MILLIONS will commemorate Remembrance Sunday this weekend. The day itself is the closest Sunday to Armistice Day, marking the end of the four years of murderous conflict known as World War I, but serves to honour all British and Commonwealth veterans of all wars.

This should be a day to respect the memories of people who fought and died.

In many cases soldiers were mere cannon fodder for Britain’s greedy and exploitative elite, the wars they died in not only pointless but criminal.

That is even more reason to remember them, the young and promising lives ruined, the horrific waste of the talents and energies and potential of so many human beings.

Part of the original power in the heartbreaking Armistice Day ceremonies was the message: Never again. Never again will we allow such slaughter.

That is partly why the annual roll-call of British politicians with blood on their hands lining up at the Cenotaph is offensive.

Tony Blair, who took this country to war on false pretences in Iraq, is merely the most obvious. Our current Prime Minister’s role in the destruction of Libya in 2011 was no more creditable.

Loud voices in the right-wing press reject any attempt to inject a message of peace into Remembrance Sunday. This, they shrill, is to “politicise” it.

These false patriots are hypocrites, since it is the right, with its bombastic militarisation of this whole season of the year, which seeks to exploit the memories of the dead to promote British imperialism and justify present and future wars.

But even if they were not hypocrites they would be wrong. The fact is that war is political.

Soldiers die because politicians send them to their deaths. War is a consequence of imperialism, the cut-throat struggle for new resources and markets that flows from capitalism’s relentless need for profit.

There is nothing inevitable about countries sending people to go and kill other people they have never met and have no quarrel with, but ending war requires ending the capitalist system itself.

The goals are inseparable: hence the call for “peace and socialism” that adorns the Morning Star’s masthead every day.

There is of course such a thing as a just war.

People can fight to defend their countries from imperialism, as the Vietnamese did so heroically in the last century. They can take up arms to defend their class from violent counter-revolution, as the Red Army did during the Russian civil war, or to overthrow an obsolete and oppressive political order as happened in China.

And in the 20th century one just war looms larger than any other — the second world war against nazi Germany, imperial Japan and their fascist allies.

Britain played a vital role in crushing the most destructive and bloodthirsty ideology in history.

Honouring all those who made victory possible is especially important this year. We mark the 70th anniversary of our shared triumph, the last significant anniversary many veterans of the conflict will live to see.

And fascism is creeping back into Europe, most sickeningly in Ukraine, with the connivance of the Kiev regime and its Western backers, including our government.

Any attempt to rewrite the history of the conflict must be challenged.

Refusing a role in the parade for veterans of the Merchant Navy — whose Arctic convoys, among many other heroic missions, helped supply the Soviet war effort that finally finished the nazis — is thus deeply disappointing.

So are the objections being raised to a proposed Oxford monument to martyrs of the International Brigades on the bizarre grounds that it would detract from monuments to people who died in the second world war. It would not — these heroes died fighting fascism too.

But the best way to honour them — and all the dead — this weekend is to remember that another world is possible, and to renew our commitment to building it.