'Pawns of War?'

War – what is it good for?: a response to Wakefield Express article: British Legion fighting new war – against apathy.

As Remembrance Day came and went maybe the question should be asked – what is it we are actually supposed to remember? Do we agonise over the deaths of our long dead relatives or are we honouring the cause they fought for?
Dodgy headlines such as the raping of Belgian nuns and bayonetting of babies helped galvanize public opinion. Britain’s farmhands, factory and office workers plus a great many from India in particular, other colonies, dominions and protectorates, enlisted to fight for King and country without further question.
These headlines have long been exposed for the propaganda they were, much like Iraqis throwing babies out of incubators in Kuwait (Gulf war #1) or indeed that Fikret Alic symbolised Serbian concentration camps. Yet any criticism or even unbiased analysis of the war, Nation or Remembrance Day invites scorn, that the dead are being mocked.
But who is doing the mocking? Our forebears died in their youth before they had led much of a life. We would better serve their memory by questioning the motives behind the war rather than dulling thought with foolish, sentimental and misplaced remembrance stunts.
The sickest part of events such as Remembrance Day is that the reasons for conflict are whitewashed and the dead resurrected to march for their political masters once more. These men (and women) though dead live on in the memory as a convenient prop for the pantomime and pageantry that is National pride, wheeled out and re-enlisted for every convenient commemoration and hastily reburied when they become stinkingly embarrassing.
Our leadership open up the old wounds of the twisted and maimed and shed crocodile tears over tortured memories. In so doing they mock the dead and seek to lock the minds of the living. Freedom of speech, to criticise, to think and argue a point becomes subverted to the limited concerns of a self-interested and deceitful minority. The national flag effectively becoming a security blanket that muffles discerning voices.
In the Express article, veteran Ralph Denby states that only one year has passed without the death of a member of the armed forces. Doesn’t this nail the myth of Remembrance Day? The day when war was supposed to end? Yet Britain’s leaders and those of an ever-shifting band of allies have continuously waged war and sold short those who believed they were fighting a just cause. To be willing to fight and die for a cause is a noble thing but senseless if that cause is neither believed in nor understood. Perhaps I judge our forebears harshly – after all, what do many of us, let alone your average 19yr old, choose to know about war?
Today’s well-documented and one-sided war in Iraq lumbers on without aim, direction or justification. The very reasons for going to war in the first place have proven to be something of a moving target – buried and resurfacing only to be lost again as war develops a crude logic. Perhaps this may explain public apathy. Our smug leaders, with no opposition of merit, vainly expose themselves through their use of ‘embeds’. Desperate for some hint of success and finding none they cling to so-called glorious days of the past, risk shooting themselves in the foot and opening the whole can of worms.


Read on: The War in Europe: What really happened?
http://www.heartfield.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/WWII/contents.htm