Remembrance Day, or Veteran’s Day in the US is the day set aside to honour the people who have sacrificed their lives for us.
The statement Lest We Forget has an implied question in it: Forget what? What is it that we’re supposed to remember? Aside from the rote rereading of "In Flanders Fields" and cutting out red construction paper poppies, that question is never really answered in schools as best I can tell, as it is highly fraught with controversy and is emphatically not politically correct. So, here goes:
In 1914 a world war erupted in Europe between Germany and the Entente, or Allied Powers of Britain, France and Russia. The reasons were geopolitical and economic if you cut out the bullshit, the overlapping treaties and the treachery, but suffice to say, it was a big war. Men of both sides, the Central Powers or the Entente, marched off to do their ‘duty’ for their respective countries, under the thrall of the politicians and rulers.
Except the war, which was supposed to be over by Christmas, was the first highly mechanized war with several inventions employed by both sides to efficiently kill each other. The slaughter was on a scale never before seen and devolved into the stalemate of trench warfare which is nothing more than butchery. The noble aims of "Beating the Hun" and "For King and Country" went out the window, except when used to bring in more soldiers.
Eventually it came to an end, as the various factions realized that murdering that many soldiers was not going to fix the economy, or settle old political scores. The resulting treaties, notably Versailles, punished those who lost and rewarded the victors. Several dynasties, the Hohenzollerns, Hapsburg, Romanov and Ottoman Empires went away and the seeds of dissent were formed in imperial colonies of every side, including Palestine, India, the Trans-Jordan, Iraq and the Pacific.
Short form, the Great War lead directly, via the Treaty of Versailles and a global Depression, to World War II. We decided to do it all again and this time managed to remove almost an entire generation from this planet. The best estimates of war dead on all sides is 50 to 70 million people.
Since then, we’ve decided that smaller wars, police actions, military assistance, insurrections and revolutions are more our style. The list is long and bloody.
Our Lest We Forget, comes directly from WWI and John McRae’s poem, In Flanders Fields and speaks to the nobility that was assumed to rest with the Allied powers battling the "Hun" where loyal men from the home country and the colonies were fighting for our freedom. Historically, the "Hun" also thought they were fighting for their freedom as well, but since we won, we get to write the history and ours was the noble cause.
In modern times, Lest We Forget has, thankfully, changed itself. Today it is a way to honour the sacrifices that soldiers have made for us and continue to make.
That’s what we’re remembering. That’s what we’re not going to forget.
We promise.
RoadDave 