Meeting of the Parliament 08 November 2018
I am grateful for the opportunity to add remarks in support of the motion, on behalf of the Scottish Greens. This moment of remembrance, in which we mark the 100th anniversary of the first world war armistice, is a moment of shared recognition of the horrors of a war that took so many lives, touching every community in Scotland and so far beyond.
Every one of those names, and the stories behind them, is powerful, but the scale of what we are here to remember is breathtaking: nearly 10 million military dead and twice as many wounded, most not there as volunteers but through conscription or under the threat of conscription. There were millions more civilian deaths: people from all walks of life were the direct victims of the war and unknown millions more died as a consequence of the war, as hunger, disease and emotional trauma followed conflict, as they so often do. This, too, must be remembered.
What can it mean to stand in remembrance of such staggering and unnecessary human suffering? What does it mean to honour those lives? It is, in part, a continued commitment to observe the intention that has been maintained strongly throughout the century quite simply to never forget. However, it must also be a chance to reflect on the nature of that war, an atrocity committed by the powerful against the powerless, as millions of young men were forced to enlist, marched across Europe and sent into fields and ditches to face mutual slaughter. That was, indeed, an atrocity committed by the Governments of both sides against the people of both sides, an atrocity committed also by the companies that sold arms to both sides or told lies to both sides to make war more likely and line their own pockets. This, too, must be remembered. It should have stood throughout those hundred years as the ultimate lesson on the futility of war.
We must remember and honour those who lost their lives, but to make that act meaningful, we should also remain true to the other sentiment that was expressed so strongly in the years immediately after the war. It was not only “never forget”, but also “never again”. On that second imperative, we have shown far less commitment. As we stand in remembrance of the first world war dead and all the victims of all wars, across the world today, in places like Rakhine, Yemen and Palestine, conflict rages on and the war profiteers in this country and around the world carry on their lethal business. This, too, must be remembered.
On this 100th anniversary of the armistice, Scotland marks the bravery of those who fought, but it still has no memorial to those other brave people who risked imprisonment, torture or execution by their own Government for having the courage to say no, they would not kill their fellow human beings. This, too, must be remembered, and if the proposal for such a memorial becomes a reality, it will offer a place to reflect on the lives of those who have worked for peace in our history and around the world.
We are right to keep in our collective memory the horrors of war and the lives that were so needlessly destroyed, but remembrance is not an end in itself. It matters because human beings matter. It is an attempt to keep us connected with the reality of war that exposed what Wilfred Owen called “The old Lie”, when he urged us not to let it be the fate of the next generation to die for their country and think it noble.
If we are to truly honour those who were sent to that fate, we must be faithful to both imperatives: we must have the continued resolve to say “never forget”, but we must also find the courage to say “never again”.
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