How Should we Honour the War Dead?

by Alan Morrison

The 11th of November is a date which impinges as a dichotomy on our already seared consciousness. Remembrance Day. Remember our war dead – especially from the First World War. Remember the heroes. Poppies. Wreaths. Solemn-faced politicians making a show of care about life and death. Elderly, stiff-gaited uniformed gentlemen with medals. Brass bands. Sentry-like cenotaphs against the dark, dank, drizzly-grey skies of November’s winter foreboding. Pomp and circumstance. Always a glorification of the heroism in militarism but never a hint of condemnation in it.

    One shudders to put one’s head over the parapet to interject a thought which may detract from all that jingoistic fervour but… dare I ask: Is there any genuine substance to it all?

    I venture to suggest that Remembrance Day as we know it is an outmoded institution which is not only inappropriate for the purposes of the remembrance of the foulness and futility of war but is also an affront to those whose lives have been wasted by it. There was no heroism in World War I. Not really. It may have felt like that for some as they gave their lives for their country. But if ever there was a futile gesture it was laying down one’s life in World War I.  Heroism is wasted if it leaves no lasting legacy. Death, if it is futile, is a jumping into the void devoid of moral virtue.

    Yet, today, everyone who is anyone will bow to the prim diktat of political correctness (or, should we say “emotional correctness”) and adopt a solemn expression, dark clothing, red poppy and sanctimonious words to curry favour with the masses. Do we seriously believe that we honour the war-dead with this po-faced theatre of priggish pageantry? Do we really imagine that by “saying it with flowers” on that special Sunday we will lessen the likelihood of war or mollify the monstrousness of it? Am I the only one who baulks at the false reverence and sentimental pomposity which springs to attention on November 11th?

    I believe that November 11th endorses war by undermining all protest against it. To say a word against war on November 11th – and not merely against the idea of “war” but against the dark forces and greedy interests which lie behind it – would be to heap opprobrium on one’s head. It is just one more occasion for an indulgence in the kind of hypocrisy so loved by nominal Christians, whose sickly smiles and hatred of truth keeps the lid on the lithe laser-beam of loveliness. The catharsis of war seems to attract such people well. Drawing their bellum theologicum from their cartoon view of the Old Testament, they imagine that God loves killing millions of infidels therefore they should too – especially “Ragheads”, a word reserved for those attired in Middle-Eastern apparel.

    Millions of professing Christian people proudly call themselves “Pro-Life” because they oppose abortion; yet they jingoistically cheer their sons and daughters and those of others into amoral wars and the killing of countless thousands of women and children in other less developed countries. They haven’t a thought for the victims of the wretched and needless bloodshed being prosecuted and supported by Western powers in the countries of the Middle-East. They oppose abortion on the one hand yet applaud the illegal and amoral wars being waged by the USA or Israel. This is the kind of moral Doublethink which politicians love to foster among their subjects. We make their job so much easier when we manage to hold two equal and opposite ideas at one and the same time.

    That children should be killed at all – worse, that they should be deliberately targeted for killing [ http://www.ifamericansknew.org/cur_sit/shooting.html ], or used as human shields by the armed forces of allegedly democratic countries [ http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/news/2006/08/hiding_behind_c.html ] – is not only abhorrent to all sense of human decency but it is indicative of the fact that we do not really live in a civilized world. When a child is killed in war, it is not just a child but it is someone’s child – the child of a man and woman – mother and father – in terms of creation, a child of God. That blasted and blistered corpse is an offspring. He or she is not just any body but has roots.

    The child is like a gentle tendril budding out of a tree. Who would destroy such a sprig of life? Let us also not forget that even the soldiers are someone’s children; and many parents of soldiers killed in action are waking up to the fact that their children died for a criminal cause. [ http://www.gsfp.org ].

    The killing of children in war is the most barren act imaginable. It creates barrenness in the lives of that child’s family, in his or her community and even in the hearts of those who do the killing. Killing not only kills some body but it also dehumanizes the killer. No one speaks of this dehumanization but it is everywhere in war. Killing at such a level cannot take place without it. Such dehumanization is a kind of inner death.

    The senseless death of a child is the ultimate vanity. It is scandalous that hardly an official voice is publicly raised against this terrible slaughter, in spite of the fact that it goes on day after day, with many bereaved children being utterly traumatized. Before Iran becomes the next country to be “bombed back to the Stone Age” [ http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-2369505,00.html ] by the corrupt Western powers – with thousands of children again being sacrificed in order to satisfy human greed and hegemony – let us finally stand up in vast numbers to the would-be warmongers, exposing their agenda to the world and letting them know that we will no longer be duped by their inhuman schemes and manipulations, which have gone unchecked for years.

    I accuse the US, UK and Israeli governmental administrations of waging genocide in the Middle-East under the shoddy guise of a “war against terror”. Why they should not have been arraigned in an international court of law for war-crimes is the greatest mystery of the century.

