An Anti-War Remembrance Day

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Midnight Oil – No Man’s Land

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep.  Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod.  All went lame, all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And floundering like a man in fire or lime…

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues –

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori (“It is sweet and noble to die for one’s country”).

-          Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est

You’re listening to Back in the USSR, brothers and sisters.  This is Siegfried.  And this is the day officially known as Remembrance Day in Canada.  But you won’t hear that poem by Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est, a stridently anti-war poem written by a man who experienced the horrors of war first-hand, in too many public ceremonies and school assemblies.  Nor would you have heard too many pieces from another strongly anti-war poet whom I’m going to quote at length tonight, Siegfried Sassoon.  Both of these men were in the British Army in World War I, and yet, even in Britain, let alone Canada, they get overshadowed by our hometown hero Colonel John McCrae, and his openly pro-war propaganda piece known as “In Flanders Fields”.  And so many thousands of kids grow up, as I did, learning that poem with its message of “take up our quarrel with the foe”, masking the horrors of war in a gloss of patriotism.  No mention of choking to death on the fumes of poison gas, getting blown apart by artillery shells, or getting wounded and getting sucked down to drown in the mud of Passchendale, Verdun, Ypres or the Somme.  Only white crosses “row on row” with red poppies in-between.  Nothing messy.  Nothing dirty.  Nothing agonizing.  Everything noble, praiseworthy and worthwhile.  This regarding a horrific war between competing imperialist colonial powers that claimed the lives of millions, feeding them into a meat-grinder of trenches and barbed wire.  History sanitized, pre-packaged and whitewashed for the consumption of the young.

As the UK-based Peace Pledge Union (PPU) said in a recent article in Morning Star, and this certainly applies to Canada as well as Britain, that the government’s official approach to Remembrance Day is not about remembering but “about forgetting”. 

As PPU’s Symon Hill said, “The day is almost entirely about British and allied army forces — and any suggestions that wars might not have been justified or the deaths were futile, or that people were exploited by the rich and powerful, is greeted by accusations of dishonoring the dead.  Pretending that the deaths were worthwhile and sanitizing wars is what is really dishonoring their deaths…The government’s approach is to use [Remembrance Day] as a euphemism to encourage people to forget and to go along with militarism today.  Militarism is a way in which the ruling class encourages the rest of us to do what we are told.”

He said that, “What we want to see is a Remembrance that remembers all victims of war, whether military or civilian and of all nationalities — seeing the real horrors of war, and not used as an excuse for nationalism.  Rather than nationalism, it should build international commitment to peace and unity.”

“[British Prime Minister] Boris Johnson on Sunday will be laying his wreath to remember the dead while British troops are actively training Saudi Arabian troops for an offensive in Yemen. He will talk about remembering death at the same time that children are dying.  Militarist policies do not solve problems of poverty and climate change, nor do we reduce terrorism and hate and division by sending in men with guns to other nations. You cannot solve deep-seated problems by bombing people.  Those in power are using the armed forces in the interests of the rich and powerful.”

He could have said the same thing about Stephen Harper invoking Remembrance Day, Vimy Ridge and World War I to justify war in Afghanistan, or Justin Trudeau collaborating with Saudi Arabia in its bloody war of aggression against the Yemeni people.  Besides wars against Afghanistan and Yemen, Canada has armed and trained open Nazis in Ukraine, given total support to the Apartheid state of Israel in its oppression of Palestinians and supported coups in Haiti, Honduras, Venezuela and now Bolivia.  And again and again, we see the dead of past wars being used by those in power to justify militarism and warfare in the present day, which means more people will suffer and die to serve the political agendas of the rich and powerful.  Veterans are too often used as props to justify any aggressive action that the government takes overseas, exploited as political symbols, and conveniently forgotten if they step out of line. 

The following is an open letter entitled "Finished with the War: A Soldier's Declaration" that the poet Siegfried Sassoon wrote to the British government in 1917, and it’s another thing you’re not likely to encounter in a Remembrance Day service:

Lt. Siegfried Sassoon.

3rd Batt: Royal Welsh Fusiliers.

July, 1917.

I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that the war upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of agression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them and that had this been done the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.

I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops and I can no longer be a party to prolonging these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.

On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practised upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realise.

