Global Research: 12-11-2024,

It was catastrophic, cataclysmic and all destructive.  It wiped out empires and aristocracies and tore through the middle class.  The First World War was a conflict that should never have happened, was pursued foolishly and incestuously by the royal families of Europe and fertilised the ground for an even greater war two decades later.  It produced an atmospheric solemnity of grief and loss, and a lingering, collective neurosis.

On November 11, 1918, when the guns fell silent in Europe, some 16 million had been left dead.  A ceremonial ritual grew up around commemorating the fallen.  So horrific were those events that a convention known as the Kellogg-Briand Pact was born, an instrument that initially began as a bilateral agreement between the United States and France to abandon war as an instrument of foreign policy.  Eventually, virtually all the established states of the day signed it, heralding a most fabulous illusion, pursued even as countries began rearming.

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Briand-Kellogg Treaty, with signatures of Gustav Stresemann, Paul Kellogg, Paul Hymans, Aristide Briand, Lord Cushendun, William Lyon Mackenzie King, John McLachlan, Sir Christopher James Parr, Jacobus Stephanus Smit, William Thomas Cosgrave, Count Gaetano Manzoni, Count Uchida, A. Zaleski, Eduard Benes. (From the Public Domain)

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The commemorators that tend to make an appearance on Remembrance Day often prove to be the war makers of tomorrow.  The demand that we all wear red poppies and contribute to the causes of veterans would be all the more poignant and significant were it to discourage killing,

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