World War I was catastrophic, cataclysmic and all destructive. It wiped out empires and aristocracies and tore through the middle class.
It was a conflict that was pursued foolishly and incestuously by the royal families of Europe and it fertilised the ground for an even greater war, two decades later.
It produced an atmospheric solemnity of grief and loss and a lingering, collective neurosis.
When the guns fell silent in Europe on November 11, 1918, about 16 million had been left dead. A ceremonial ritual grew up around commemorating the fallen.
So horrific were those events that a convention known as the Kellogg-Briand Pact was born, an instrument that initially began as a bilateral agreement between the United States and France to abandon war as an instrument of foreign policy.
Eventually, virtually all the established states of the day signed it, heralding a most fabulous illusion, pursued even as countries began rearming.
The commemorators that make an appearance on Remembrance Day often prove to be the war makers of tomorrow. The demand that we all wear red poppies and contribute to the causes of veterans would be all the more poignant and significant were it to discourage killing, foster peace and encourage the brighter instincts of human progress.
Instead, these occasions become a form of vulgar conditioning, used by the military-minded to ready the populace for the next conflict.
Before his death in 2009, at the ripe age of 111 years, Harry Patch, a British veteran of the Great War’s trench warfare, proposed that war was “a license to go out and murder”.
“Why should the British government call me up and take me out to a battlefield to shoot a man I never knew, whose language I couldn’t speak?”
That logic is hard to better.
The statement here should not be “Lest we forget” but “What should be remembered?”
They died so that you could live and prosper, or so we are told.
The ruling classes repeatedly refer to “democracy”, “freedom” and “our way of life”, a way of suggesting value in sending the young to an early grave.
Accordingly, so that your children should be able to live in a way befitting their standing, you must participate in the next murderous, maiming conflict.
If these commemorations served as lessons, they should be revered, repeated and rerun with mighty fortitude. Unfortunately, those lessons are never observed.
Were that to be the case, such quixotic, costly provocations as the AUKUS pact, which incites nuclear proliferation and arming for future conflict against China, would be matters of the past.
As things are, these commemorative days mark anticipate the next bloodbath that will enlist cannon fodder for war, leaving the planners untouched by accountability.
To this day, former Australian Prime Minister John Howard, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and former United States President George W Bush remain at large for illegally invading Iraq in March 2003.
It was an invasion based on a monstrous lie about Iraq’s weapons’ capabilities: it dismembered a sovereign state and unleashed a surge of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East.
Bianca Wheeler, the new director of Veterans SA, says Remembrance Day is not just for previous generations but about “linking the past to the present, and then taking that and considering what it means for the future”, whatever that means.
The young seem increasingly disassociated from November 11 occasions and those in the Remembrance Day amnesia racket are concerned. “For many young people,” the Hawkesbury Post said, “Remembrance Day may seem like an event disconnected from their daily lives. After all, the wars it commemorates feel like ancient history.”
If history is but a record of agreed-upon facts, then this occasion is one about agreed-upon mythology.
Wheeler would have you believe that a historical exercise is at play, hence the following platitude: “You can’t know where to go in the future without knowing where you come from.”
The onus should be on the war-maker, the arms manufacturer and merchants of death to explain why their handiwork needs to be remembered.
By focusing on the dead, we can ignore the reasons for their deployment, the circumstances they found themselves in countries they barely knew existed, falling for causes they could hardly articulate.
The statues, monuments and honour boards always mention the heroically fallen; they never mention those who signed their death warrants to guarantee the Grim Reaper his fill.
As things stand, the armaments complex has far better things to do than turning up at war memorials.
Killing fellow human beings is a frightfully pressing business and there is always ruddy cash to be made from the quarry of the eternally gullible.
[Binoy Kampmark lectures at RMIT University.]