Time for some common decency

I recently had a bit of an electronic dust-up over a post that I had planned. The issue was that I am seeing growing parallels between Germany in the 1930s and Canada in 2009. I quoted a speech given by Hitler and compared that with one given recently by Harper.

Well the veritable fecal material hit the rotating device. You might be able to guess the venom spit in my direction.

Let me tell a story that is overdue to be told.

My father was a big man -- big in heart and big in stature. He did not talk much about his life during WWII. He joined the Canadian army shortly after marrying my mother, then went off to “walk from Sicily to Holland.” He was one of the so-called D-Day dodgers, so called because by the time the allies were ready to launch D-Day, the dodgers were a bit occupied fighting Nazis and Italians a little further east. One story that I drew out of my father before he died was that his best friend in the world, a guy he had grown up with, got drunk with and chased girls with, was burned alive in a flaming tank during a battle. My father watched the conflagration without being able to do anything to save his friend (the tank was hit by a round and erupted immediately into flames). My father, that big, powerful and self-confident man, was moved to tears on telling the story.

Here is the point of my story. No one group has an exclusive ownership of the horrors of the Second World War. There were 6 million Jews killed in camps but there were also between 18 and 25 million Russians who died. Nearly 50,000 Canadians died, including my father’s best friend. It is estimated that as many as 78 million persons, civilian and military lost their lives during the six official years of the war.  No group escaped a gruesome war, including the over 7 million Germans, that some say could have been avoided if the signals in the 1930s had been heeded.

If I see parallels between Germany in 1935 and Canada in 2009, those observations should be acknowledged and analyzed on their own merit -- not washed through the morass of what was a grossly inhumane period and then dismissed on that basis.