'I agree with Harry Leslie Smith's opinions on war'

I have to confess that I hadn’t heard of Mr Smith before now.

But having checked him out, I find myself bowled over by his straight-talking, no-nonsense approach to life.

He is best known for giving an impassioned speech at the Labour Party Conference in 2014, mainly focusing on the damage being done to the NHS by the then Cameron Government.

He is, perhaps, known more famously (or infamously) for a letter he wrote to the Guardian in 2013, saying he would no longer wear a Remembrance Poppy as, in his view, this had become politicised and increasingly was being used to somehow justify war in a broader sense.

Quite something for a Second World War veteran to say.

This struck a chord with me. I too have become increasingly uneasy over the last few years about the message being conveyed regarding how we should remember past conflicts.

I would make it very clear that I have nothing but enormous sympathy for the poor souls who ‘gave’ their lives in the First World War, for example (as if they had a choice), but I find phrases like ‘lest we forget’ more and more insufferable.

‘Lest we forget’ as if we (i.e the great unwashed) are in any way responsible for the millions killed in wars?

Of course we aren’t.

So stop trying to make us all feel guilty about this.

I would be rather less agitated if at least some attention were being paid to how wars start in the first place.

Did the First World War really start because some obscure individual was assassinated in Sarajevo?

Similarly, did the Second World War start because Hitler ‘invaded’ Poland with zero provocation?

Check out the background to this and you may be surprised.

Don’t forget that wars are one of the most lucrative possible enterprises for those controlling the purse strings, those supplying arms and weapons and those who get to decide how countries are carved up afterwards.

I suspect many millions either simply don’t believe or seriously question the official 9/11 narrative.

Many more believe Bush/Blair lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Yet, these two events have led to non-stop wars in the Middle East ever since, all justified by the so-called ‘war on terror’.

Every bomb dropped here puts money in someone’s pocket, every dollar ‘loaned’ to ‘rebuild’ these countries comes with interest pre-attached.

Every regime changed benefits someone and it ain’t you or I.

Bottom line here is that war is neither big nor clever. It is ugly and brutish. It is not something to be glorified or revelled in.

It is always the innocent who suffer and die.

Tim Kennedy

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