We Need To Do More Than Just Remember

This year, and indeed for the next four years there will be many events of commemoration for the centenary of the First World War. It has been commemorated ever since it finished and was in fact the first war to be treated in such a way on such a large scale.
People back then decided that the sacrifice they and people they knew had made was so great that it would be wrong to forget it and also that by being reminded of just how terrible the effects of war now were that war could become a thing of the past. Fast forward one hundred years and now every year on November 11th we commemorate the sacrifices made by British soldiers “in all conflicts since 1914”. We have failed the brave people who fought one hundred years ago.

War has not become a thing of the past, since then Britain has been involved in numerous major conflicts such as the Russian Civil War, the Second World War, the Greek Civil War, the Troubles, the Falklands War, the Persian Gulf War, the Bosnian War, the War in Afghanistan, the Iraq War, and almost innumerable colonial conflicts. Britain has constantly been involved in conflicts so that next year could be the first year in a century that Britain is not at war.

I say again we have failed those people who hoped they had fought the final war. I say “we” have failed because although I believe that it is the politicians who cause these conflicts, who are the ones who actually have a stake in the outcome and are the ones who originate actually having any dislike for the other side it is we who elect them. It is our democratic duty to elect leaders who have our best interests at stake, clearly after a century of warfare we have not done this and it has been soldiers who have paid the price. It is our responsibility to elect leaders who can solve problems peacefully and to remove those that can’t if we truly want to honour the sacrifice of those that have gone before.