Friday, November 07, 2014

War - and the failure of politics

This is what political failure leads to . The images are striking and have had a profound affect on public opinion. War is not an acceptable or 'normal' part of the human condition - it certainly isn't 'generational' or inevitable. I'm reading a collection of pieces written by First World War veterans that was published originally in 1930. Time and again, they use the phrase 'never again', and many were firmly convinced that they had taken part in the last war ever to be fought; there was no way they could ever imagine another conflict after the horror and loss they had witnessed - no politician could ever make that mistake again. But now, we see remembrance used in a very different way: remember the past, but also with an eye to contemporary and future events - almost as if the past is being used to validate future political shortcomings: 'we fought before and we'll fight again' has replaced 'never again'. On Sunday, I'll stand before a war memorial, as I did in years gone by with my granddad and my dad - veterans of the First and Second World wars. When I was young, I wondered why dad didn't wear his medals when the others did. He replied that they 'meant nothing' to him, and that the regimental mascot, a bulldog, had been given the same ones. For dad - who fought in North Africa, Sicily and Italy - war was neither normal or inevitable. He'd been brought up in a family where is dad and uncles had fought - and in one case died - in the war 'to end all wars' and he knew that the conflict he had had to endure was a result of the failure of politicians to secure a lasting peace, compounding the failure that led to the First World War. Now, I have to stand on my own, my granddad and beloved dad have gone, but I go to honour their memory and remember the suffering they and their comrades and former enemies had to endure. But I have a growing sense of unease when politicians now speak of war was inevitable, or of engendering military discipline in our schools, because this makes conflict seem commonplace, even acceptable, especially when fought in far away places, where its victims are not placed in the public eye - we hear about the casualties, but the ambulance trains do not bring the wounded home to the full glare of the public gaze, as in those earlier wars. The suffering has almost been sanitised and the media - especially the tabloid end - uses this language and imagery to perpetuate the old myth: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori

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