Never Knew they Were Worse Things than Dying

 

Met up with a client from Australia and we both remembered that it’s “Armistice Day,” or the day when the armistice that ended the first World War was signed. At the time, the First World War had been the bloodiest and its end seemed like a nightmare for a continent that at the time pretty much controlled the world.

When I grew up in the UK, “Armistice Day” was something that one just took for granted. It was understood that you simply looked sombre on the 11^th hour of the 11^th day of the 11^th month as a mark of respect for a generation that spent years in the most awful conditions being gunned down because the royals of Europe had a family tiff (the Russian Czar, the German kaiser and the British King were all cousins). I grew up being told that this was a generation that sacrificed so that mine could enjoy the freedoms that we enjoy today.

I could get the message on an intellectual level but it was never an emotional connection. I thought of it as a particularly British thing that didn’t really have much to do to the rest of us in the colonies. Ironically, it would take coming back to Singapore, which doesn’t commemorate the occasion, serving in the military and seeing a friend come home in a body bag for me to fully appreciate the significance of the end of this war.

One of the things that I believe that not enough of us fully understand is that war and conflicts are a waste. They waste natural and economic resources and more importantly human resources. The futility of war is best summed up in an Australian Song called “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda,” which describes the Gallipoli Campaign during World War I.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG48Ftsr3OI

 

 The two of the most prominent points in the song are when the main character states that he never knew that there were worse things that dying and then, later in the song, goes onto to say that the young keep asking why the old guys are marching for and he admits that he wonders the same.

I believe these two points are things that most of us have forgotten when it comes to war. Firstly, death is actually not the worst thing that can happen to people. If you take out the religious connotations associated with death, the guy who dies doesn’t have worries. He’s just a corpse who doesn’t suffer any pain or have any stress. The real horror is suffered by those who don’t actually die but suffer from physical and mental ailments.

Then, there’s the second point is why are people placed in positions where they risk having to suffer the various mental and physical ailments that come from conflict. Yes, I do get the importance of fighting to defend yourself. I do get the fact that there are awful situations where the choice is kill or be killed.

However, how many of the conflicts on the global stage are down to the awful choice of kill or be killed? How many “conflict” situations in one’s personal life are actually kill or be killed?

The people in power understand this and hence they produce dubious emotional reasons to get people riled up and willing to fight for whatever the powers that be want them to fight over. This notion was best satirised in the novel “Gulliver’s Travels” when the islands of Lilliput and Blefuscu go to war over which side of the table an egg should be broken.

Let’s always remember that the people who seem most interested in getting into fights are usually not the people doing the fighting. The generation that saw the horror of World War I tried to avoid similar bloodshed but failed and we got World War II. After that, the world came up with the UN as a body to regulate conflicts from getting too big and the EU was created to tie French and German interest so closely together so as to prevent conflicts. However, its been nearly seven decades since the last global conflict and we now have a situation of nations around the world electing chest-thumping eunuchs who need to find their masculinity by sending other people to die.

War is rarely necessary and in an age of rising nationalism, it become even more important for us to teach our kids to be more sceptical. When someone tells you to be angry at a group or person, so angry that you need to get into a fight, one should always ask for the real agenda. Why do you want me to hate this group or this person? What have they done to me? Ask – “how have they harmed me to the point where it becomes necessary to take up arms and wipe them off the face of the earth.” Remember you’re putting your life and your kids life at stake, so its up to you to make sure that the sacrifice is necessary.