The Solemnity of Remembrance

This day, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of the year, European and Commonwealth countries observe a day of remembrance.

Of those fallen in conflicts throughout modern history, primarily in the 20th Century, representing their countries' determination to battle an enemy for the dire protection of their freedom and sovereignty. The ideological scourge of our time that drew the world into protracted and bitter wars, 1914 to 1918, and 1935 to 1945, was fascism; the cold wars that followed along with the Korean and Vietnamese conflicts owed to the scourge of communism.

There is a fine line between gratitude and memory transcending on reverential at the inescapable regret, sadness and longing at the memory of the historical sacrifice of young lives given to combat the threat of a fascistic or communist world order - and the glorification of war. For the simple truth is, there is no glory in war, only piteous misery of an order most people removed from war can never begin to imagine.

Conflict itself represents a deranged state of human affairs. It is a sad admission of deep failure to exert the fairest of our human traits, to overcome the adversity of misunderstanding and miscommunication, to rise above errant hubris and mad egotism in favour of the possibilities inherent in striving toward global justice. We are, in our need to give combat to protect that which our societies hold dear, succumbing to desperation.

Political elites whom a populace permits through indifference to launch a systematic and successful propaganda machine entitling their country to consider themselves needful of a march upon their neighbours to assert an unwilling political, ideological, religious compact upon them through force of arms, deliberately and with malice aforethought, empower their armies to commit mass murder.

In the doing of which, their actions force upon those nations who rise up in defense of themselves, a like position, where the government calls upon its citizens to defend their prized freedoms to celebrate their own traditions, cultures, religion, by sacrificing their young men, by drawing them into the military compact, assuring them that their patriotism will save their families, their communities, their country, from the aggressor.

In the process, allowing them, schooling them, in the practise of warfare, the use of arms, erasing from their consciences the societally-taught and family-nurtured respect for life inherent in the social compact. The state thus orders their young men to indulge themselves in the discipline of army life, to embrace other conscripts, their peers in honourable battle, as family and dear to them. Supporting and valuing one another, fighting a just cause together.

The deliberate and conscious social compact of living in harmony with one's fellow man erased in one fell swoop of national deliberation, through the need to do battle, to conquer the illegal, immoral, unconscionable aspirations of an army campaigning to do harm to their neighbours in the interests of conquest. Who else does a country turn to, to protect its own, than the young, the strong, the mobile?

Those unattached young men and women whose personal responsibilities have not yet matured to include families dependent on their close presence and support? Until, with the decimation of that initial corps of volunteers or conscripts or both, the need becomes sufficiently great to tear other young men and women from the normalcy of fruitful lives in defence of a nation.

When an eventual armistice is called, after years of blood and tears spilled over soil better used to grow and harvest crops for the living; death and destruction delivered to innocent civilian elderly, children and women, huddled in their homes in towns and cities invaded by aggressors and finally delivered from deadly occupation, human exhaustion has reached its final stages.

We shed tears of regret over the loss of so many young and valuable lives. Enact some version of military justice in an effort to heal the wounds of society. And bitterly mourn a society's depletion of strong young men and women. The wounded troop home, never to forget the horrors they have witnessed and experienced. The sounds and smells and impacts will never leave their memories.

And the society that their sacrifices have protected observe a solemn dedication to remember what it has demanded of its youth. We recall the names of the dead, inscribe them for posterity, and toll the bells of memory. There is no mercy in war, but we obtain the mercy of closure in commemoration.