Canada and Other Matters of Opinion (16 page)

Four years after the Taliban were deposed, even after Afghanistan made the first steps to building a democracy, that country is still under threat from forces, both Taliban and others, who do not wish to see that result and who are on a campaign to demoralize Afghans, destabilize their government, intimidate their citizens and drive from Afghanistan all those who are assisting its democratic growth.

Those forces must be fought. The first principle of establishing a representative government in Afghanistan is to fight those who would deny it: the Taliban, remnants of al-Qaeda and the so-called insurgents. There is no other way that the secondary parts of the mission, the more benign or peacekeeping operations, can be performed.

So, we are at war. We are at war because we acknowledge our own interest in Afghanistan and because, as Canadians,
we see the value of extending, if we can, some measure of liberty and democracy to a people who have not tasted those virtues. The campaign in Afghanistan can be seen as harmonious with the liberation efforts that Canadian forces, to their honour, were associated with in the far more enormous campaigns of the First and Second World Wars. That, as I see it, is the rationale of our mission in Afghanistan. To the extent that a majority of Canadians accept these goals and fully appreciate and understand them, the mission will have the kind of support outside Parliament that is necessary to maintain it.

Achieving that appreciation and understanding will take far more, however, than the very mixed effort in Parliament last week.

I was never an
X-Files
fan. Agents Mulder and Scully grimly walked through hundreds of episodes, wearily tearing away at the flimsy curtain the rest of us call “reality,” whispering of cover-ups, UFOs, secret agencies within secret agencies, and powerful forces “out there,” and I was happy to have missed almost every one of them.

Moody and Sullen, as one bright parodist renamed them, were knights errant of the paranormal and the paranoid. Though relentlessly grey, brooding and portentous,
The X-Files
made a sweet pitch to adolescent minds (of all ages) with its signature motto: “The Truth Is Out There.” Capital letters mandatory. (It’s not philosophy unless it’s in capital letters.)

The X-Files
was fast food for the conspiracy gluttons, the intellectually lazy who relish the frisson of some exotic theory of “hidden others” who have arranged the world, and all that happens in it, in dark code:
they
with their laboratories and computers,
they
with their power and money,
they
with their secret societies (think
The Da Vinci Code
), run everything. In other words, the world is a puppet show run by dark and hidden adepts of power and politics, and only a few—the conspiracy-mongers—have peeped behind the occluding screen.

The assassination of John F. Kennedy, now nearly forty years on, has spawned a literature of suspicion and conjecture of intimidating bulk and mass. The “grassy knoll” and the “second gunman” have inspired more plots than the entire membership of the International Association of Crime Writers. It’s a law of this kind of thinking: the further from the event under scrutiny, the more mountainous the unhinged speculation surrounding it.

Except—except for September 11, 2001. I would have thought that the horrors of that day, the magnitude of the attacks, the immense coverage of the actual crashes into the towers, the even more immense coverage in the days after, had evacuated September 11 of all mystery and speculation. We know that day too well.

We swiftly learned the identities of all nineteen hijackers. We saw, in (alas) real time, the buildings collapse; we saw the heroic efforts of firefighters and police in New York; we have since read and heard of the numerous cellphone conversations before the brave passengers of Flight 93 tried to wrest control of the doomed jet from the hijackers. We have even seen the video of Osama bin Laden wherein he gloatingly narrates the success of his mission, takes pride in his drear accomplishment.

What else is there, the reasonable mind pleads to ask? But no. The questioning of 9/11 is a full-blown industry on the Internet. The buildings didn’t collapse because two fuel-loaded jets crashed into them; a missile, not another jet, hit the Pentagon; Flight 93 was brought down with a missile—the fantasies spin on. Books have been written telling the “real truth” of that day.

One truly bizarre, or comic, online posting conducts an experiment (with pictures) using rabbit wire, a concrete cinder block and a container of kerosene to “prove” the steel pillars of the twin towers would not have melted in the fires that followed the crash. Engineers who visited this site have left jibbering and in tears.

Bush was behind 9/11. The Israelis were behind 9/11. Bush and the Israelis and a neo-con cabal were behind 9/11. Osama didn’t do it. Thousands of people engineered a controlled demolition of the towers; the hijacked jets crashing into them were no more than an elaborate version of the street magician’s “bait and switch.”

I cannot comprehend what tilt of mind refuses the tidal wave of tragic facts about that horrible day in favour of near-lunatic and unmoored speculation. The answer must be that the hatred of U.S. President George Bush has, among the most strident of those who despise him, reached incandescent proportions and has merged with that strain of freewheeling paranoia that is an undercurrent of much of our modern times. Hating Mr. Bush ferociously, and believing so firmly that the truth is always “Out There” (never in front of your face), has produced a monstrous fable of conspiracy, cover-up, sinister motivations of an all-controlling apparatus that has abused the world and engaged in two wars (Iraq and Afghanistan), all for some agenda that works for the benefit of (who else?) Israel and the Jews.

The 9/11 conspiracy theories—whether those who peddle them are aware of it or not—trail in the spurious and repulsive wake of that arch-conspiracy, the demented Protocols of the Elders of Zion. One would have thought the last century had got us past that delirious and hate-nourished fantasy-hoax.

The mighty of the Earth—presidents, kings, queens and diplomats—were drawn to Rome this week. For a few days, it seemed the ancient capital was reliving the days of its early power and glory, when it was the heart of the greatest empire of its day, and when the coronation or the death of an emperor summoned the potentates of all the then known world.

