As he quotes “In Flanders Fields” during Remembrance Week, Stephen Harper is telling us that today’s Canadian forces are paying homage to heroes of the past. It seems he wants to be like Robert Borden, the famous prime minister who led Canada during the First World War as our homegrown heroes fighting in Europe earned our country worldwide respect.
But who, in the end, pays the price for a place in history?
It is high time for Canadians to question what “hero” means. Heroes are handed difficult circumstances to deal with, and do not always come out of the experience the better for it. Herakles, the namesake of Canada’s helicopters and the supreme hero of the ages, is a perfect example of the ugly side of heroes.
Herakles was, among other things, a compliant servant, a bad father, a frequent killer, and finally the disturbed murderer of own his wife and kids. As Robert Meagher argues in herakles gone mad, his recent translation of Euripedes’ Herakles, the hero is an abhorrent character any sane society would gladly do without.
No matter which telling of Herakles we read, the hero is never the author of his own labours. Though we might not think of him as a soldier, that is essentially what he is, fighting to carry out someone else’s vendettas.
Are our ultimate role models those who fight at the bidding of others? Though we also give our soldiers horrible tasks to complete on our behalf, we would do better to valorize the peacemakers, those who can steer us clear of the hellish, heroic situation.
Many other aspects of Herakles’ story show us that a nation full of heroes like him would be terrible.
He fails abysmally as a father, leaving his wife and children to seek his glory. Would one who instead dedicates his entire life to being a good father ever be valued like Herakles?
The completion of the very acts we supposedly admire him for, his twelve labours, render Herakles too brutal for the peacetime world. After he returns from Hades, where he had completed his last labour, he hears that his rival Lycus plans to execute Herakles’ then-current wife Megara, his foster father Amphitryon, and his children. He rushes back in time to save them, but as the original story tells us, madness seizes him, and he slaughters his own wife and children.
Meagher argues that this strange insanity is quite explicable: Herakles suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. The horror of having killed repeatedly throughout his life leaves even mighty Herakles burdened by mental illness, leading to this most heinous slaughter.
This is the level of trauma humans at war face, as it would have been for Euripides when he fought in the Peloponnesian War, as it would have been for John McCrae in World War I, and as it is now for our soldiers in Afghanistan.
The leader of Canada is likening our current mission in Afganistan to the glorious wars of the past. Upon closer inspection, neither heroes nor war were ever glorious, not even in Herakles’ time. We know the hell that surrounds the hero and his family, during and after combat. Yet our valiant leader would prolong the horrendous mission in Afganistan, perhaps to bolster Canada’s place on the world stage, perhaps to write himself into the history books. Meanwhile hundreds of soldiers are being thrust into the tragic circumstances of war.
It might do Harper well to recall another passage of First World War poetry, from Wilfred Owen: ” … 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.” [“It is sweet and right to die for your country.”]
