Each year we honour the dead, those who were slain in war for us. Often they were young men taken from life. We remember them. We think how many. We recall the horrors of gas, of submarine warfare, of being hit and dying and what each could have become. We are in debt, and the debt can never be repaid by us.

But there is more to remember. There are war memorials all over Britain, and we have mostly stood at several. They are usually World War One memorials with World War Two names added. At Coton and elsewhere there are often several names from a family, but fewer in World War Two. For Churchill, after the Gallipoli failure in WW1, was parsimonious of British soldiers lives and long delayed the Second Front while the Russians ground down the German army. We lost half a million men and Russia lost twenty five million. So we also remember the dead Russians.

Then there is the battle of Britain. Here Spitfires still fly over most weeks from Duxford, do a few amazing moves in the clouds, and fly back. Wars hang on machines, pilots, tanks and we remember them. We all know the Battle of Britain, the fight for Britain’s survival in 1940, and we remember it with unqualified gratitude, whether we mow the lawn or hear Vera Lynn. We think of the women workers who helped win that War. We think of our family members eighty years ago.

We remember through poppies, because the fields of Flanders, with churned up mud from exploding shells, became fields of poppies through the seeds that germinated in the process, and that beauty covered the barbed wire and body parts. The poppies as remembrance are not quite to be trusted. They are too beautiful, beside weeping widows and shell shocked men.

We remember war memorials in Cambridge Colleges – a vast long list of young men in Trinity, thinking and learning, and then killed. Rupert Brooke, on the list in Grantchester Village Hall Board, did not even get to Gallipoli. His poems were overtaken by the real war after he died. For loss is loss and it cannot be without mourning, and fathers should not mourn their sons. And we remember inadequate politicians left in the twenties and thirties.

Then we remember that all military history is not like the Battle of Britain. We have invaded and conquered like the Nazis tried to do. In fact, we have had a go at half the countries round the world. And now we know we were often despicable, using them for our gain and purposes. We confiscated Hong Kong because the Chinese did not want us to make them into opium addicts. We used the vast Indian economy during and after the East Indian Company, and we did not help properly in the Bengal Famine. Even in 1952-60 we practiced appalling torture on a massive scale in the “Mau Mau uprising”, but kept it quiet. We did Concentration Camps in the Second Boer War, and Blair did WMD to back up an illegal war with a lie. We, our State, is not the righteous one, and we have often been not glorious, even wicked. We are like the others and not exceptional.

We remember empires, but how? Perhaps a rich Anglo-Saxon English Christian culture was destroyed by the Normans. The Romans built roads here, but at what cost? Who worked and who supervised? And was England really good for Scotland, Ireland and Wales? And were the Spanish Empire, the Dutch Empire, the British Empire, the French Empire justified in their self-importance, their slavery, their quest for gold and their distain of those they conquered? We have to re-remember empires.

We remember the Bible’s treatment of military empires. Pharoah and the Egyptian Empire are forced to Let My People Go. The Children of Israel are little people and God set them up with good laws, to respect the alien, without armies, and to live good holy lives. They fail, but God is patient and guides them on and on. Their rulers also fail, like all do. They do self-importance, but God introduces the Servant-king. The What? The One they and we would not understand, the gentle ruler for the people, for all people who are created for God’s glory, the One who served the people and did not need soldiers.  So Isaiah’s not-understood Servant king is there to serve, heal and bring peace. Nation shall speak peace unto nation, and they will not learn war any more. He will settle disputes among the nations and they will beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks. First they will disarm first and then, obviously, nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war any more.

We remember the great reversal. The mighty are brought down. Hitler in the bunker. Caesar “Et Tu Brute”. Why do the mighty fall? Israel faces Babylon as captives, but Nebuchadnezzar finishes on his knees, eating grass and acknowledging the Lord God Almighty rules. God has them, and later rulers intoxicated in their own power in derision because of their pretentiousness. Those who self-promote with weapons, only destroy. They will fall. He will lift up the lowly. The mighty must come down from their thrones. Why do we not see that? The Superpowers will fall because they serve themselves. They are already falling.

Then I remember, nearly only I, because it has been obliterated from British national history, the Geneva Disarmament Conference of 1932, supported by tens of millions of people around the world to make the Great War the War to End All Wars. I have studied the German delegation confident that an agreement would see Hitler’s gang off into oblivion. President Hoover’s proposal to cut all aggressive weapons completely and all other weapons by a third with the US ones on the table was deliriously welcomed around the world – the USSR, Germany, China, Italy and most of the other states, because disarmament would mean peace. Yes. But then the British Cabinet, jealous of the US new superpower, holding on to its navy to control the Empire, squeezes the Conference into doing nothing with a little help from Fascist Japan. We stopped disarmament in 1932, and soon the arms traders were back in business, Hitler came to power and was funded and armed by the US and others into World War Two. We do not remember that history. It is covered up by the word “appeasement” and hidden from view.  We nearly did world multilateral disarmament in 1932 

And I remember a likeable former student, back from the Gulf, now strange, talking of depleted uranium, in physical distress before the label PTSD was available to me. There was another Northern Ireland student whom we held down all night when he flipped after the Troubles resurfaced in his life. We now know there are tens of millions of traumatized soldiers and civilians suiciding, or fighting, or angry, or withdrawn through the evils they have known. We each probably remember one or more of those suicides. Secondary PTSD among those who suffer from the main victims is another massive problem. WW1 shell shock was horror taken to the grave. War scars humanity. This, we now learn, is normal history in the USSR, China, Germany and now throughout the Middle East and after all wars. Terrorism is PTSD when your home has been trashed by the West. How dare we believe that war leaves us normal?

