In the Ideas section, for instance, Newfoundland-based writer Tony Fabijancic contributed an interesting travelogue from Bosnia and Herzegovina, tracking down the last traces of Gavrilo Princip and seeing what post-war Bosnians thought of those shots of his 91 years ago that killed the Archduke and his wife. In the main section (page A10), Martin Regg Cohn contributed an article examining the unsettling popularity of the Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots.
It's not just aging war veterans and aspiring samurais who visit the museum in search of past glories. Many ordinary Japanese who had lmost no exposure to wartime history during their years of sanitized education make the pilgrimage to Chiran out of curiosity.
Many visit more than once, stocking up on souvenirs bearing the museum logo.
"I don't know if you can understand this, coming from Canada, but if you read the letters you will cry," says Shinichiro Kamio, a 61-year-old businessman making a return visit with his wife.
Sales manager Koichi Inoue came once before, on a company-organized vacation trip. Marvelling at the kamikazes' steely resolve, he has brought his adult son here to expose him to the discipline of previous generations.
"My son is 22, about the same age as the Special Attack Forces," Inoue explains, using the Japanese term for suicide pilots. "These people died for their families and country, and if we learn about this, it could change our lives in future."
Inoue's father served in Japan's imperial expeditions--"somewhere in China," but he knows not where, because "Dad never talked about the war." Now, he wants to inculcate the kamikaze spirit of self-sacrifice in his own offspring but fears Japan's affluence has spawned "individualism and an egocentric way of thinking that wasn't there before."
In the editorial section, Gwynne Dyer argues fairly lucidly that "[t]here is a connection between Washington's Mideast policies [. . .] and the fact that Americans have become the preferred targets for Islamist terrorist attacks" and that pointing out the connection is neither obscene not morally flawed. More calmly, in a piece imported from the Boston Globe Christopher Shea examines the research of Robert A. Pape on the motivations of suicide bombers, noting that they tend to be more educated than the average member of their demographic and that they tend to take place in inter-religious conflicts involving the occupation of their homeland (ETA hasn't allowed its members to blow thenmselves up for Euskadi, and FARC couldn't pay people enough to pilot a plane into Columbia's Presidential Palace).
I finished reading the paper by going back to Fabijancic's piece on Princip. He noted that Princip came from a very poor region of Bosnia, a place where Serb peasants were held as serfs by their Muslim landlords, and that this poverty contributed to the tuberculosis that he contracted at some point in his life. Princip, however, was also well-educated by the region's standards, and he was certainly strongly motivated. It was sweet to kill for his nation, and if need be to die for his nation. It was sweet to kill and if need be die for many men for many nation in Princip's lifetime, and before, and after.
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,---
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
We need another Wilfrid Owen.
