THIS weekend, politicians will line up at the Cenotaph to lay wreaths in memory of the war dead.
The Sunday closest to Armistice Day, the anniversary of the ceasefire that ended what was once called “the war to end all wars,” should be a day to reflect on the horror of war and vow: “Never again.”
It is nothing short of a scandal that it has instead become a celebration of militarism in which the pro-war politicians who lead all Britain’s big political parties compete to display their support for the armed forces — and a chance to disparage peace campaigners as unpatriotic, cowardly or treacherous, just as the brave minority who called out the barbarism of World War I were smeared.
World War I has long been understood as a clash of imperialisms. There were no good guys, no “right” side in a power struggle between the world’s leading imperialists.
Every schoolchild learns about the division of Europe into two mutually hostile armed camps and the way in which these rivalries, alliances and arms races paved the way for that terrible conflict.
Staples of popular culture like Blackadder present the war for what it was — the futile mutual slaughter of working-class people by other working-class people at the behest of callous and incompetent masters — something lamented by Conservative politician Michael Gove, who once blamed the series for undermining enthusiasm for war.
World War I should be borne in mind as we stand closer to the brink of a new world war than at any point in the last 40 years.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was an act of aggression, but the huge Nato military build-up along its borders and the mammoth Exercise Defender Europe war games staged annually by the United States echo the arms races that led to war in 1914.
The war has rapidly morphed into a proxy war between Russia and the world’s top imperialist power, the United States, which with its allies is arming and training the Ukrainian military.
We should heed the lessons of history as a modern war hysteria demands a fight to the finish against a nuclear-armed adversary and voices for peace are silenced or marginalised.
Since Remembrance Sunday is a day to honour servicemen and women, let’s direct our politicians to the words of Harry Patch, who before his death in 2009 was the last surviving veteran of the trenches.
War, said Patch, “is a licence to go out and murder. Why should the British government call me up and take me out to a battlefield to shoot a man I never knew, whose language I couldn’t speak?”
Questions that could be asked about our government’s wars on Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.
Last week’s findings on the child victims of British military action in Afghanistan, young lives snuffed out for which Britain paid families an average of £1,656 in compensation per killing, expose the lie that “our” wars are somehow different from that launched by Russia or that our militaries enjoy some kind of moral high ground.
World War I was not brought to an end by victory, but by revolution: the October Revolution that took Russia out of the war first of all, and the revolt by German sailors at Kiel on November 3 1918 that led to the overthrow of the Kaiser and the armistice a week later.
Ordinary people in desperate circumstances took their fate in their own hands and told their rulers enough was enough.
It is that spirit we should look to this weekend as we remember the victims of war.
The warmongers on the Tory and Labour front benches disgrace their memory. It is Britain’s peace movement that grasps the real meaning of remembrance.
