I turned on the radio on November 11th, 2020 in order to hear something about Remembrance Day. Within a minute or two I heard the host, a male, say this: “On this day we pause to remember the women and men….” I don’t know exactly how that sentence ended because those few words were so belittling to the men who fought and died in the wars that the rest of the sentence was obscured by the fog of anger running through my mind.
Putting women before men as soldiers to be remembered is not a matter of a CBC host being polite and chivalrous. It is the CBC putting women before men because at the CBC men are systemically hated. That the CBC host was free to mention the men first in that sentence—this is doubtful. The CBC is so authoritarian that that was probably not an option. If he spoke like this without being told to do so, it is almost enough to make us believe that he is of a third gender— call it ‘sissy-man,’ ‘girlie-man,’ or ‘fifi-man’ or some other moniker that would make you imagine some unmanly form of manhood.
Did women die in battle in WW1? They did not. Did women die in battle in WW2? They did not. Did women die in battle in Korea? They did not. Did women die in battle in Afghanistan? At least one Canadian woman did. But even if many women had died in battle in that war, there would be no justification for saying that we pause on Remembrance Day to remember ‘the women and men.’ The right thing to do would be to say, not that ‘we pause to remember the women and men,’ not even that ‘we pause to remember the men and women,’ but simply that ‘we pause to remember the men.’ The word ‘men’ implies ‘women’ if there were any. That is the generic rule. If there is one woman alderman among many men aldermen, that is a council of aldermen. If there is one woman postman among many men postmen, that is a company of postmen. If there is one woman soldier among many men soldiers, that is a section, or platoon, or company of men. That is what soldiers are called. When a section commander calls his soldiers together, he says, “Okay, gather around men.” At least that’s what he used to say: before effeminate orders came down from feminist Ottawa.
You might think that this is a small thing to be angry over. If this is what you think, you do not realize that the military is being taken down incrementally by a thousand belittling steps just like this one. Soon it will be too ‘toxically’ masculine to have any Remembrance Day celebrations at all. We’re almost there already.
Before I turned the radio off—which did not take more than a few minutes—I took note of these other belittling steps. The CBC had to interview someone about war. So what was done? They found a ‘woman expert’ from a university who said this: “We’re not a militaristic people, but we have been engaged in wars around the world.” So a people engaged in ‘wars around the world’ are not militaristic? This is like saying that the people of Sodom were not sodomites (see Genesis), that the Cretans were never liars (see Titus), and that the Galatians were never foolish (see Galatians.) This female ‘expert’ doesn’t want Canadians to have been militaristic; that is why she spoke contradictorily. Meanwhile beyond the studio over at the war memorial, the CBC’s masters in Ottawa had chosen two men to read some words on war. At least the readers were men; but what they read was trashed nonetheless. How was the reading messed up? They had an English-speaking man read French; and they had a French-speaking man read English. That way English-speaking Canadians could be humiliated by hardly understanding war memories in broken English; and French-speaking Canadians could be humiliated by hardly understanding war memories in broken French. For example, the Frenchman spoke, not of ‘hope,’ but of ‘ope’; and of the ‘vilnerable’ instead of the ‘vulnerable.’ It wasn’t his fault; English is just not his native tongue.
I have no doubt that Remembrance Day and its traditional poppy will soon be as controversial as a Trump presidency and a MAGA hat. There are at least three other poppies vying to replace the traditional one. There is the anti-remembrance white poppy; there is the black poppy for persons of darker skin than white; and there is the LGBT rainbow poppy, as if so many queers and fake gender persons have died in trenches. ‘We pause to remember the women and men’ may lead to ‘we pause to remember the black lives’ and ‘we pause to remember the non-binary persons.’ To pause to remember the actual soldiers who died in war will be regarded as a racist-sexist remembrance because almost all of them were white men; therefore this remembrance—the only factually based remembrance there is—will be disallowed.
How did it come to pass that the word ‘woman’ was derived from the word ‘man’ and that the word ‘man’ was used to denote both genders when appropriate for use generically ? It came to pass through acts of creation by God. Man’s body was created from dust; woman was created from the man’s rib. “She shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man” (Genesis 2.23.) Not only this, but she was created for man, not the other way around. “Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man” (1 Corinthians 11.9.) It is improper, being unbiblical, to exalt woman at the expense of man, as the CBC did when one of its pawns uttered, “On this day we pause to remember the women and men….” On Remembrance Day, therefore, we pause to remember the men.
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