Lest I forget, it’s Remembrance Sunday. Every day, for one reason or another, I think about people who have died in military action, and so I do not stand in silence for two minutes once a year to commemorate them. I understand and support others who do want to make public their feelings of loss. I guess we each have to find a way of respecting and remembering those who have lost their lives so violently. This is not to set aside thoughts for those survivors who have been physically and emotionally maimed by war.
Those who die as a consequence of military action have almost invariably been carrying out the will of governments, and this, to an extent, might be morally satisfactory if those wars had been honourable ones. The latter has too seldom been the case. In large measure the less well off people in our country have been the ones who have lain down their lives waging war under the orders of a relatively small group of rich, comfortably off people. The latter generally instigate war to protect their own positions of power, their own financial interests and not the interests of those they would have fight for them. Of the wars in which the United Kingdom has been involved since the beginning of the 20th century it is my own personal view - and I may be wrong - that only World War II can be claimed to have been morally justifiable, in that those fighting against the Axis forces were truly doing so in the interests of the wellbeing of all humankind.
I mourn the deaths of each of the human beings who have died in recent decades obeying the orders of a UK government. I do even more so because they were told that they were fighting for our freedom and for the freedom of others. In my view it is difficult to argue that the latter has generally been the case and I am saddened that we do not mark as religiously as those of our own that we do today, the deaths of all the innocent civilian adults and children who have been slaughtered as a consequence of our military adventures in the middle-east in recent decades. Who bears the cost of these lives ?
