“Greater love hath no man than this…” Each November the verse drifts through drizzle and brass, as if the words themselves could absolve us. What once meant grief and gratitude has become a national lullaby – a soft hymn to obedience. We remember the dead, but too often only as props in a ritual that flatters the living.
After 1945 remembrance had substance. The Attlee government honoured the fallen not with parades but with purpose: the NHS, housing, education – a moral reconstruction as real as the physical one. The dead were paid the only tribute that mattered – a fairer country. That generation remembered why the war was fought, not just that it was won.
It is right to remember that we won. Victory over fascism was no small thing; it ended a darkness that had swallowed continents. But it’s also right to remember why we fought – not for glory or revenge, but to defend the idea that ordinary people have the right to live free from tyranny. Forget that, and victory becomes empty theatre.
Now remembrance is mostly pageantry. Flags wave, cameras pan, politicians declaim scripture as though courage were theirs by inheritance. Across Europe, remembrance still aches – Poles, Czechs, and Ukrainians know tyranny by touch. We, cushioned by comfort, turn it into ceremony. We remember victory but forget virtue.
And in that confusion, courage and love have been blurred beyond recognition. Courage is institutional – drilled, disciplined, required. Love is personal – irrational, human, uncommanded. When it appears in war it isn’t the tool of empire but its quiet rebellion: a man dragging his friend from the mud, not for king or country but because his friend still breathes. That is the “greater love” Christ meant. The state celebrates courage because it needs it; it ignores love because it can’t control it.
Still, love doesn’t always mean surrender. There are times when it demands resistance – when peace itself is under attack. Some wars are fought because existence is threatened, when evil makes peace impossible. To fight then is not warmongering but moral realism. To refuse even in the face of annihilation isn’t purity; it’s abdication. Pacifism raised to dogma becomes vanity – the comfort of believing that righteousness alone can stop a tank. Evil doesn’t retreat before principles; it retreats before those willing to defend them.
Christ grasped that paradox. He preached peace but defied empire. His war was moral, not martial – resistance without hatred. He would never have fought for conquest, yet he might have stood in defence of the innocent. Love, for him, wasn’t passive suffering; it was the courage to resist without becoming what you oppose.
Remembrance should echo that spirit. To honour the dead is to rebuild the decency they believed they were dying for – not to drape ourselves in borrowed glory. The generation of 1945 came home to build; ours comes home to brand – themselves, their virtue, their grief. They forged a welfare state; we forge hashtags. They understood that courage without conscience is obedience, and that love without action is sentiment.
To be anti-war is not to be naïve. It is to be anti-stupid war – anti the vainglorious, the avoidable, the dishonest. The lesson of 1945 was never that war ennobles; it was that peace must be earned. If we truly remember them, we’ll stop confusing heroism with obedience and ceremony with conscience.
We shouldn’t need another war to recall that love – and the decency it defended – was what made their sacrifice sacred. The question is whether we still deserve the memory of those who once fought to give us a better peace.
You know which rising political force I refer to.
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