Sting – Children’s Crusade

That was Siegfried Sassoon and he would have been court-martialed for writing that public protest letter had he not been deemed “unfit for service”.  His principled stand against the war was not something many were prepared to follow, but the sentiments of that letter that he wrote were shared by countless thousands of soldiers as the war dragged on year after year.  I know that my great-grandfather, Ernest Weeks, who, although British, was in the Canadian Army in the First World War and was likely at Vimy Ridge himself, had had enough of bloodshed after he got out in 1918.  He’d volunteered for the Boer War before, he’d believed in all the “king and country” propaganda nonsense, but now he just wanted it to be over.  He’d been wounded, had his face sliced up with a bayonet even, and he’d had enough.  He wanted some peace.  Some space to pick up the broken pieces of his life.  And he would have told any politician trying to use him for political grandstanding to go to hell.  He’d had enough of “mud and rain”.

Mud and rain and wretchedness and blood.

Why should jolly soldier boys complain?

God made these before the roofless flood –

Mud and rain.

Mangling cramps and bullets through the brain,

Jesus never guessed them when he died.

Jesus had a purpose for his pain,

Ay, like abject beasts we shed our blood,

Often asking if we die in vain.

Gloom conceals us in a soaking sack –

Mud and rain.

-          Siegfried Sassoon, Mud and Rain

The same holds true for my granddad Thomas Laybourne, who was born in 1918 in a company coal mining town in northern England, practically on the Scottish border.  And there’s a man who needed bravery just to survive.  The town of Crook didn’t have sewers, running water, electricity or medical care.  The company controlled everything and TB epidemics were claiming lives everyday.  He actually spoke Scotch Gaelic at home, although the schoolmasters beat the language out of him long before he was an adult.  I think if he’d known about residential schools in Canada and how indigenous peoples had their languages beat out of them as kids, he would have identified with them.  He was conscripted in 1942, grabbed by the army right off the streets of London, and shipped out to South Asia, half a world away, to fight so that the British Empire could keep hold of its colony of Burma, which was getting overrun by the Japanese Army.  He hated the army, particularly getting screamed at by aristocratic officers.  But he formed plenty of bonds with the other working class boys in his unit.  One time he even helped men from another unit get a truck free from the mud in driving rain while under fire from Japanese troops.  They wanted to give him a medal for that, but my granddad, having known through life experience who his real friends and enemies were, said in no uncertain terms to the officer who tried to pin it on him, “beg your pardon, sir, but shove it up your ass.” He had helped his comrades and didn’t need or want recognition from the powers that be.  He would have used even stronger language to any right-wing politician trying to use him and his experience in World War 2 to justify more war and bloodshed.

It seems that the further we get from the era of the World Wars, the more their memory is used to justify imperialism: in Afghanistan, Libya, Haiti, Mali, Iraq and in other parts of the world as well.  And we get more and more “my country right or wrong” propaganda at hockey games, sports events, and public events in general.  I remember the display from the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa on Vimy Ridge that I saw in 2017 when the government was celebrating the centennial of the battle, and how it openly admitted that the Government of Canada deliberately resurrected the memory of Vimy Ridge after the end of the Cold War in the name of political legitimacy, and as a way of getting people behind the government and the army in this new age of empire and imperial expansion.  Some veterans might be willing to be a pawn in this political theatre but my granddad was not and I intend to stay true to his memory and the memory of so many others who would not be used.

Walter Benjamin’s point that “not even the dead will be safe from the enemy if he is victorious” is very important to keep in mind on this day, as the rich and powerful seek to manipulate the fallen of past wars in service of new and bloody agendas to keep the world safe for the Fortune 500.  Capitalism is capable of exploiting the dead as well as the living, brothers and sisters.  That is why official history leaves out so many inconvenient truths.

Siegfried Sassoon would never forget the reality of the war that he was made to fight.  But he feared that the rest of us would.  I’m going to leave you with a poem of his about what we should remember on Remembrance Day and how we must all struggle to put an end to war and to the imperial forces that continue to drive us to war in the 21^st Century.  Listen, brothers and sisters.

Have you forgotten yet?

For the world’s events have rumbled on since those gagged days,

Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city-ways:

And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow

Like clouds in the lit heaven of life; and you’re a man reprieved to go,

Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.

But the past is just the same – and War’s a bloody game…

Have you forgotten yet?

Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget.

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz –

The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?

Do you remember the rats; and the stench

Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench –

And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?

Do you ever stop and ask, “Is it all going to happen again?”

Do you remember that hour of din before the attack –

And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then

As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?

Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back

With drying eyes and lolling heads – those ashen grey

Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?

Have you forgotten yet?

Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you’ll never forget.

-          Siegfried Sassoon, Aftermath

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Victor Jara - El Derecho de Vivir en Paz

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