Lest we forget. I meant to write about Remembrance Day last week, but I forgot. Just as well to do it after, since I’d like to discuss not the sacrifices of those who fell, but the aftermath of the two wars most associated with the day: how the people of that era were affected by them.

Anyone who grew up in the West during the first half of the past century was seared by those wars. It would be hard to find a family not touched by a death or disability. They lived with a sense of mass carnage and unnecessary killing, not only among civilian populations, but also among soldiers often ill-guided by their military and political leaders.

This psychic scarring cut across society; it included the wealthy and the elites, such as, in Canada, Lester Pearson and Walter Gordon. They felt a kind of horror, merely accentuated by the economic carnage of the Great Depression between the two wars, about what human beings were capable of doing to themselves. The only kind of scar that might come close in recent times in the West is the effect of September 11, and I’m not sure it’s analogous.

They were left with a grim generational resolve, well expressed in the preamble to the United Nations Charter, written with a sense of urgency in 1945: “We, the Peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.” It has always sounded to me a bit like a very sobered bunch of Rotarians, and I mean that in a good sense.

I suspect this sense of being appalled by wars cannot be sustained in an era that has not lived through the experiences. But how desensitized to wanton death is it necessary for our contemporaries to become? I’m thinking of the endless flow of cheap wisdom about how “inevitable” civilian casualties are in war. I could buy a house in Provence if I had a dime for every such announcement by journalists or politicians.

Recently, for instance, Fox television anchor Brit Hume said the deaths of women and children under bombing in Afghanistan should not be “big news” because “civilian casualties are historically, by definition, a part of war, really.” Oh, really. Since Fox is proudly rightwing, let me also quote Mara Liasson from National Public Radio: “Look, war is about killing people. Civilian casualties are unavoidable.” Her “Look,” like his “really,” is meant to convey, I think, a sense of worldliness and experience. To me, it just sounds callow, as if they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

Who do they think they are? It seems to me there is a subtext to this crisis of, How dare they challenge us? Just who do these people think they are? The West likes to think of itself as the engine of history. For the UN generation, global history was about European conflicts, with Japan as an honorary member after its industrialization.

The Cold War maintained that sense of an intramural Western conflict at the heart of global history for nearly fifty years more. Yet those “others” kept leaping up and biting the West on the leg. Gandhi in India. Latin American revolutionaries. The Vietnamese. Mao. Africa’s national liberation movements. And Arabs with their terrorism.

Through it all, the mouthpieces of the West contrived to see their own nations as history’s focus, despite being massively outnumbered. Robert Fisk says he’s been asked in Pakistan: “If, as Mr. Bush claims, the attacks on New York and Washington were an assault on civilization, why shouldn’t Muslims regard an attack on Afghanistan as a war on Islam?” The answer seems to be: Because we frame these arguments, and you guys don’t. In this syndrome, Afghanistan plays a role.

Listen to former U.S. national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, a figure of Kissingerian endurance, one of those academics who never seem to go away, never cease pestering us with geopolitics.

He’s talking about the U.S. decision to underwrite and build up Islamic fundamentalism as a counterforce to the Soviet Union, incidentally inflicting, first, the nightmare of the Northern Alliance (1992-96) and then the Taliban on the Afghan people:

“What was more important in the worldview of history? The Taliban or the fall of the Soviet empire? A few stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”

You could not have your smugness served up more plainly: West matters, white matters, Europe matters. (I write this as someone with a certain affection for Mr. Brzezinski. He once saved me from having my head staved in by New York City police during a protest against the Vietnam War for which he was a major apologist.) For him, the question he poses is rhetorical: Of course, Central Europe and the Cold War are more important.

It is part of history’s cunning, as Hegel called it, that you might now reply to his question: Possibly, just possibly, a few stirred-up Muslims.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.