The Collins Column | May 26, 2000

Letter To An Unknown Soldier

by Doug Collins

Dear Unknown Soldier:

Welcome back. It has taken you a long time to get here and those who have been to the wars have to blink back a tear at the thought of your coming home. For your war, which was to have been the war to end all wars, was the worst war of all. You probably struggled through the mud many times, wondering whether the brass-hats had gone mad in ordering you forward.

If you could open your eyes today, though, your disbelief might be even greater. They have put you in a good place in Ottawa, but it is not the Ottawa you may have known, either topographically or temperamentally. Sam Hughes, the general and defence minister of your years, was said to be off his rocker. But he was sanity in excelsis compared with those who rule us now.

You may have come from Toronto. If you did I wish I could take you for a walk through that city, which in your day was the Queen City of what was known as English Canada. It is that no longer, the politicians who congregate in the Parliament Buildings near you having decided, with the playwright, that they would like to "dismiss this people and elect another." As a Jewish minister for multiculturalism once told me, "You can forget the Canada of 1945, we're making a new Canada."

Multiculturalism is a new word for you. What it means is that on that walk we cannot take, you might think we were in Somalia, the Caribbean, India or China. It's much the same everywhere else. Here in British Columbia, immigration has made the name of the province a joke. To crown the joke, we have a Sikh premier. In Ottawa we have a Governor-Generaless who hails from Hong Kong. We also have something called bilingualism. It is untrue to say that everything changes and everything remains the same.

It's good that you cannot speak, because if you did your opinions would probably be damned as "racist" and instead of lying in state in the Parliament Buildings you would have been hauled before the Canadian Human Rights Commission.That too is something new: tyranny in the name of freedom. In this New Canada it is dangerous to give vent to views to which some people object. You can be fined for hurting someone's feelings.

You would blink in astonishment, too, at the thought that a regiment could be disbanded when a few of its members did the wrong thing in Somalia or some place. Wrong things sometimes happened on the Western Front, as you know, but no battalions were were ever disbanded. They just had to go on struggling through the mud.These days, the rules are set by the weak, the wimps, and the demented.

This letter may be "hate literature," another new thing to you. You may have hated the Germans when you were fighting them, but in the Year of Our Lord 2000, all hating is out, unless you are hating "racists." So is the Lord. The Christian Cross has been thrown out of public buildings and prayers have been thrown out of most schools, just as Canadian history has been amended to satisfy the New Canada. All this would be very confusing to you -- far more confusing than Flanders Fields.

You would not believe, I am sure, that 100,000 babies a year are being flushed down the drain.That's more than were killed in many of the battles you fought.You would also be amazed that we have handed over our political fate to a bunch of social engineers in Ottawa known as the Supreme Court of Canada. They are our real rulers, and rule in favor of sodomy. Soon, men will be able to marry one another. What would you and your comrades have thought of that?

It's a pity you cannot see the flag they draped over your coffin. You knew the Union Jack and the Red Ensign. But they were torn up years ago. It won't be long, either, before the same thing is done to the Queen and to the constitutional monarchy. It's a wonder we still have the "royal" in the RCMP, attempts having been made to remove it. It disappeared years ago from the Royal Mails.

Dear Unknown Soldier, I cannot speak for you and you cannot speak for yourself. If you could, you might ask them to take you back to France, today's Canada being every bit as foreign to you as the country in which you lay for over 80 years. And given a chance, would you fight for the New Canada?

Yours in sorrow and respect,

Doug Collins.