On this, the day of Rememberance...

Today marks the anniversary of the signing of the Armistice marking the conclusion of the Great War, known today as the first World War. It is a day on which we commemorate the end of "the war to end all wars" that did anything but. Perhaps, if it was up to you or me or anyone subjected to this nightmare, that old axiom would have held true.

Today, you are likely to hear your leaders pay homage to the fallen for the sacrifices they made in the name of "freedom", and trumpet the need for more of us to continue these sacrifices in the face of our current enemy, the foremost threat to said "freedom", one they call "terrorism". They will mark the anniversary of the end of a war by celebrating it - perhaps because the Allied forces were victorious - and every other time they sent and continue to send scores of young men and women to kill and die, while those fortunate to return home will discover the sacrifices they made aren't worth the money it costs to care for them afterwards, though their telephones will be ringing every subsequent November when it's time to parade them before the proletariat.

Freedom. I am sick to death of hearing this word, of seeing it in the newspapers and on the television. The only freedom for which these men and women fought and are fighting is the freedom for this gang of capitalists to pillage and plunder populations, both here and abroad. By doing so, we, as a people, have managed to anger those left in the wake of the destructive path called "freedom", and now, we are told we must destroy these people before they destroy us.

Keeping with the spirit of wordplay, I want to draw your attention to two other, perhaps more important terms:

Script, referring to the notion that one tribe is superior to another, thus dehumanizing the latter, making subjugation and/or annihilation less reprehensible. For Nazi Germany, it was the Jews and the Gypsies and the homosexuals who were "vermin"; for Suharto, the East Timorese; for Saddam Hussein, the Shi'a and Kurds; for the Hutus of Rwanda, the Tutsis; for us, "Injuns", "Niggers", "Chinks", "Spics", "Japs", "Commies", "Gooks", "Rag-heads", "Hadjis" and any other non-White tribe we perceive to be threatening; perhaps more importantly, for men, regardless of ethnicity or religious belief, it is our female counterparts who are inferior, both physically and mentally, and need us to rule over them.

The Big Lie, that which we need to believe to justify our subjugation and/or annihilation of the "other" group, examples of which include: "They are taking away our jobs!", "They are a burden on our society!", "They are the Great Satan who needs to be destroyed!", "They hate our freedom!", "They will drive us into the sea!", "They are Godless!", "They pray to the wrong God!", "They will blow themselves up on our buses and in our marketplaces!", "God hates fags!" - I can continue ad nauseam, but you get the idea.

So long as we have these scripts instilled within us, so long as we keep buying into "the big lie", we will never see the end of war. There are a select few who aim to keep it this way, as they use us for their personal gain. So long as religious leaders take aim at whom they believe to be the "evil" plaguing our world, so long as gun-runners reap astronomical profits, so long as there are commodities to be controlled - such as the world's largest opium patch; the second, third and sixth-largest oil patches; and, soon enough, the world's largest freshwater reserve - so long as we allow all of this to continue, we will never see the end of war.

In Canada, each of us wears a poppy in recognition of the men and women of wars past and present who have laid down their lives, by and large, for love of a country who doesn't seem to love them all that much, for if it did, it wouldn't be so quick to send them into the meat grinder. As far as I'm concerned, pinning a mock poppy to my coat is an exercise in vain without understanding why we fight; how can we honour the memories of the fallen if we are content to let others' names join theirs on the cenotaph? How can we bring ourselves to continue to destroy each other? Even here, in the "land of the free", we are pitted against one another in a struggle for survival, while politicians and corporate executives capitalize on our fear, loathing and self-gratification.

So long as we sit idle and let our so-called leaders force-feed us their dogma, I'm afraid these young men and women - children, no less! barely adults! what just and moral society sends children off to kill other children? - will have died in vain. For those who feel we need to take up arms against the elite, have we not learned the pitfalls of fighting evil by evil means? It's time to cast aside the barriers between us, the barriers used to perpetuate war. We are not killing "the enemy": we are killing our brothers and sisters; our children are killing each other. It's time to cast aside our "scripts" and these "big lies", and start seeing each other for who we are: people.

Contrary to what we've been told, God does not take sides, for God not some mythical man in the sky who rules over us and smites our enemies: God is love, and we are all God's children, for we lived, and are alive.