Remembrance – what is it good for?

Citation

McCaig, P. (2001), "Remembrance – what is it good for?", European Business Review, Vol. 13 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.2001.05413aab.013

Remembrance – what is it good for?

Remembrance – what is it good for?

Peter McCaigPeter McCaig is director of Green Events, Swanfleet Centre, 93 Fortess Road, London NW5 1AG. Tel: +44 (0)20 7267 2552; Fax: +44 (0)20 7813 4889; E-mail: pmccaig@onet.co.uk

Keywords War

My father fought in the Second World War, but he never spoke about it. He did not answer my questions about what battles he had been in, or how many Germans he had killed. And he did not get teary eyed and nostalgic on Armistice day – preferring to put the whole horrible experience behind him, and thus denying his excitable young boy the opportunity to feel proud or boastful about his daring exploits. It was years after his death that I found out he was at both Dunkirk and the Normandy landings, and I wondered at the restraint that would have made him shield these facts from his adoring eldest boy – like it was something to be ashamed of rather than proud. Had he been a coward – his medals belied this – or had he seen enough human tragedy up close and personal to feel there was any purpose in glorifying it?

There has been much talk about my generation, born in the 1950s and 1960s, being the first to be denied the formative experience of war as if it were some rite of passage, some primeval need to be bloodied, to shed the innocence of our youth and mark indelibly on our souls the fact that it is a cruel world and we should not suppose ourselves to be above its wanton ways. And perhaps it is this lack of battle hardness that makes me question this need we have to commemorate the dead and how it has the effect of making wars seem like a proud achievement.

Now another Remembrance Day has passed, the first of the new millennium, with repeated calls to continue and renew our commemoration and honour of our glorious war dead – to not let fade their sacrifice as the tragedy of the Great War fades from living memory. Yet somehow I cannot help feel that in the pageantry of these commemorations the vital message is lost and an altogether ulterior purpose of propaganda is served.

Look first of all at the language we use – the "glorious dead", the "Great War" – when there was nothing remotely glorious or great about most of the deaths in these pointless battles. The majority of these young men were not informed, reasoned combatants, but were coerced into battle by the prevailing mindset of service to "King and Country" which held sway in super-power colonial Britain. To object would only have led to accusations of cowardice which in those days meant facing castigation and execution. Their deaths were not in order to uphold lofty ideals of freedom, liberty or democracy but to ensure that the privileged elites who played out the global chess game of colonialism maintained their advantage over their rivals. And their chief weapon in ensuring their advantage was the ignorance of those who followed their orders, thinking there was something "noble" in their struggle.

Perhaps it is in our shame or horror that we seek retrospectively to give meaning to their loss by building monuments and arranging pageants in their memory, but it always seems to me that the greater effect is to prime a new generation in preparedness for the next "noble" struggle. This boosting of the military ego serves governments who are always willing to pay lip service to their sacrifice and arrange fly-by spectacles to glorify the arts of war (but notably reluctant to fund war widows' pensions or compensation for victims of Gulf War syndrome), as it keeps the whole patriotic charade going.

Yet, the real lesson of such wars is that they are a tragic mistake and that no right thinking person or democratically accountable nation should get involved in them, or promote any activity or trade that encourages conflict. Unfortunately, we do not live in such a mature, utopian world. We do not even live in a reasonable, ethical one. It seems increasingly, in these days of free trade agreements being able to overrule the laws of member states, that we live in a world that is controlled by unelected, unaccountable economic barons who think nothing of setting one nation against another if a slight economic advantage can be gained, or if it serves to promote their long term strategic goals of cowing populations into acquiescence to their new world order.

Do we not think that global power blocs are in opposition to each other when in fact they may be in collusion? When Russia objects to NATO intervention in Kosovo is it simply to ensure that the West does not make too much of a fuss about their repression in Chechnya? When China signs lucrative trade deals with Western companies is it not at the cost of Tibetan Independence? Is the dissolution of Sierra Leone really to do with petty tribal conflicts or the result of decades of exploitation and suppression by multinationals such as DeBeers and Rio Tinto?

Many would say these are just the realities of a less than ideal world, and we must inch our way forward through restraint and compromise. That eventually free trade and international governance will lead to a more equitable world. That conflicts are not engineered by conspiratorial clandestine forces but are the natural if unwelcome by-product of human greed and envy. That it is a flaw in our human character that propagates conflict. Yes, we need to be good Christians, Muslims or Jews and promote the virtues of the Universal Soldier, otherwise anarchy will descend, nothing will be secure and no one will be able to make a profit anymore.

And it would be entirely inappropriate to describe our war dead in terms of "wasted youth on the battlefields of misguided nationalism." Yet the war to end all wars will not be won until we can face this brutal reality and honour our dead instead by dismantling the edifice of the military industrial complex which is the real cause of their deaths.