That spectacle in ancient days was the requisite homage exerted by earthly dominion, the obsequious response of vassal states and client rulers to a great imperial machine.

Imperial Rome, the Rome of the Caesars, was mighty and disciplined. Obeisance was the necessary coin of satellites and satraps to the overwhelming predominance of manifest power.

It is almost chilling that, nearly two thousand years after Augustus, after all that has changed over that vast time, this same city should, even for a few days, become again the
epicentre of the world’s focus, and that the highest representatives of the world’s more powerful and wealthy nations, together with those of some of the world’s weakest and most miserable, have been drawn almost irresistibly once more to that venerable capital.

For reasons vastly different, however. John Paul II was no Augustus Caesar. The insolent taunt of murderous Stalin, which was recalled so many times in the past seven days—How many divisions does the Pope command?—was its own answer. Of power, in the sense Stalin used the word and abused its exercise, John Paul II had none. Yet where is wretched Stalin now, for all his legions? Darkening the darker pages of history, remembered as a monster.

So it was not power, not the leverage of a great military, or that other power of great wealth to which the world so frequently offers obliging genuflection, that summoned those kings, queens and presidents. The death of a pope, even a great one, does not shatter alliances, rearrange the pieces on the chessboard—those days, too, are long past.

The leaders of almost the entire world (China being the churlish exception, but then, China is still yoked to decayed communism) presented themselves because they had watched and seen, over two and a half decades, that this pontiff presented himself in a uniquely special way to all the world. They had seen that a man holding the highest office of what very many regard as an anachronistic institution—and representing what very many equally regard as an outmoded idea, ethos and practice, that of religion—exercised
a sublime ability to move and enter into the spirit of millions and millions of people.

In the great fury of this modern secular age, in a world freighted with injustice, shadowed by terrorism and frantic with the thirst for speed, novelty and distraction, Pope John Paul II, by the example of his person and by the immensity of his ability to communicate, was the singular example of a kind of integrity that most had thought had long since vanished.

Egoless, direct, transparent, resolute—there are a host of personal attributes of this remarkable man—he reached into millions of hearts of every condition and faith, and into the hearts of many agnostics and even atheists as well.

It is not a phenomenon that will be unriddled—unless, of course, the world is prepared to understand it on his terms, on the terms of his faith in Christ and on his understanding of faith itself. That, for those outside the circle of Catholicism, is almost certainly a bridge too far, especially in our corner of the world, in the tumultuously secular West. A culture that offers intellectual hospitality to the chatterings of Dr. Phil and the romps of
Desperate Housewives
doesn’t have the stamina to pursue the idea of faith and its agency.

But the record is there. Before the advent of this man, the world was living nightmarishly the terrible equilibrium of the Cold War and the ever-present anxiety of a nuclear holocaust. Suddenly (in retrospect, it seems almost over-night), beginning in Poland, Russian communism was gone,
and a score of countries and their citizens unshackled from totalitarian tyranny. The massive structure of a great antireligious dispensation collapsed and vanished.

And all of was this traceable, in part it is true, but also inescapably, to the presence of this one figure, whose only force—besides those delightfully caparisoned Swiss Guards—was unadorned belief.

The operation of the intangible on the tangible, of the pulses of the spirit on the reality of the world, is the dynamic of faith. John Paul II radiated a faith so plain and deep that it shattered what was, at bottom, simply false and cruel.

Which is why, during this week, Rome is again for a time the centre of the world. Why millions have stood in line merely to pass this pope one last time, and why the mighty and the powerful find it irresistible not to acknowledge, by their presence, that a marvel has been among us.

The death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn was the passing of a human-rights giant. There are few individuals, writers or otherwise, who even approach his stature as an opponent of repression and tyranny. Solzhenitsyn belongs to a very select set of people whose courage and example lit the darkness of the century just past, among whom are Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King and Gandhi.

Here in the contemporary West, the phrase “speaking truth to power” all too often drops from the lips of some self-regarding protester, the ravings of 9/11 “truthers,” or a Hollywood B-lister taking on “Big Oil.” Michael Moore was, I believe, hailed as speaking truth to power when he “took on” the world’s easiest and favourite target, George Bush, and played to the tuxedoed Amen corner at the Cannes Film Festival. That the film he made was mendacious, that its thesis was a guaranteed applause line, that there was not a one-in-a-billion chance he would “suffer” from making
Fahrenheit 9/11
, shows how empty, how deflated, the application of that once so potent phrase has become. Speaking mush to millions is more like it.

How different the life and example of Solzhenitsyn, though even juxtaposing the commercial propagandist Moore and the Soviet hero makes me cringe—mosquitoes and eagles don’t belong on the same page. A few references to Stalin in a letter (one a description of the tyrant as “the whiskered one”) was enough to have the army hero
Solzhenitsyn sentenced to eight years and internal exile for life. There was a “human-rights” violation. A Soviet soldier makes a few wisecracks in a letter and gets sent off to the horrors and deprivations of the Stalinist labour camps.

We in the West don’t know of such things. For all the inanities, incompetence and disappointments of our politics, and however much on our worst and most cynical days we deplore their glide into artful contests between barely disguised twins (Democrat-Republican, Liberal-Conservative, who can tell the difference?), we have been so secured from the true horrors of unfettered state power that we barely understand how good we actually have it.