BLOOD

This past week Collette and I saw the play If Were Birds at the Tarragon Theatre. It's a contemporary play by Erin Shields based upon the Greek myth of the rape of Philomela by her brother in law, the king Tereus.

It is a dark and powerful play. It is very much about violence and control and war and how one influences the other. In the play, the traditional Greek chorus is embodied by a group of women who are victims of war; but not victims of bullets, victims of rape and torture committed by soldiers. And not ancient Greek wars. These women's stories of horror come from Rwanda and Nanking and the Persian Gulf.

Which brings me to another event that happened this week. The death of another Canadian soldier in Afghanistan. A young sailor killed by an IED. His body was brought home and driven along the "highway of heroes", a section of the 401, where people stand on overpasses and salute and wave flags as the body is driven below ...

I don't know much about this sailor and I am not for one moment implying that he was involved in any kind of atrocity overseas. But atrocities do happen in war. In all wars. If We Were Birds is pretty accurate in its depiction of ancient wars as contests for power and wealth, the wealth being land, the wealth being women. Control the women, by either enslavement or genocide, and you control breeding. Replace your enemy's genetic wealth with your own, wipe out his seed, and the carriers of his seed. Nowadays we call this ethnic cleansing.

Our Canadian soldiers are returning from Afghanistan with many stories of horror. Of young boys dressed as girls put out on street corners for prostitution, of young boys being gang raped till they die; not by soldiers, but by civilians. Not by insurgents or the "enemy" but by the very civilian population our troops are there to protect. The psychological impact on our soldiers has been intense, to the point where the Forces have finally acknowledged that they may actually need help .. in the macho lexicon of the military, this really means that we are in trouble.

We've all heard the stories from Rwanda and the Baltics, the very kind of rape and murder of women that the play addresses; of women given to soldiers as prizes, of soldiers encouraged to engage in rape and torture, of young boys being forced to commit these atrocities and if they do no participate, being killed. We like to throw up our hands and say "We didn't know, we didn't know" but as this telling of an ancient Greek story points out, this has been going on for a very long time.

In the play, as Tereus is about to rape Philomela, he justifies his actions by talking about his blood. The violence is in his blood. He can't control it. He can't help it. The very thing that allows him to kill his enemies, to murder perfect strangers, to slaughter them even when his own life is not in jeopardy, is the same compulsion that leads him to rape.

We ask so much of our soldiers. We put them in these UN wars, these corporate wars, where the lines between good and bad are blurred, where there aren't trenches and enemy emplacements, where any face on any block could be the enemy ... where they act more like cops than soldiers and yet cops are what they are. Cops without proper authority or even motivation

We put our soldiers, our brothers and our sisters, in more than harm's way when we send them to war. The Hurt Locker addressed the physical danger contemporary soldiers must face and it suggested the moral dilemmas with which they are faced. What we need to more clearly address is what we do to them, what we do their blood, how we challenge that blood. In war after war, time after time, we ask them to get their blood up, to be able to take the blood of others, we challenge their blood, we ask them to go into the dark places we have always taught them as forbidden, we ask them taste their blood, the blood of others, to live in a world of blood ...

Do we teach them how to deal with the consequences of that blood call, that blood lust. Or do we just wait until they cross that line, until they wound and hurt and scar people beyond every recovery. And we say "Look at all that blood. However did it come to this point"