    I accuse the Western newspaper and television companies (with very few exceptions) of shirking their responsibility as journalists by collaborating in a deliberate cover-up of that genocide. The media have behaved like fawning courtiers rather than fearless reporters.

    I accuse the United Nations, culpable NGOs and international children’s agencies of failing to make public the reality of this genocide and of merely attempting to make futile ameliorations. On this basis, they, too, are collaborators.

    I accuse the US and British parliaments of wilful collusion in this genocide. Elected representatives in the main have not only failed to oppose the genocide but they have bent over backwards to facilitate it.

    I accuse the US and UK governments of encouraging a climate of fear, in which the people have been blackmailed into passivity and coerced into silence by being told that they must either support this genocide or be labelled as supportive of terrorism (“Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html ). True human beings will not be threatened by such false dilemmas or logical fallacies. Somebody once said that a government should fear the people (and thus behave nobly and justly lest they be removed from office), rather than the people having to be afraid of their government.

    The people who deliberately started these wars – on the basis of proven lies told to the people – need to be held to account for their crimes. It is plain that the worst of all terrorists today live in the White House, Downing Street and the Knesset, along with their co-conspirators on Capitol Hill and Westminster.

    That such war-criminals are still at large – holding office, addressing their congresses, parliaments and party conferences, giving speeches at the United Nations, being politely applauded at international gatherings – is not only a scandal but is an insult to those men, women and children whom they have coldly massacred. It is a modern rendition of the children’s story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. Many of those politely applauding see the truth but feel powerless to say or do anything. Perhaps also they are fearful of what might happen to them if they do speak out. But if enough people speak out and act, the perpetrators of these war-crimes will be less likely to harm them.

    Repeatedly, we see the wrong people being feted as “heroes” and “heroines” in this world while the real heroes and heroines are ridiculed, vilified, defamed and often snuffed out of existence.

    Where are those for whom compromise and mediocrity are the basest of human qualities? Where are the brave, the courageous, the good and the true, who will stand up for truth when it looms into view?

    Where are the heroes and heroines of influence today who will put their salaries and their lives on the line by refusing to be collaborators in the bellicose firestorm of modern governance?

    Where are the real statesmen and women who will rule with justice, equity, honesty and… yes… love?

In case you’re “over the moon” about recent events in the USA, please realise that a change of government will ultimately change nothing because the same hardliner militarists, secret intelligence agencies and faceless corporate entities who run the world and determine its fiscal and political policy will be in power behind the scenes. You don’t vote for them and they couldn’t care less what you think. They will still do what they want to do – politicians be damned.

Propaganda is everywhere on November 11th. Two nights ago, I watched a BBC 4 documentary about the WWI war poet, Wilfred Owen. Fronted by Jeremy Paxman it completely missed the point of Owen’s psychology and especially of his poems. Poems were read aloud by a wimpish voice which would cut short of the final ascerbic lines from the poet which contained the message. Owen himself was portrayed as a master soldier filled with patriotism when nothing could be further from the truth. After being withdrawn from duty, shell-shocked, he eventually went back to the front and was killed a few days before the end of the war. His death was completely pointless as the action in which he was engaged was of no use whatsoever strategically (a fact which the BBC documentary significantly failed to mention). Anyone reading his letters to his mother from that period can see that he became completely immersed in the animalism which passes as soldiery in the final days of his life. He had lost it, in fact, and joined the frenzied desperate ranks of those who must kill to preserve their sanity in the hothouse of war. It was a form of suicide and identification with the doomed youth who were in his charge. He owed it to them to die. It was a kind of poetic justice.

I’d like to close this brief piece with some poems of Owen, which could not be more appropriate for this 11th day of November. Owen used the image of Abram and Isaac with a sting in the tail as a fitting allegory for the way that the youth of 1914-1918 were in reality massacred by their governments:

THE PARABLE OF THE OLD MAN & THE YOUNG

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him, thy son.
Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,
A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

He wrote his sonnet, “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, as a paean to the young men he saw slain all around him:

ANTHEM FOR DOOMED YOUTH

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

In the preface to some of his poems, Owen wrote: “Above all I am not concerned with poetry. My subject is war, and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity”. And indeed it was. One of his greatest and most evocative poems was “Dulce et Decorum Est”. He had taken a couple of old Latin lines, meaning “Sweet and right it is to die for your country” and stood them on their head. He calls such a sentiment an “old lie”. Coming at the end of the poem they form a gigantically bitter outburst against the ‘respectabilising’ of war which takes place on such occasions as November 11th.

DULCE ET DECORUM EST

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! -  An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, 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.

There are many old lies in this broken world of ours. So old that they have managed by stealth to disguise themselves as the truth to the weaker mind. Our duty – far from being to fight and die for our countries – is to see through all disguises and proclaim the truths which they hide, horrifying and shocking though they may be to the vast majority of people today.

So let us not join in the solemn-faced pomposity of this 11th day of November but instead dedicate ourselves to leading lives which do not glorify war. Let our peace not be that external suspension which forms the space between two wars but an internal intention which opens many golden doors.

© Alan Morrison
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