John Robson: As They Were Ready to Serve, So We Must Be

Commentary When I was a kid, Remembrance Day was a widely observed tribute to a bygone era, and to people who had shown a particular kind of virtue and dedication we wouldn’t be needing any more. It was heartfelt, including because virtue and dedication generally were still needed. But war? All gone. I realize Francis Fukuyama didn’t proclaim the end of history until 1989. But the still-hale veterans of World War I who showed up in my youth, and of  World War II who were still showing up until quite recently, had done what they did, suffered what they did, and left behind so many comrades because of a world in which conquest by tyrants was still the grave peril it had been from time immemorial, and democracies had been caught napping as it loomed. By the 1960s it was supposedly no longer so (as in 1921 according to Canada’s Prime Minister Arthur Meighan.)...