We remember soldiers showing bravery beyond thought out of concern for others, those who die, those who are honest and care for the enemy and for their comrades. We remember not the films, but the unseen goodness shown in war. We remember the honesty of soldiers who face death at our behest.

Then there is the antinomy, the great contradiction. The people we remember and honour were themselves shooting to kill. We honour the sanctity of their lives, but command them to kill – machine gun, howitzer, landmine, bomb, even nuclear bomb to destroy others. We remember the US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the report of a little girl with her eyeballs in her hands. We remember the First US Secretary of Defence, James Forrestal went mad, partly because he had seen the bombs at Bikini Atoll. We command to kill, in principle to defend, but then in practice, to protect life and people die. The military train to kill to preserve the sanctity of life.

 Then we remember that they tell us this. The militarists sell the threat to kill as the route to peace. We have lived within this propaganda though our lifetimes from the Cold War to renewing Trident as if there were no alternative. They would say this, wouldn’t they? The business of militarism needs its advertising. We keep you safe. Give us more missiles, guns, nuclear weapons, fighters. We must spend a trillion dollars on this fighter. And we remember Corbyn and others who question this militarism are trashed, and are slightly uneasy. We remember Eisenhower warned us about the Military-Industrial Complex. This message rules the world – superpowers, military dictators and ordinary states who must have a military and pay for it, thoug their neighbours are all nice. The message always gets through and the arms companies flourish.

We remember the peace people as nice gentle folk who withdraw from war, and really do not pull their weight for the nation except as hospital porters of something. But some of us remember the real peace people. Tolstoy, the world’s greatest novelist, moves on from War and Peace to only peace. He lambasts the Kaiser. He backs the Doukabours who burn their weapons. Gladstone sees why WW1 will happen. Keir Hardie follows Jesus to try to stop the Great War and Pope Benedict XV organises the first Christmas truce and tries to make it permanent, because all will lose and civilisation will be destroyed. The real pacifists need to be heard again, because we do not remember them.

There is the pacifism which ridicules the whole military show and sees through it. Weapons only destroy. Individual murder is the greatest wrong, but mass murder validated by the State is “glorious”. What a waste. In the playground we know that kids get on much better without weapons, why not among states? Autocratic rulers needs weapons, but why run democracies on weapons? Militarism is often a 2-10% drag on the economy; disarmed peace costs nothing. Can’t you work it out: No weapons – No wars. One war leads to another. Weapons breed distrust. Peace works in Sawbridgeworth or Goolagong. Why have we idiots been persuaded that weapons are the way to live?

Then we remember Jesus  – he is always right and we have had two thousand years to hear him.  “Those who use the sword, will die by the sword” Yes, Japan, Germany and the USA should understand that. Pearl Harbour- Hiroshima. Nuremburg and the Bunker. The CIA train and arm Al Qaida to attack the USSR and finish up with the Twin Towers. Those who go for weapons suffer from them. Americans with guns under their pillows more often get shot. Militarism does not work. It is the biggest failed experiment in history. Jesus is right. Jesus is always right.

We remember that Jesus does the other. He laughs at us, because we are so thick. He does peace; he switches the war horse entrance to Jerusalem for the donkey, the parody of L’Arc De Triomphe. Sort all quarrels early, he says. Forgive wrongs. I rule by truth, not military power, he says to the representative of the Roman Empire, and tells the truth: “I am King of the Jews” even when the truth will automatically lead to his death. Turn the other cheek; break the causal chain of retaliation. Love your enemies and understand them; they will disappear. Make peace and you will be blessed – you have to manufacture peace; it will not just happen. Pass on peace to others. No threats. We can be friends. God’s gentle rule can come among us. I am the Lamb on the Throne. I use words not weapons. I do the Servant King and that is the God-given structure of government. I insist on it, and the first will be last and the last will be first. When we remember Jesus, the friend of all us sinners, war is powerless. Do NOT fear those who kill the body, he says, and after the resurrection, “My peace I leave with you.” So what will we do with it?

Then we remember that the United Nations passed the Treaty Prohibiting Nuclear Weapons with a substantial sane majority, and it is now ratified and will pass into Law next January. We sadly understand that the “Superpowers” who have not used nuclear weapons for seventy five years because they are unusable, but have spent tens of trillions on them, cannot lose face by abandoning them. But we can. We can quit nuclear weapons and all weapons in about six years, if we have a mind to it, and we ordinary people have to have a mind to it, together, democratically, around the world. The militarists will not do it, because turkeys do not vote for Christmas. But it can be done, and then we will honour those who have died. Then we will close down the war machine by truly remembering and bringing about the healing of the nations. “Blessed,” said Jesus, “are the peace makers, for they (we) will be called children of God.” “My peace I leave with you”, and we can do His peace, ordinary High Street peace that works for everybody and against no-one.