What does Remembrance Day really mean?
As November approaches we can see people with red poppies on their clothes everywhere. On Remembrance Day there are a lot of ceremonies held in public. However, is there in the world somebody who can tell us what it means?
At eleven o’clock on the eleventh day of November 1918, the bell tolled. It announced the end of the European War. Eighteen million soldiers died merely because of a stupid assassination. Then people spent four years fighting one another. In the war most people lost their minds and just madly fought with their “enemies”. Millions of people died in the trenches and the battlefields. Their lives were taken by Maxims machine guns and toxic gases. Finally, after the nonsense fighting for four cursed years, the war ended. Now people remember all soldiers killed in action on the day the Bell of Peace tolled in Paris.
We all believe that men are created equal. In the battlefields there were British corpses, German corpses, French corpses, American corpses, Canadian corpses, ……However, they were all once human beings. There were their families expecting their home-coming. There were their friends looking forward to their return. We cannot find any differences among them before the war had happened. They were common people such as farmers, workers, storekeepers and so on. In peace they lived happily, enjoying their life. However, the war just robbed their families, their friends, and it even stole their lives.
Now, whom do we remember on the Remembrance Day? An article in the newspaper said, “Let us spare a moment for the dead of our country. Their honourable sacrificing of their life made peace for us.” It may give us one of the answers. People think of only their countrymen. Then what about their allied countries? They were our friends, and we have fought for the same things together; therefore, we also must remember them. “The price of victory is never cheap”, said an Allied general during the Second World War, “Sometimes it is unavoidable for us to have necessary casualties because the victory is not substituted for by anything else. After having the war, let us remember these brave and honourable souls.”
On the other hand, what about the opposing dead? They were also humans with senses and feelings. Is it seemly to remember their deaths?
In April 1945, Joseph Stalin told the Soviet soldiers on the Eastern Front, “Kill! Kill! All Germans need killing. There are no exceptions, whether they be living or about to born. Follow the order of the Soviet! Crush all the Fascis hogs in this land! Go! Our brave Red Army!” Unfortunately, people always regard the opposing side as aliens. Even though the British and the American people did not say something like this, they thought the same.
During the Second World War, there were a lot of British broadcasts similar to the following: “Hitler is a madman, and so are his generals, and so are all German soldiers, and so are all the Germans.” A great number of official broadcasts just told people that all Germans are evil Nazis. There should be no mercy, no sorrow and no remorse when killing them because we are “cleansing the world”.
It is extremely pathetic to see people holding this view. Remembrance Day should have meant that we remember all the damage and all the deaths of the war, and we are increasingly making efforts to prevent the world from another war. Pitifully now there is another version:
Behold! The soldiers were brave. They did their duty in the war. They died for our country. They are our models because they were so brave and noble. If there should be a war, go now for your country! Fight for our country! Die nobly for our country! We will remember your contributions as well as the dead in the past.
Now it is just propaganda for militarism. It is the same as what the Nazis said in the 1930s. Even though they spoke different words, the meanings are all the same. Although the period of McCarthyism has been history since a long time ago, how can we have clear minds when there are still gobbledegook and officialese filled with our society?
In some circumstances, especially under the “banners of patriotism”, we cannot, or we may suffer from red-baiting. However, a genuine patriot should know what is good for his country and what is not. In the Cold War, the period of Pax Americana, we can still find that the Western Alliances adopted the same approaches to describe Communist countries. It was so unbelievable and unthinkable to agree with this kind of officialese, whereas most people believed that. Then, just as bossy as Uncle Sam, we can take it as granted if we want to “teach whomever a big lesson whenever they should dare any of profits of our country”. No! It is not human nature. Being habitually fond of war is not our human nature.
Why do some politicians and generals hunger and thirst for a war? They are merely a extremely small minority of people in our society, and almost everybody in the society abhors having a war. In this situation we must ask: Is there any skeleton in the closet?
Certainly there is something behind what we can see. In the more politically correct versions, they tell people that what they are doing is for the country. Oh how divine it is! Under the banners of “All for our country”, how can we refuse to entangle into a war? Otherwise, only when we make efforts to have peace can we say that it is good for our country. Even if it should be unavoidable to get tangled into a war, what we need to do is that we should make the war finish as soon as possible.
What Churchill and Roosevelt said was completely incorrect. A non-conditional surrender is never the moderate way to end a war. What people will have after asking for a non-conditional surrender are nothing but ruins and animosities. A victory without peace will result in the advent of another war. People should have learnt something from history after having so much suffering and many disasters, but there is not any lesson borne in people’s minds.
We should have cancelled the license to kill of all the politicians and generals. There is no need to kill others because we can sit together around a round table, and accomplish reconciliation by some measure. We should have remembered all the dead in war long time ago. We should have been triumphant to remember any kind of victory no more. Peace is the most important thing. In my opinion, I wish there would not be so much triumph on Remembrance Day because we ought to examine ourselves thoroughly, and we might learn something.
Dr. Einstein said, “We cannot imagine what the Third World War will be, but people only can throw stones at one other in the Fourth World War.” The nuclear weapons in the world have been so many that people can even destroy the Earth for hundreds of times. In order to avoid the doomed catastrophes of human history as many historians have predicted, we should spare no thoughts for this three-letter evil word “W-A-R”.