Remembrance Day 2018

It is Remembrance Day 2018.  One hundred years ago, the carnage we call World War I ended.  We heard the stories of dead and wounded soldiers from that war including the Canadian, George Price, who was the last Commonwealth soldier to die in the war, several hours after the last British soldier died.  There was another world war, more wide-spread and devastating than the first.  But we still pay homage to that first one.

There was an on-line story the other day about an artifact in the Canadian War Museum that had been made ready to be used in a Remembrance Day ceremony in Europe.  The artifact was one of the first armoured cars used by Canadians in that war.  It is still in working order.  In the comments section of the story, one writer had made it very plain that this machine was designed to kill people and therefore should not have been built.  That comment got me thinking.

There are probably no people who abhor war more than serving and retired members of the military.  They know the power of present-day weapons and what they can do.  And once you have seen men and women killed or wounded by these weapons, you probably never want to see it again.

If the world were such a pacific place that we were able to do without weapons, it would be the most wonderful thing that ever happened to humanity.  But if you stopped building modern weapons; armoured cars, tanks, war planes, warships, missiles and nuclear bombs; it would not stop violence.  People would continue to fight with clubs, sticks, knives, spears, hatchets and hunting rifles.  They would continue to find ways to kill or maim other people.  Enterprising humans would continue to refine and improve such ways with bigger clubs, longer sticks with sharp points, better knives that would evolve into swords, spears that were longer and sharper, better hatchets and improved rifles that would shoot farther and faster.  Of course, this is the route that the history of violence has already gone.  And we still haven’t been able to figure out a way to bring about the kind of state of permanent peace that almost all peoples of the world crave.  And as long as there is even one belligerent group of people with weapons, others must be prepared to defend themselves.  The development and proliferation of weapons sadly goes on.