the fact that Ghaddafi is gone from power. Why then the word militants instead of simply the Palestinians in Gaza. At any rate this is not explained and neither is it explained that the millions living in that little strip of land called Gaza are just ordinary folks who cannot exit, leave or do anything, they are captive since the borders are closed by Israël. But you could be excused if you thought that all Palestinians where with the militants or worse. Do the Palestinians desire peace and a better life in a secure country, yes, they all do like any human being, but that is rarely discussed by the media.

The media loves to use all kinds of images and words to inject meaning, the other day a reporter for the CBC spoke of the Sacred City being shelled, then in the next phrased used Jerusalem. Sacred to whom, did this reporter mean Jews, Christians and Muslims? No she meant to the Israelis. Another CBC reporter called Jerusalem the Capital of Israel, not correct, Tel Aviv is the capital of modern Israel.
Ancient Biblical texts do not make international law today.

Then the BBC got into the act and presents lopsided reporting, it would appear from the perspective of the BBC News that Israel is far more at risk and suffers far more than anyone in Gaza. Given the terrible living conditions in Gaza compared to modern affluent Israel, one wonders where does this comparison come from. What is missing is the context, what Gaza is really like as a place to live for millions of people, a huge poor ghetto where people are contained in squalor and surrounded by a powerful modern, well equipped Israëli army who is preparing to invade, up to 75,000 soldiers ready to march and already staging an invasion. Given the population density of Gaza it is going to be a civilian blood bath.

The New York Times has a series of photos showing the two sides of that border, in Israel people lead modern affluent lives, this could be Florida. One photo shows a young women in a luxury car, talking on her cell phone next to a huge army tank, another photo shows Israeli citizens in a shelter, all are well dressed, they look worried but otherwise the photo could be a community centre in North America.

On the other side of the border in Gaza, people are poorly dressed, dirty, amongst ruins, desperate scared, some are injured looking bewildered, this is the third world. One comment says that a family has gathered together so if Israel attacks they will at least die together. All is devastation and despair, so far 45 civilians have been killed and 390 injured, medical support is weak due to the economic and military siege of Gaza by Israel. There is something totally unnerving about such photos and the inequality is stark.

What is truly obscene, is the IDF, Israel Defence Force on social media justifying their actions against civilians. Even if you accept that in politics and war there is no morality and no ethical behaviour, in the 21 century, there are laws on how civilians will be treated. Israel claims to be a modern state ruled by laws and says it abides by international treaties, so then why the social media PR campaign to try to justify its actions. I am not convinced and find no credibility in the explanations given by Israel so far on action in Gaza. It is not the first time in the last 35 years that Israel has launched military campaigns in the region against much weaker rivals.

Despite the fact that Israel claims it is only defending itself, an editorial yesterday in the Jerusalem Post by Gershon Baskin entitled ''Israel shortsighted assassination'' says that this campaign is not what it appears and Israel provoked this crisis by killing Al-Jabari, Security Chief of Hamas. An election is coming next year in Israel, PM Netanyahu wants to retain power at all cost and this type of action is a vote getter amongst the fanatical settlers and other groups who would like ''a final solution'' to the Palestinian question. He is politically in trouble and his war mongering against Iran during the USA Election campaign and his open support of Mitt Romney backfired badly so now he has to try something else.

We can still be hopeful that some foreign government will call Israel's bluff and refuse to look the other way. The argument of self-defence does not hold water anymore. It is high time for the Israeli government to find a true path to peace and a living arrangement with its neighbours, bellicose attitudes will not do.

Salute to a brave and modest nation!

Salute to a brave and modest nation - Kevin Myers , 'The Sunday Telegraph'
LONDON :

Until the deaths of Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan , probably
almost no one outside their home country had been aware that Canadian troops
are deployed in the region.

