Remember

How we study and remember history affects our world in the present. In other words, remembering and commemorating military history is a political act. For that reason, as Remembrance Day approaches, I think it's healthy to question how we remember our country's wars.

Remembrance Day in Canada typically focusses on Canadian and allied soldiers, especially those who were killed or injured in combat. Because all of Canada's wars in the 20th and 21st centuries have been fought overseas, far from the eyes of the Canadian public, we haven't witnessed first-hand the horrific toll war takes on civilians.

Modern wars often kill more civilians than combatants, and many of those who survive lose their homes, their jobs, their families and friends, even their limbs. Civilians don't sign up to live in a war zone, unlike soldiers paid to kill. They are left without choice, caught in the middle of state-sponsored violence.

Perhaps the best way to remember the horrors of war is to support those civilians who survived, and honour their loved ones who didn't.

Civilians such as Setsuko Thurlow and the hundreds of thousands of Hibakusha, people who survived the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Dare I say, even the millions of civilians whose lives were upended by NATO's invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.

But of course the government and the military don't want us to remember the civilian victims of our wars, because doing so inevitably reminds us that war is by nature cruel and unjust.