Editorial: Converting Armistice Day into a celebration of war insults the dead and endangers the living

ARMISTICE Day, as the name suggests, should be a celebration of the end of war. Its transformation into a militarist platform is a grotesque insult to the war dead.

The poppy that bloomed in the fields of Flanders destroyed by years of heavy artillery fire became the symbol of those who lost their lives in the carnage of the Western Front.

Today it is worn as a badge of conformity by politicians happy to fuel, finance, arm and start wars, and although it is still worn by millions in respectful memory of their deceased relatives, it is used in public to silence criticism of the army.

Those who display their poppies as a sign of loyalty to British militarism should remember the words of the last surviving soldier of the First World War, Harry Patch: The politicians who took us to war should have been given guns and told to settle their disputes. themselves, instead of organizing nothing better than legalized mass murder.

Although its iconography and its date refer to the First World War, the propaganda machine relies heavily on the second because rather than a pointless massacre in the service of rival European imperialist interests, it became a real people's war against fascism.

The Second World War is deployed to promote the myth that subsequent multiple British military deployments are equally noble campaigns for freedom or democracy.

This is not the case. From Suez to 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, These are illegal acts of aggression whose victims are numerous. in millions.

Today, British military bases in Cyprus and RAF surveillance flights play a role in facilitating an ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people by our Israeli ally, our government.

The ally's former prime minister, Naftali Bennett, is among several international leaders who have denounced the role of the British government under Boris Johnson and joked after the bombing of Libya that he could seize new business opportunities as soon as that he would have disposed of the corpses. This helped prevent a peace deal at the start of the war in Ukraine, which has now lasted for almost three years and is taking a huge toll in deaths and injuries.

Britain is, with the United States, at the forefront of a new militarist campaign that brings a third world war closer by expanding its nuclear arsenal, forging anti-China alliances on the other side of the world through the Aukus submarine pact and a new army. with Japan and is playing the most hawkish role of any NATO power toward Ukraine, pushing for kyiv to be allowed to fire long-range missiles at Russia when even Washington advises caution.

Whatever establishment propagandists say, the British people are not naturally belligerent. In an interview with the Morning Star, Kate Hudson, longtime leader of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, noted that the largest protests in our history have been for peace against the war in Iraq, against missiles in American cruise and against the current war in Palestine and Lebanon.

This latest move enjoys majority support in poll after poll, a serious challenge to the state's determination to prepare us for new wars. This further encourages politicians to use Armistice Day to shove chauvinist propaganda down our throats.

The workers and soldiers whose strikes, mutinies and revolutions helped end World War I called it the war to end all wars.

This did not happen because the imperialist system that conducted the war survived and still dominates the world today.

This is why the causes mentioned in the Morning Stars 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.