Quebec Women's Group: Canadian Soldiers 'Cannon Fodder'

Isn't that something? Apparently they don't have their own Cindy Sheehan up there, so anti-war and anti-military groups have to make up their own.

MONTREAL— A feminist coalition in Quebec has come under fire for placing on YouTube an anti-war video that compares military recruits to “cannon fodder.”

It shows an actress playing the part of a grieving mother. As she fills a military-issue bag with her children’s personal belongings, including a rifle, she explains that her eldest son has died in Afghanistan and, as she places a red, flowery bra in the bag, that her youngest daughter has just been recruited in school.

“People say, ‘Make love not war,’” the actress begins. “But you should say, ‘Make love for war,’ because you need a lot of children to make an army.”

“If I’d known that in giving birth I was going to supply cannon fodder,” she continues, “I might not have had kids.”

When challenged by real-life mothers of Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan, the Quebec-based group was initially defiant before issuing a tepid non-apology apology and editing the video.

“I can understand why some women and mothers of military officers felt hurt but it was never and still not our intention to question them or the role of their children,” Conradi said. “What we’re trying to do is make the government responsive to a critique.”

There are different perspectives that need to be heard, Conradi reasoned. “What we’re saying is that the army is using our children. We’re not saying that women shouldn’t have had those children.”

For Céline Lizotte, these words strike at the heart of what it means to be a mother, and particularly the mother of a soldier.

Lizotte’s son, Corporal Jonathan Couturier, died in September, 2009 after his vehicle hit a roadside bomb in the Panjwaii district near Kandahar, Afghanistan. He was 23.

“It’s a huge lack of respect, an insult,” Lizotte said in an interview. “I don’t consider my son as cannon fodder. What were they looking to get across with this video? It has nothing to do with feminists.”

Lizotte, who is demanding the video be removed from the web, said you can’t criticize the government by “going after someone’s grief.”

No mother can know what her child will grow up to be, she added. “It’s the career my son chose and it’s the career I respect.”

This story was actually brought to my attention on another news outlet's website, but the sheer, willful idiocy and malice directed at some of these military mothers in the comments section was staggering....starting with a basic reading comprehension problem (many commenters in favor of the group failed to realize the woman in the video was an actress) and followed up with a selective application of Freedom of Expression- i.e. the Quebecois women's group was within their rights to make the video, but the military families had no business objecting to it.