We Remember Them

Today is Remembrance Sunday, a day when we remember those who have fallen in wars, largely working people of many nations who have died on the battlefield in wars both just and unjust. It is a great tragedy of the modern age that we are still sending people to war (for what reason?) and then not looking after the survivors when they come back. Why do we let our politicians get away with this and the removal of our freedoms and right to protest in the name of some war on terror. We are more surveilled in this country than the supposed evil empires of China, Russia, Syria, etc.

We live in a world where politicians still send young working people to their deaths or to be maimed behind a curtain of lies hiding the true reason which is to protect the interests of the political classes and their rich friends. I'm no pacifist but why are we letting this happen, it would be great to have a Remembrance Sunday to remember the fallen and know that we will never have to remember the fallen of a pointless war again.

So to end for today, I leave you with Wilfred Owen who saw the horrors of the trenches in WW1 and is much more eloquent than me:

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 tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped 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 flound'ring 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,
Obscene as cancer, 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.

Wilfred Owen
8 October 1917 - March, 1918