Never Again: time to save Remembrance from warmongers like Blair and Cameron

“The Great Silence.” That’s how the London Times newspaper (back then Britain’s newspaper of record and not a crude neo-con propaganda sheet), described Britain’s first Armistice/Remembrance Day, which took place on November 11, 1919.

“Everywhere there was mourning, sorrow, and thanksgiving… For some minutes before the maroons ushered in the period of prayer, a strange self-consciousness had fallen upon the people,” The Times reported.

The feelings were easy to understand. During WW1, over 700,000 British soldiers and servicemen were killed in a conflict that claimed the lives of around 17 million people worldwide. No wonder the talk was of a “Lost Generation.”

The first Remembrance Days I can recall were in the 1970s. Back then, there were still plenty of WW1 veterans around to tell us about the horror of the trenches. World War Two had only taken place 30 years earlier – and many people who had played key roles in that conflict were still alive and active in public life.

While WW2 was seen as a genuinely just war against Nazism, World War One was seen differently as conflict which could and should have been avoided. The anti-war musical “Oh, What a Lovely War” – made into a film by Dickie Attenborough in 1969 – made a big impact on how people viewed “The Great War.” The poster for the film showed actor John Mills (who played Field Marshal Douglas Haig) in a vast field marked with hundreds of crosses.

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