Every year we’re expected to remember, and mourn, all the young men who sacrificed themselves for the good of us all, and with every passing year, this remembrance grows more fervid.
But why is that? My generation – the baby boomers – by and large rejected pointless wars, like the conflict in Vietnam, which led many promising youths to slaughter for no reason, and left a legacy of thousands of “survivors” whose subsequent lives were so damaged that they were beyond repair.
It seemed obvious to me even as a teenager studying history at school (which is pretty much a history of conflict between tribes/countries) that most of the time, war wasn’t about protecting communities, but about political issues with little ethical base, and that the authorities were always quite happy to send a generation of young men to battle, because they were expedient. It was simply population attrition, and gave the rich and powerful a fun time on the world stage.
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