Remembrance Day was originally intended to remind us of the futility of war. The 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month marked the time the Armistice was signed at the end of WWI, or, as it was known at the time, The Great War, the war to end all wars. 

Such was the scale of death and suffering 1914-18 it was believed to be inconceivable that nations would again engage in such wasteful and destructive confrontation.

In fact, The Great War instead turned out to be only the opening chapter of the most destructive and murderous century in the history of the human race.

War and mass slaughter of Europe’s finest young men became mechanized, industrial, and all-consuming. No longer did armies simply face each other across a battlefield in ordered rows to slog it out until one side was victorious, entire cities and nations would be left in ruins and generation after generation of young men would be wiped out of existence. 

The slogan of Remembrance Day was Lest we Forget, but we did forget. We failed to learn anything, and slowly, the original idea that we should remember all of the fallen, from all sides, military and civilian, was subtly replaced with the war propaganda that instead, we honor only our own.

Deviously, the sacrifices of the past began to be used not to discourage us from war, but to lend a fake patriotic legitimacy to new wars, to glorify war and falsely portray human cannon fodder as heroes and to thus serve as recruiting sergeants for further wars.

Supported by corporate media, politicians began to plunder the graves of the fallen, men and women already robbed of their lives, to encourage new recruits to their armies and silence dissenters and brand them as traitors and cowards. 

LEST WE FORGET

WINSTON CHURCHILL ’I love this war. I know it’s smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment and yet, I can’t help it, I enjoy every second of it.’ ~ 1916 in a letter to Lord Asquith’s daughter.

HENRY KISSINGER ‘Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.’  As quoted in Kiss the Boys Goodbye: How the United States Betrayed Its Own POW in Vietnam (1990) by Monika Jensen-Stevenson and William Stevenson.  

RUDYARD KIPLING ’If any question why we died, tell them because our fathers lied.’  – Rudyard Kipling 1865 – 1936.

 WWI VETERAN HARRY PATCH ’I felt then, as I feel now, that the politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organizing nothing more than legalized mass murder’

FINIAN CUNNINGHAM ’War is a profitable business, they say, so much so, it seems, that the US has placed it at the heart of its economy. This is why US politicians and military officials have claimed that Russia poses a threat to their nation and its allies, adding that Washington’s only real enemy is peace.’

FIELD MARSHAL DOUGLAS MACARTHUR ’It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear.’ – Douglas MacArthur.

PETER BOWMAN ‘Battle doesn’t determine who is right. Only who is left. We destroyed fascists, not fascism; men, not ideas. Our triumphs did not serve as evidence that democracy is best for the world any more than Russian victories proved that communism is an ideal system for all mankind. 

Only through our peacetime efforts to abolish war and bring a larger measure of freedom and security to all peoples can we reveal to others that we are any better than our defeated opponents.’  ~ Beach Red. You can share this story on social media:

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