We really ought to remind ourselves and our military that people rarely die in wars. No, they are killed. And they are intended to be killed, murdered in cold blood, and not in piddling ones and twos, but by the hundred or, on a good day, thousands.
For a really bumper harvest in the opinion of the experts at the game, the chiefs on both sides with a name for the game such as Hague and so on, the daily score can be in the tens of thousands. - But civilians too? These days, of course, they can always call it 'a tragic accident' and we skilfully-dumbed mindless public will buy that, won't we?
Wars are very carefully designed to kill as many as possible on all the 'sides' that can decently or indecently be involved. Costly and ingenious armaments are sold to all such parties - usually by the same manufacturers - with the express purpose to do just that.
And men do not pay the supreme sacrifice. They are wilfully sacrificed for the sake of others' pockets, and unless seriously mentally disturbed have to be ordered to kill and be killed under pain of being penalized and even murdered by their own side if they don't or won't comply.
"They shall not grow old"? No, they are already dead, without having been allowed to live long enough to avoid it.
And, just in case you innocents have been misled, there is nothing particularly glorious about being maimed or just being dead and putrefying. Hang around the unburied or untreated dead for awhile and you'll catch my drift, and theirs. No, in that connection glory is only mentioned by those who want them and you and as many others as possible to share the same ingloriously putrid fate.
Nor is there anything very glorious about the heartbreak of bereaved families, now realizing only too late that the glory of their 'sacrifice' was never anything but a cheap and cynical lie to line some financier's or arms- or oil-baron's pocket.
No, the only glory of war is in the glorious happiness of those who make glorious profits by having armaments made, and then by supplying and selling said armaments with gloriously fat contracts, and for the flag- and patriot-music makers and all our brave politicians who have been paid to bring about the happy condition of war.
The dead are war's tragedy rather than its glory, and the folly and shame of the butchery is ours that, before they plot and cause the next, we don't butcher those who cause and glorify war generation after generation.
So, Reader, don't you think it is about time that we called a halt to this ridiculous farce? Why should we all suffer, just to support a few malignant beasts who want nothing other than the rest of us - if not off the planet - then at least six feet under its surface?
Then what say we start by obstructing the next intended shemozzle against the innocent countries of Iran and Syria, with doubtless oil-rich Venezuela in the sights down the range. Let's tell our evilly conniving and ever duplicitous 'leaders', and those who move them, once and for all to go and take a running jump at themselves.
Or, if in the name of the loot which is all that's holy to them they still insist, then let's just give each of them a very sharp stick, put them where the heat is, and tell them to go right ahead with their glorious war!
And then let's just watch their 'glory'!
