War is too important to be left to the politicians

This angry and moving piece from OpenDemocracy is well worth a few minutes of your time. The writer, Adam Ramsay, is appalled that the Cameron government in the UK seems poised to re-write the history of World War I to suit its own political purposes.  Remarkably, in the midst of its ongoing austerity drive, the British Government has come up with 50 million pounds to fund a Golden Jubilee-style "celebration" next year, marking the centenary of the start of the conflict.  The irascible Jeremy Paxman has been moved to observe that "anyone who wants to celebrate war is a moron".

Quite so, and sadly the morons are not confined to that side of the Atlantic.  Here in Canada, the Harper government has poured large sums of money into commemoration of the relatively small-scale (though historically pivotal) War of 1812.  This may have been good for tourism in my neck of the woods, even if the last thing we need here is even more tourists, but it's an odd priority for a government that's much more committed to fiscal rectitude than David Cameron's.

It's not just about commemoration, though.  Even as Harper's team cuts social spending and eviscerates decades of federal-provincial co-operation, it's trying to recapture some of the Canadian military's past glories.  The three services, which had been merged into a single "Canadian Armed Forces" as an economy measure, have been separated again, and restored to distinct, colonial-style uniforms, with UK-inspired ranks.  The government has even taking to talking tough, for example taking a much tougher line on negotiations with Iran than any of the countries that are actually involved.  It's all quite bizarre, especially as it's almost entirely for show; Canada's actual military capabilities are little more than risible.

Yesterday's Remembrance Day ceremonies, in the customary gloom and sleet of an Ottawa November morning, focused on the undoubted bravery of the fallen, with no mention of the idiocy of the politicians and generals who sent them to their deaths.  Take the infamous Dieppe raid, for example, in August 1942, in which 60% of the Canadian forces personnel involved were killed, wounded or captured, and both the RAF and the Royal Navy took severe losses.  (As it happens, my father was coxswain on one of the RN landing craft that survived the slaughter).  A new book suggests that this raid, long explained as a tester for D-Day, was in fact an attempt to capture a new type of German cipher machine.  Earl Mountbatten took the "credit" for the fiasco, but it appears that the author of the plan was none other than Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond.  It's probably not a major part of his memoirs.

It's important that we not forget those who died in war. but it's equally important that we don't fall for mythical accounts of why they were sent to die.  And we need to remind our political leaders that the only real way to honour the fallen is to make sure we don't keep adding to their numbers.