While we forget

In solemn tones, the BBC coverage from the Cenotaph tomorrow will remind us that we're remembering all those fallen in wars. This year, I'm not buying it.

I've worn a poppy in November of every year I can remember. But the last couple of years I've found it difficult to square the display with my conscience. Not because I've suddenly awoken to the horrors of war - I don't agree with those who claim Remembrance is a glorification of violence, although there are certainly those who see it that way - but because of a growing suspicion that Remembrance has come to mask the very thing of which it's supposed to remind us.

That feeling has grown from the everyday news from Ukraine since February 2022. There is a war going on in Europe. It's being fought in trenches, in conditions very similar to those in the first half of the last century. It's claimed perhaps half a million lives so far, with many Ukrainian civilians among them - many more than have been reliably counted (particularly in Mariupol and despite some deeply distasteful manipulation by those protesting Israel's offensive on Gaza, as if these horrors were capable of reduction to some ghoulish league table of body counts). And it's being fought against a fundamentally similar threat, posed by a revanchist power that mythologises itself as a victim and thereby justifies unrestrained aggression.

Ukraine battles alone against a Russian attack that, if successful, will not stop at its borders. This seems a certainty because Russia's aggression didn't begin with Ukraine: Moldova, Chechnya and Georgia had already seen the horrors arising from Russian contempt for a rules-based order when Ukraine was first attacked in 2014, the Crimean peninsula annexed to the dismay of the native Tatar population and the Donbas region brought under "separatist" control (in reality the separatists were either former Russian military or controlled and funded by the Kremlin). People in Syria, Mali, Sudan, Libya, the Central African Republic and several others have seen either Russian regulars or the GRU-controlled Wagner mercenary group propping up authoritarian leaders through indiscriminate slaughter of opposition. Russia - with Putin at the helm, or quite possibly without - wants nothing less than a restoration of its Empire by another name and by any means possible, and Ukraine is but one step in that direction.

Not a day goes by without a Ukrainian soldier dying to protect Europe's eastern border from this threat. Yet Remembrance encourages us to focus our gaze on past wars, to reflect, however sombrely, on past glories and in doing so, to consider the job done (although almost nobody now remembering had any part in doing said job). It continues to direct our vision backwards - November is for many just the high season of a year-round nostalgia - when we should be looking at the present and the future, because the job is clearly not done. The threat, of an end of the rules-based order, of a return to Great Power politics and the supremacy of "might is right", is not just gathering again but is on the move and on the march, firing real missiles and shells and bullets at real people who are bleeding and breathing their last to defend real values.

The values at stake are those we popularly claim those men and women listed on war memorials up and down the country died to protect - democracy, liberty from oppression, self-determination. Never mind that at the outbreak of war in 1914, 40% of men over 21, and all women, were denied the right to vote in Great Britain & Ireland, or that that war was in part a contest of empires. Yet here we stand, misty-eyed, beguiled by a version of history in which we said with one voice "never again", while it begins again to happen around us. The job is, I suspect, never done, but we appear wilfully ignorant of that as we "remember". I fear what we actually want to do is forget: forget that the threat comes time and again, forget that it can rise anywhere if we don't all police ourselves and one another, and forget that one's duty isn't discharged by one's great-grandparents.

In the least ambiguous conflict possible - a democratic state invaded by its authoritarian neighbour in an attempt to dictate the former's future - the assorted elements of the old Western alliance should have been providing every assistance possible from day one. Yet a sizeable chunk of public opinion, guided by proven Russian influence campaigns has, together with a rash of populist rises to power across the West, provided a damper to political action and produced a drip-feed of weaponry sufficient to prevent a Ukrainian collapse but by no measure enough to allow Ukraine to drive Russian forces out of occupied territory.

I fear the poppy has become, like its black sheep cousin, a narcotic, a way of blocking out the cold, rising wind and settling back into our chairs. Not to remember, not really, but to embrace amnesia and inaction. It may not be too late to rouse ourselves, but we're cutting it very fine. As I look at the poppy I bought, but couldn't bring myself to wear, I hope this year isn't the one history records as the last, lost chance to prevent a recurrence of the catastrophic events to which, at this time of year, we ritually say "never again".