I have lived through a period in which many small wars have been fought, mostly in poor countries a long way from here. Overwhelmingly, the British soldiers who have died in these wars have been young working class men. We have taken no serious count of those we have killed.

These wars are often framed using the same language as the last world war, as if they were the same. Whatever your stance on the nature of war itself, surely we must concede that the world wide struggle against fascism is not analagous to an empire struggle in Kenya or the dreadful, deceitful, illegal Iraq war which has left such a legacy of pain and stoked the hate that has led to so much more violence.

Back in 2018, I put it like this

Every year, we remember those who died in the world wars of the last century. Industrial slaughter after industrial slaughter.

They died for us, we are told. To preserve our way of life.

At some point, I fear that the act of remembrance was hijacked. We do not remember the terrible first war as being a futile obscene expression of empire. Rather we remember it as a mass exercise in noble sacrifice. The dead soldier is sacred. We must worship him.

And we do not remember the second war as arising in brutal consequence of the first, in that it created the precise broken and splintered context into which populism and fascism could flourish. Rather we glorify and obsess over Merlin engines and the Dunkirk spirit. Britain is sacred. Her empire will last for a thousand years.

I fear that both kinds of remembering are an exercise in forgetting. They miss the point, perhaps deliberately.

Perhaps the war generations did not die for us after all. They died for them– the others, those for whom war is simply politics by another name.

I am done with it all. Rememberance day is no longer a way to make a commitment to peace, in the wake of all the suffering that war brings. I will not stand with those who glorify and fetishise the poor expendab le soldier as some kind of noble defender of our way of life.

I will be buying some of these instead.