Mr. Speaker, I am glad to rise to speak to this motion which I do not support. I wish to explain in some detail why I do not support it.
Some years ago I was in Washington to do some research in the archives. I found the archives were closed, that it was a public holiday and quite an unexpected public holiday. It turned out that it was Memorial Day.
I had nothing to do because I could not work so I walked down into the mall area. I found myself next to the Vietnam memorial. It was the first time I had ever seen the Vietnam memorial. As I said, it was on Memorial Day so quite a few veterans were standing around the memorial.
It has to be imagined. The monument to the Vietnam war in the United States is probably one of the most moving monuments built anywhere in the world. It is quite remarkable. It consists of a huge slab of black marble. A ramp goes down one end and up the other, and on it are engraved all the names of the people who died during the Vietnam war.
Many of the veterans were middle aged since the Vietnam war occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Many people of my age were standing around the Vietnam memorial to pay homage to their fallen comrades. It was very moving. I was surprised to see little Canadian flags everywhere from one end of the memorial to the other. It was quite a shocking contrast to see the Canadian flags against the black.
I did not realize that Canadians had served in the Vietnam war. I was very surprised to find that out. I talked to some of the veterans there at the time who explained that they knew Canadians who fought with them in the rice paddies in Vietnam, Canadians who served with great courage. Some were killed and some were injured. Many of them believed in the cause the Americans were fighting for in Vietnam.
On further inquiry I found out that approximately 10,000 Canadians fought with the Americans in Vietnam. There was such a surge of support for the war among young people in Canada that the Americans set up a special recruitment system whereby Canadians could cross the border to get a letter of acceptance and then go back across the border to join up and serve in the forces.
Many Canadians who served in Vietnam did so because they thought they were fighting against communism. They believed that communism as we saw it in North Korea was a terrible force in the world and they wanted to save the world from it. True idealism brought those Canadians to actually risk their lives in that foreign war.
Canada does not recognize veterans who served in foreign armies. We can see the wisdom of that decision when we consider Vietnam. Those young Canadians who went over there to serve in the American forces in Vietnam believed they were doing the right thing. We now know subsequently that the war in Vietnam was not really a war of the United States fighting to save the free world and sparing it from communism. It was really the United States intervening in a civil war that involved a struggle for independence.
The Vietnamese had been under the heel, literally speaking, of the French, the Vichy French and even the Japanese during the second world war and post second world war. The Vietnamese are very proud people and were very determined to gain their independence.
The war in Vietnam, as we know, led to some very terrible atrocities. I think of My Lai in which Canadian soldiers were distressed by the fact that they could not see the enemy among the civilians so they killed the civilians. The Vietnam war was also a war in which the Americans resorted to chemical warfare in the form of defoliants and agent orange.
I think we would agree that Canada is probably very glad that it did not officially sanction the Canadians fighting in Vietnam because in fact despite their very best intentions they were fighting for a losing cause and a wrong cause. That is the most important issue.
This is one of the dangers when Canadians fight for other countries. They may indeed take up a cause that later is discovered to be a cause that Canada would not want to associate itself with.
The Vietnam war was from 1967 to 1973, the major portion of the war. If we flip back another 30 years we come to 1937 and the Spanish civil war. That war involved the forces of General Franco representing the state and backed by the fascists, backed by Germany and Mussolini but mainly by Nazi Germany, and the republican forces which were backed by the communist power of the day, the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was instrumental in getting that war rolling because it had a philosophy until recent years of spreading international communism. The Soviet Union made a direct effort to keep the civil war going in Spain.
Part of the Soviet Union's campaign to support the republican side involved the formation of international brigades. These brigades comprised battalions and volunteers who were recruited from all over the world. One of those battalions was the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion.
Approximately 1,300 Canadians went over and joined the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion and fought on the side of the republicans during the Spanish civil war. The Spanish civil war was a terrible war. It was a brutal war. Men, women and children were killed. It was a war that is echoed by the civil war that is now occurring in Algeria.
It was a different world in 1937. As the young men from Canada went over to serve in the republican forces they could not see inside the Soviet Union. They only knew the Soviet Union as a country that was supporting workers and they thought it was a grand new experiment. They thought it was going to free the people, and so with the greatest good spirit they went over to serve in the republican forces.
One of the most famous persons at that time was Norman Bethune who served in the Spanish civil war, not in the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion but by giving medical aid to the republican troops.
We now know in retrospect that far from fighting for democracy, as the member from Kamloops said, they were fighting on the side of the republicans who were supported by the worst dictatorship in the world. The dictator was Stalin. After the war we discovered that this was a communist rule, a dictatorship that would kill millions of people, millions of people in Ukraine and millions of its own people, the Russians.
We have to remember that Norman Bethune went on to China, served in the Chinese forces and became famous there. However China became a dictatorship under Mao and it was one of the cruelest dictatorships in modern time. These people killed millions and they were every bit as bad as Hitler.
We have the dilemma that these people in good spirit and good heart went over to support a cause that Canada and all the world in retrospect realize was actually supporting a cause that was perfectly reprehensible and we would not want to have Canada associated with it.
We have the dilemma that the member for Kamloops wants to acknowledge the courage and contribution to history, the contribution in spirit of the members of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion 60 years ago. He is right in his intention but wrong in the execution.
Canada can never take the chance of supporting foreign wars in which the outcome or result may indicate a political entity that is completely unacceptable to Canada.
I will conclude by making a suggestion to the member for Kamloops. In the United States the Canadian Vietnam veterans are recognized and compensated by the United States because of their service in the Vietnam war. I suggest very strongly to the member that he make representations to the Embassy of Spain to see if he can get Spain to make a similar recognition of the members of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion and to get compensation from where it really ought to come and that is Spain.