Lest We Forget

It is entirely right, fitting and perhaps essential that for a few moments each year we pause, bow our heads and ponder on the memory of those who have perished in service to the political imperatives of British foreign policy.  You will not often see it described thus, people preferring to use more abstract and grandiloquent terms.  But the fact remains that in the two world wars and in the plethora of minor campaigns and skirmishes around the globe, most of which are now forgotten, our men (and a considerbale number of women, too) died at the behest of the Foreign Office, the British cabinet and Parliament.  I put it thus to remind us that we should consider carefully where and when we deploy our armed forces and for what purpose.  Not, I hasten to add, that we should allow ourselves to be paralysed by fear of action.  It is a Darwinian world and if (big word that 'if'!) we value our society, using 'society' in its fullest and widest sense, then we should be prepared to fight and die for it.  It seems to me that a general feeling has grown up, perhaps engendered by the magnificent WWI poets and encouraged by the Marxists, that somehow the first world war was a waste of blood and treasure in contrast to the second which was entirely honourable and necessary.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The difference between Prussian and Hitlerian militarism was minimal.  The French had to be helped to resist the German onslaught in August 1914 because their defeat would have made ours almost inevitable.  So the men who fell in Flanders' fields did not do so in vain and we should remember them.