REMEMBERING

I'm lucky enough to have been born in a generation that was never sent away to war. I know that the wars in the world never really stop, and that soldiers in this country are constantly being sent off to fight in them, but the kind of mass mobilisation that my father and grandfather’s generations had to experience passed us by…

So, two minutes silence to reflect, remember and give thanks for what they did, and for what servicemen and women still have to do to preserve our freedom isn’t really too much to ask of us, is it?

A couple of years ago I did a lot of reading about the First World War for one of my projects and it taught me that I have to be grateful every single day that, when I was a teenager, nobody decided that the world was due one of its cycles of escalating violence where the great and the good could decide that the youth of our generation should be sent away and sacrificed in the service of the greater good.

Yes, there was the Falklands conflict around that time of course, and as an 18 year old there was a definite tremble around the schools and the pubs and about how that might possibly escalate for us, but thankfully for me and my peers, that’s about as close as we ever came, and somebody else got to fight those battles for us. Those of us who still chose the armed forces as a career option could do it in the relatively safe knowledge that things were relatively calm, and, whilst there were still dreadful military casualties back then and the conflict in Northern Ireland and other parts of the world was still ongoing, the wholesale slaughter that had ripped through those previous generations had been spared us.

I’ve got an awful lot of respect for our armed forces. Personally I really have my doubts that I would ever haves had the backbone to stand up and be counted, so I’m always impressed by those who could. When I was younger, a lot of my contemporaries used to dismiss anyone who had “joined up” as being less than the brightest of sparks for making that choice to serve their country, but that was just ignorance speaking. In a lot of circumstances you can see the wisdom of such a choice. That life has got a heck of a lot to offer a young person, maybe even more if you were someone whose options might be limited by circumstances, and those arrogant enough to belittle what they do should take a moment to think about how the freedom they have, and the ability to express those opinions they hold so dear is maintained. A lot of countries still see some value in compulsory military service, and quite a lot of people don’t think it would do much harm to our society if we still did, although I hear the Army isn’t so keen. They’ve got very high standards it would seem and wouldn’t want to take on someone they thought wasn’t up to them.

One of the good things at least that has come out of our part in the ongoing conflicts in the world, whether you agree with the decisions behind them or not, is that public respect for those who put their lives on the line in the service of their country is a lot higher these days, although the price paid is always far too high, and it always seems that no matter what times we live in, it’s always the youngest that pay the highest price.

Over 16 million people died as a direct result of the First World War, (anything up to 100 million being wiped out by the subsequent flu pandemic) and just a couple of decades later, anything up to 79 million died due to the Second World War, and we are still living with the social and economic fallout from both of those conflicts today, and some of the unresolved issues even now can cause the odd punch-up to break out. “Two World Wars and One World Cup” might just be a chant on the terraces to some people, but the truth behind those words is very hard to take; You would have to fill the terraces of Wembley Stadium every night for nearly three years and have every single person on those terraces die, or have a full Jumbo Jet crash every minute for six months, before you were close to seeing the same number of fatalities, and that’s before you start to even consider the numbers of casualties who were wounded and crippled.

Some of the history leading up to both those conflicts still has some alarming parallels in our modern world. Anyone reading any histories of those bitter years between the wars doesn’t have to look too far to see the same kinds of themes surfacing in news stories nowadays and wonder whether history could possibly be stupid enough to repeat itself.

You could say that the roots of the Second World War lay in the treaties signed at the end of the First. Disputed territories that were signed over to the control of former enemies, who would then do their utmost to let the citizens living there know exactly who was now in charge and make sure they continued to know it. Those little injustices that they meted out, possibly as a perceived need for vengeance, led to parts of Europe becoming breeding grounds for resentment and discontent which ultimately meant that extreme political figures could come along and offer magical solutions, and people of normally sound and rational judgement would find themselves nodding sagely and saying to themselves “they might have a point there” without looking beyond the rhetoric and seeing the idiocy supporting it. The odd won election here, the odd bit of unpunished brutality there and suddenly you’ve got a foothold in the political system, you’ve got legitimacy and before too much time has passed, you’ve got a movement.

Once people see something becoming popular, they’re more likely to disengage their brain and go along with the flow. Success breeds success and we all know how any kind of success or popularity can attract followers like rats to a bag of food waste. Suddenly you’ve got a bit of power, and then a lot of power, and we all know what power does. It doesn’t take much for someone in that position to abuse that power and wonder how far they might be able to push people. If there aren’t any checks and balances in the system, one person truly can come to believe that if they ask the people to jump, they’ll chant back “How high?” If that person is even slightly unstable and has any small (or large) prejudices and has become to see themselves as an infallible leader who nobody would dare to contradict because it might put them in fear for their own lives at the hands and booted feet of the thugs backing the regime, it doesn’t take much of a leap of the imagination to see how a previously rational and stable society can suddenly start to pick on one group or other as the source of all their troubles and decide that their culture might be better off if that “element” were to somehow disappear.

It’s easy in a socio-economic crisis to single out one group or other as the cause of all our woes. It’s also rather too easy to say bad things about foreign aid or bankers or immigrants or the unemployed or single mums or the homeless, as if any one group can be held accountable for the various messes we’ve got ourselves into recently. The problem comes when the “I reckon” brigade start to think that there are simple solutions to complicated problems because we all suffer from the same basic problem that it is enormously difficult to view the world from anyone else’s point of view. How will it affect me? How much will it cost me? What will I have to sacrifice? Why can’t everyone be more like me? The old cliché of trying to walk in someone else’s shoes has never been more relevant, or more ignored.

We look around ourselves and see poverty and homelessness and shortages and a lack of funding. We notice on this day when we should remember that, amongst the homeless, an awfully large percentage are themselves from a military background, and we are rightfully appalled, but we shouldn’t blame it simply on things like immigration or the foreign aid bill or Europe. Things are so much more complicated than that. Immigrant labour can sometimes be the only thing keeping some services going; Foreign Aid keeps people alive and stops wars; The European Economic Community gives us somewhere to trade with and has most probably stopped there from being another European War for over half a century now that the old allegiances and empires have been rendered obsolete. These are all things that we should try and remember when we think that we know what the answers are to all the world’s problems, and can say them in three words or less.

I suppose what I’m trying to say this morning is, when that silence falls today and we as a nation show our rightful respect for the sacrifice made by successive generations to ensure all the freedoms we currently enjoy, we should also remember what it is that causes conflict and try to make sure that these things won’t happen again. We should really try to look at history as a real and genuine lesson about things that happened to real and genuine people, people who are the very people that gave birth to our generations, because such horrors can happen again if we are not very, very careful.