Remembering The Fallen Doesn’t Glorify War

I wrote about Anzac Day 2016 here the other day.

ANZAC Day 2016 has come and gone, and with it, the usual debate about whether days such as this glorify war, and the ugliness that goes with it.

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[sm_smlts_col type=”lts-one-half”]The ugliness includes the death and destruction. It includes the raping and the pillaging, the losses of sons, daughters, fathers and mothers.

No one can justify, let alone glorify those things.

Yet for some reason, as human beings we continue to go to war.

To justify an ideology, a religion.

Or to gain a position of superiority in trade and commerce.

I saw debate yesterday about whether religion was to blame.

My opinion is that religion may not be the reason for war, but that it can be used to justify war.

That doesn’t make it right!

As a Christian, I feel dismayed at the use of God’s name when it comes to war, and hear old hymns such as Onward Christian Soldiers being sung as if to justify the position taken as “holy” in some sense..

I remember talking to a man from Germany some years ago. He shared how his father fought in the trenches during World War 1, and how he heard the chaplains praying for victory, while watching across the trenches as the Allied chaplains were doing the same thing.

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Soldiers don’t start wars, politicians do.

Soldiers fight the wars.

They suffer, and their families suffer.

And the populations of nations suffer, but for what?

At high school, I took the position of a conscientious objector.

The Vietnam war was escalating at the time.

I would have gone to war had my country and family been threatened.

But I couldn’t see the point of being involved in someone else’s war.

My position is still basically the same.

There’s no glory in war.

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