Remembrance Day: killing as we mourn?

A letter/feature for the local paper, trying to pull together race and war, focussing on next month's Remembrance Day ceremonies. I wrote the piece partly to atone for not going to London for a big Stop the War demonstration on the same day.

Saturday Oct 24th
To the Editor
South Wales Evening Post

I missed the BNP debut on Question Time. That was partly because here in Wales the programme was pushed into a late-night slot, partly because I felt people had already put up a good anti-racist showing job in Swansea last week. My wife helped make a big banner saying ‘Equality, Welcome, Respect’ and I joined the crowd behind it for a while, across the road from the Swansea Mosque.

That silent protest was called by Quakers, a sideshow to the larger demo in Castle Square. What I’m wondering about now is whether there should be another silent presence alongside the usual Rememberance Day event at the Swansea Cenotaph.

Like Nick Griffin, I have a father who served, in the Second World War, and like Jack Straw’s father, I myself refused to join the army. Instead I did a three-year stint in voluntary work-camps. Earlier, when we lived in wartime London, we had our windows blown out, twice. I hardly remember that, but what does stand out is my mother getting the news of her younger brother’s death. An army engineer, he was blown up, not long after the allied landings, by what would now be called an IED. At that time, we were sharing our house with a family of Jewish refugees: during the V1s and V2s we children camped happily under tables in the basement.

In my father’s or uncle’s place, faced with Hitler’s attack, I don’t know what I would have done. But that wasn’t the sort of war facing me when my turn came. Self-defence is one thing, but that didn’t seem to be the issue in Malaya, Cyprus, Kenya, Aden or Suez. Then, as now in Afghanistan, it wasn’t clear who or what were we fighting for.

The BNP links war and race, but in the wrong way. Like Harry Patch, I believe there’s no such thing as a good war and I want to remember the dead on both sides, all sides. Since the Hitler war, most of our foreign engagements have set ‘us’ - mainly white – against ‘them’ in various shades of brown and black, with maybe 10 of ‘them’ killed to every one of ‘us’. Add religion, as in Iraq, Afghanistan and the ‘war on terrorism,’ it’s worse, and the wounds take longer to heal.

One of my first work-camps was in an Algiers shanty-town, at the start of the Algerian independence war. One workmate, an Algerian student, was later killed. Another, a young French officer, joined us when he could because he wasn’t happy in his army role. After that war, I knew another Algerian, ‘freedom fighter’ or ’terrorist’ who never quite recovered from the killing he’d done. In Egypt, soon after Suez, I shared a flat with a black, gay, former US serviceman. Later became press-spokesman for the militant Black Panthers, but in Cairo his presence was a talisman to me: a lot of Egyptians were still bitter about our Suez attack, and I was easy to pick out.

Earlier this year, an old Algerian journalist colleague came to stay with us in Swansea. He was more religious than I remembered him. We took him to the Swansea Mosque – to pray for us, he said – and we enjoyed the halal chicken and lamb we bought in St Helen’s Road.

So… The equation of Islam = extremist = terrorist makes no sense to me, and I cant make sense of a world divided on religious or racial lines. I may not have fought in wars, but I have got close enough to know and respect people who did. I want to show my respect and remember the dead. But can I stand in mourning for the dead while turning my back on the ongoing waste of lives in Afghanistan? ‘Organised murder,’ to quote Harry Patch again, or bloody chaos, oil on the flames, a gift to the enemy.

It’s a couple of weeks from Remembrance Sunday and I would like to know what other people think, in Swansea or further afield. Especially those who have fought and suffered themselves, lost family or friends, welcomed home the disfigured or deranged.

Yours sincerely


Greg Wilkinson
dgregwilkinson@yahoo.co.uk