Thiepval remembrance memorial on the Somme, France (Photo: Wikimedia commons)
Remembrance Sunday is supposed to be about paying tribute to those who died in wars. But politicians and the media use it as an opportunity to glorify war, militarism and state violence. Anyone who dissents is accused of being disrespectful to the dead.
Politicians line up to lay their wreaths at the cenotaph—the very same politicians who enable genocide in Gaza and slaughter in Lebanon.
Remembering the war dead goes back to the global, inter-imperialist bloodbath that was the First World War.
A staggering 40 million soldiers and civilians died as a result of the war. Many were killed in fighting—over one million during the Battle of the Somme on Europe’s Western Front in 1916 alone. Others died from famine and disease.
Millions of the dead were never found. Some were sucked into the mud and drowned. Some were buried alive when shells hit their dugouts. Or they were blown into a thousand pieces.
Those missing became the focus of battlefield monuments. The 1927 Menin Gate in Ypres lists the names of 55,000, the 1932 Thiepval Memorial on the Somme a further 72,000.
Remembrance Day was first inaugurated by king George V in 1919. In 1921, the Earl Haig Fund, a charity for former servicemen, was launched, and the sale of poppies marked the build-up to Remembrance Day. It is named after Sir Douglas Haig, the British commander responsible for the mass slaughter at the battles of the Somme and Passchendaele.
The First World War was different in scale from anything that had happened before. It plunged the world into an abyss of barbarism, industrialised killing and destruction, and grief beyond imagination.
In 1914, men had marched to war with a glorified image of British military prowess and dizzy notions of empire, nation and glory. Enemies were demonised as militarists and baby-killers.
Many saw the war as a great adventure and an escape from lives of drudgery and poverty at home. Nothing prepared them for what was to come.
They were told an aggressive German state threatened the peace and democracy in Europe. This was all lies—the war was an imperialist conflict waged to protect and extend empires.
Millions of people suffered indescribable pain so that our rulers could fight over who controlled which bits of land. The First World War was a war of global empires and industrial mass production—a distinctive type of war characteristic of capitalist imperialism.
Decades of economic growth meant intensified competition as the giant corporations of the global economy clashed over markets, contracts and profits. Behind the corporations stood the great powers whose armies and navies had been used to carve the world into rival empires in the interests of their own capitalists.
The British Empire feared the growing industrial and military power of imperial Germany. Capitalism created the corporations and empires whose collision caused the war—and also the mass industries that were to make modern war so violent and destructive.
Modern economies were able to equip, supply and transport conscript armies of millions. New technology transformed the killing power of weapons. Machine guns and heavy artillery dominated battlefields, creating a “storm of steel”.
Popular revulsion against the carnage fused with class anger against exploitation and privation at home. In the spring of 1917 the French army mutinied on the Western Front in the spring. The Italian army broke and headed for home in the autumn.
In Russia, revolt turned into revolution and an end to war. It started with mass strikes and protests in Petrograd and other industrial centres, but it quickly spread into the army. Soldiers refused to attack. Gung-ho officers were shot.
Russians fraternised with Germans and Austrians across the line. Soon, following the example of the workers, the soldiers were forming democratic councils and taking control of the army from below.
The ferment of revolt culminated in the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917 and an end to the war on the Eastern Front early the following year.
As the “contagion” of revolution spread westwards, Germany’s war leaders launched a final desperate offensive on the Western Front. But they failed to break through. German sailors and soldiers mutinied and the German working class joined the revolt.
The armistice of 1918 was a product of incipient revolution—Germany’s rulers surrendered because of fears that revolution would topple the state. Even the winners were scared. Britain, France and Italy all experienced mass strikes, giant demonstrations and a huge growth of the left.
Action by ordinary workers and soldiers ended the slaughter. The ruling class created an official industry of remembrance to pretend they cared about the suffering and to bury the history of mass revolt against war.
War tears the veil off the capitalist system and lays bare its rapacious, murderous drive for control and for profits. The First World War showed millions how little our rulers valued working class lives then. And they have not changed. Only now their targets are people in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine.
The First World War also showed how ordinary people have the power, even in the most desperate circumstances, to fight back. The war ended in a tidal wave of revolt against world rulers. Poppies, cemeteries and remembrance rituals were the official response to popular anti-war bitterness.
The people who really disrespect the dead are those who keep selling arms and keep giving political support to regimes committing genocide. The revolutions that ended the war gave a glimpse of a different way of running society, and of the potential for a world without wars. That’s what we should remember.
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