War, law and Remembrance Sunday

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The two world wars play different roles in the ceremony the British state has built up around Armistice Day and we should pay attention to the lessons of each.

World War I provides the date, the iconography (the red poppy of Flanders Fields) and the “bugles calling for them from sad shires” referenced in Wilfred Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth.

World War II provides the “just war,” in which our soldiers played a heroic role in the fight to defeat Nazi Germany and liberate Europe from fascism. It allows Britain’s military history to be seen as noble, our armies fighting for freedom against tyranny, in an age when Victorian-style celebration of the conquest and subjugation of others is not politically acceptable.

The anti-war message in Armistice Day has never been effectively suppressed, despite the state’s effort to turn it into a celebration of militarism. World War I in popular memory is still what it actually was — a terrible waste of life as the rival imperial interests of European powers saw millions of young men sent to kill and be killed.

The last surviving British soldier from the trenches, Harry Patch, called war “legalised mass murder.” That is usually what it is — Britain has been involved in far more aggressive than defensive wars — and now we have a Defence Secretary telling us to be ready for war in 1,000 days, lining up with military chiefs such as the French general suggesting we should be ready to “sacrifice our children” to the next war, Harry Patch’s bitter insight, borne of horrific experience, should be shouted from the rooftops.

The lessons of the second world war are important too. Efforts to construct an international legal order began after World War I but did not get far until after World War II.

Modern international law is, like the United Nations, a product of the determination of those who fought fascism to create a better world — one where “might is right” ideologies and notions of the supremacy of some nations over others would be consigned to the past.

This aspiration was never met. Outrageous violations of international law by our own government are nothing new: witness the entirely unprovoked invasion of Iraq.

But we now live in a world where the most powerful country is systematically attempting to destroy the whole framework of international law and revive unregulated rule by the strongest.

It is no coincidence that the Donald Trump administration has a secretary of state in Marco Rubio who dates the end of European greatness to 1945, or that its return to power was greeted by the world’s richest man with Nazi salutes.

That administration is toying with renewing its illegal aggression against Iran. Law firm Leigh Day’s warning that “there are significant questions as to whether the UK is facilitating operations that fall outside the bounds of international law” must prompt immediate demands that the British government ban US forces from using British territory or bases to prosecute their illegal war.

Both Keir Starmer and Andy Burnham have permitted US bombers to launch for Iran from Britain, despite the US war involving horrendous crimes such as the Minab primary school bombing from its very first day. Our aircraft have helped shoot down Iranian retaliatory fire, encouraging the US and Israel to continue their aggression, and have deployed to assist another aggressor, Saudi Arabia, in its murderous war on Yemen — which again has reignited as a side-effect of Trump’s war on Iran.

In all this Britain is on the side of those tearing down international law, not defending it. That is not honouring the legacy of those who died to defeat fascism: it is a mockery of it.