And as always, Canada will bury its dead, just as the rest of the world, as
always will forget its sacrifice, just as it always forgets nearly everything Canada ever does..
It seems that Canada's historic mission is to come to the selfless aid both
of its friends and of complete strangers, and then, once the crisis is over,
to be well and truly ignored.

Canada is the perpetual wallflower that stands on the edge of the hall,
waiting for someone to come and ask her for a dance. A fire breaks out, she
risks life and limb to rescue her fellow dance-goers, and suffers serious injuries. 
But when the hall is repaired and the dancing resumes, there is Canada, the wallflower
still, while those she once helped glamorously cavort across the floor, blithely
neglecting her yet again.

That is the price Canada pays for sharing the North American continent with
the United States , and for being a selfless friend of Britain in two global
conflicts.

For much of the 20th century, Canada was torn in two different directions:
It seemed to be a part of the old world, yet had an address in the new one,
and that divided identity ensured that it never fully got the gratitude it deserved.

Yet its purely voluntary contribution to the cause of freedom in two world
wars was perhaps the greatest of any democracy. Almost 10% of Canada's
entire population of seven million people served in the armed forces during the First World
War, and nearly 60,000 died. The great Allied victories of 1918 were spearheaded by
Canadian troops, perhaps the most capable soldiers in the entire British
order of battle.

Canada was repaid for its enormous sacrifice by downright neglect, its
unique contribution to victory being absorbed into the popular memory as
somehow or other the work of the 'British.'

The Second World War provided a re-run. The Canadian navy began the war with
a half dozen vessels, and ended up policing nearly half of the Atlantic
against U-boat attack. More than 120 Canadian warships participated in the Normandy
landings, during which 15,000 Canadian soldiers went ashore on D-Day alone.

Canada finished the war with the third-largest navy and the fourth largest
air force in the world. The world thanked Canada with the same sublime
indifference as it had the previous time.

Canadian participation in the war was acknowledged in film only if it was
necessary to give an American actor a part in a campaign in which the United
States had clearly not participated - a touching scrupulousness which, of course,
Hollywood has since abandoned, as it has any notion of a separate Canadian
identity.

So it is a general rule that actors and filmmakers arriving in Hollywood
keep their nationality - unless, that is, they are Canadian. Thus Mary
Pickford, Walter Huston,Donald Sutherland, Michael J. Fox, William Shatner, Norman Jewison, David
Cronenberg, Alex Trebek, Art Linkletter, Mike Weir and Dan Aykroyd have in
the popular perception become American, and Christopher Plummer, British.

It is as if, in the very act of becoming famous, a Canadian ceases to be
Canadian, unless she is Margaret Atwood, who is as unshakably Canadian as a
moose, or Celine Dion, for whom Canada has proved quite unable to find any takers.

Moreover, Canada is every bit as querulously alert to the achievements of
its sons and daughters as the rest of the world is completely unaware of
them. The Canadians proudly say of themselves - and are unheard by anyone else - that
1% of the world's population has provided 10% of the world's peacekeeping
forces.

Canadian soldiers in the past half century have been the greatest
peacekeepers on Earth - in 39 missions on UN mandates, and six on non-UN
peacekeeping duties, from Vietnam to East Timor, from Sinai to Bosnia.

Yet the only foreign engagement that has entered the popular non-Canadian
imagination was the sorry affair in Somalia , in which out-of-control
paratroopers murdered two Somali infiltrators. Their regiment was then disbanded in
disgrace - a uniquely Canadian act of self-abasement for which, naturally,
the Canadians received no international credit.

So who today in the United States knows about the stoic and selfless
friendship its northern neighbour has given it in Afghanistan ?

Rather like Cyrano de Bergerac , Canada repeatedly does honourable things
for honourable motives, but instead of being thanked for it, it remains
something of a figure of fun. It is the Canadian way, for which Canadians should be proud,
yet such honour comes at a high cost. This past year more grieving Canadian
families knew that cost all too tragically well.

Lest we forget.