ARMISTICE Day, as the name suggests, should be a celebration of war ending. Its distortion into a platform for militarism is a grotesque insult to the war dead.
The poppy that flourished on Flanders fields torn up by years of heavy artillery fire became a symbol of those who lost their lives on the carnage of the Western Front.
Now it is worn as a badge of conformity by politicians happy to fuel, fund, arm and start wars, and — while still worn by millions in respectful memory of deceased relatives — is used in public to silence criticism of the military.
Those who sport their poppies as a sign of loyalty to British militarism should be reminded of the words of the last surviving soldier of World War I, Harry Patch: “Politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder.”
Though its iconography and date reference the first world war, the propaganda machine relies heavily on the second — since rather than purposeless slaughter in service of rival European imperialist interests, this became a genuine people’s war against fascism.
The second world war is deployed to promote the myth that Britain’s multiple subsequent military deployments are similarly noble campaigns for freedom or democracy.
They are not. From Suez through the “forever wars” that began with the attack on Yugoslavia in 1999 and have since encompassed a bloody occupation of Afghanistan, a brutal invasion of Iraq and the destruction of Libya as a functioning state, they have been unlawful acts of aggression whose victims number in the millions.
Today, British military bases on Cyprus and RAF surveillance flights play a role in facilitating an ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people by our government’s ally Israel.
The former prime minister of that ally, Naftali Bennett, is among several international leaders who exposed the role the British government under Boris Johnson — who joked after Libya was bombed into the ground that it could embrace new business opportunities as soon as it “cleared the dead bodies away” — played in preventing a peace deal in the early days of the Ukraine war, which has now ground on for nearly three years with a huge cost in dead and wounded.
Britain is, with the United States, at the forefront of a new militarist drive that is bringing a third world war closer — expanding its nuclear arsenal, forging anti-China alliances on the other side of the world through the Aukus submarine pact and a new military treaty with Japan, and playing the most hawkish role of any Nato power on Ukraine, pushing for Kiev to be allowed to fire long-range missiles into Russia when even Washington advises caution.
Whatever the Establishment propagandists say, the British people are not naturally warlike. In a retirement interview with the Morning Star, long-term Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament leader Kate Hudson noted that the biggest demonstrations in our history have been for peace — against war on Iraq, against US cruise missiles and against the current war on Palestine and Lebanon.
The last movement commands majority support in poll after poll, a grave challenge to the state’s determination to soften us up for further wars. This makes politicians all the keener to use Armistice Day to ram jingoist propaganda down our throats.
The workers and soldiers whose strikes, mutinies and revolutions helped bring World War I to an end called it the “war to end all wars.”
It did not prove that way because the imperialist system which drives war survived, and dominates the world to this day.
That’s why the causes on the Morning Star’s masthead — peace and socialism — can never be separated. The struggle for one is the struggle for the other.
As we remember the dead, we must fight to revive the original, popular sentiment behind Armistice Day: never again.