Die Jugend Marschiert -or- Stick The Fucking Flag Up Your Goddamn Ass

Looks like it's remembrance day today. First things first: how many of you assholes actually remember anything about the war? No I didn't think so. Get a better name. Furthermore, remembrance day is the most immense amount of bullshit you'll ever hear about in your fucking life. Here's why:

The First World War, upon which the whole sorry institution is based was, almost inarguably, a swing and miss of epic proportions for every concerned party and it's not, in my opinion, something to be honoured. Now, don't shit yourself about my lack of compassion just yet - I'm not trying to tell you that I think the 15 million (!) motherfuckers who died had it coming or anything like that. I agree, it was an incomprehensible tragedy, but think for a moment - it was not necessary and nor was it justified. What the wearing of a red poppy does is to honour the fact that a bunch of rich and powerful assholes managed to send a generation of their respective countries' poor to their deaths in order to serve their own ends. That's what remembrance day really remembers. War is rarely, if ever, a necessary and unavoidable course of action, but it is always a humanitarian catastrophe, and the commemoration of the incompetencies of past governments seems completely ridiculous to me.

Remembrance day is a pro-war institution, and you're a fool if you think otherwise. You simply cannot participate in an event enacted by the military, (an organisation the very existence of which stands in the way of peace [the universal establishment of which is more than likely a stupidly idealistic pipe-dream anyway, so ignore this parenthesis]) which is carried out by soldiers to remember other soldiers who died, which is emphatically encouraged by a government similar to that which sent (and still sends) it's young men to be killed and then treated those who returned with a brutal indignity, and which glorifies war (yes it does) and claim to be horrified by the event which gave rise to it. If you're anti-war, you can't participate in remembrance day, or else you're a fucking hypocrite.

Having said that, all this pro-life, anti-young-people-dying-as-soldiers talk is, you might've noticed, fairly moderate. And regular readers will know that here at Luke McGinty HQ we're not all that moderate. Here's the real story:

Soldiers are fucking idiots. From the gung-ho patriot serving his queen and country right now in Afghanistan to the poor kid seduced by those "let's all be good mates and never kill anyone" army recruitment adverts to the WW1 conscript, every soldier history has been a pure and simple dullard, or worse. The army, despite the rhetoric and sophistry that often surrounds it, is and ever was a tool of the government. I don't believe any government in this country has ever been elected because the nation as a whole wanted to go to war and kill foreigners. I don't think anyone could argue that, and the conclusion is that whenever the army has been sent to war, the government has failed the people it has a duty to serve. Any intelligent person would have no part in such an endeavour, and remembrance day is intended to celebrate those who do; those who would fall for the sort of deceitful propaganda used to attempt to justify the unjustifiable. In short, idiots. It's a celebration of the repression of conscious and conscientious thought and of unthinking dedication to a weak and flimsy ideology, namely that one's country (read: government) is worth fighting for.

Long story short, what the army does is it kills people. And joining the army under any circumstances (bearing in mind that conscientious objection existed, and flourished in certain quarters, even during the First World War throws into relief the frankly ignorant argument from cultural difference, and the idea that my writing this in the midst of a different cultural zeitgeist makes me some sort of arrogant fool who doesn't know of which he speaks) makes you a fucking moron. Not to mention a potential, if not actual, killer. Remembrance day celebrates killers. Lest we forget...