The text today is Jesus’ words. “Those who take the sword will perish by the sword.”

WE HONOUR THE WAR DEAD.
We are gathered here to remember and honour our dead and injured in the Great War, perhaps a million dead and 1.6 million wounded. We remember and honour them, in particular those on our Memorial. We think of their bravery, care for one another, selflessness, concern to protect us and sacrifice themselves, even unto death. As Jesus said, “Greater love has no man than this, that he lays down his life for his friends.” Many of these men and women sacrificed themselves all the way for us, and we honour them, and we are grateful to all the British Legion does for present veterans of the armed forces.

CAN WE ALSO CRITICIZE WAR?
Does honouring these people make it impossible to criticize War? Perhaps not, for five reasons.

1. THE MEN THEMSELVES DID. Volunteers had been told they would be home before Christmas; the real long war was very different. The Christmas Truce suggested by the Pope taught many that playing football across No Man’s Land with the Huns, was far more sensible than being dismembered in the rat-infested trenches by a thundering barrage of explosions. Many resented being cannon fodder and wanted out. Nothing justified the Somme, Verdun, Passchendaele and men going over the top to be ripped apart by machine guns. Patriotism was, as Wilfred Owen called it, “ The Old Lie”. Also, millions of mothers, sweethearts, children knew that the war was not honestly presented or worth it for those they mourned. It promised winning, but all sides lost.

2. THE SILENT ONES. We also owe it to two silent groups. First, those who died. After death, they had no voice, no votes. We have been silent, remembering them, for two minutes, but they were silenced for ever. They went to fight, not to die, and even those who faced death willingly for his country, like our neighbour, Rupert Brooke, might see things differently when the time came; he died on the way over to Gallipoli. These people are silent in our history.

So, too, were many of the shell-shocked, the PTSD, people. We do not see the scale of this problem. Now PTSD is identified in 5-30% of combatants in various studies. Say we look at a conservative figure of 10-15% of 50 million unkilled combatants – that is 5-7.5 million shell shocked or PTSD soldiers. WW1 was possibly the worst of all wars for this. Sometimes these people were gibbering wrecks or just silent. Sometimes they fumed into hate, like shell-shocked Hitler, who was injured and gassed. Last week a US veteran killed 12 people gratuitously. PTSD can be dangerous.

Indeed, we should recognize the contribution PTSD made to the NAZI Movement. Hitler gathered people like himself, made them a quasi-military movement, with weapons, gave them objects of hate and a pittance of daily pay that he received from the rich. My guesstimate is that Germany had one to two million PTSD soldiers and perhaps 100-200,000 with anger and aggression problems, an ample number of feed Hitler’s vicious movement. Look at the pictures and writing of George Grotz; it is recorded there. The Nazi stormtroopers institutionalised WW1 shell-shock anger and aggression and turned it on the Jews. War begets war. Those who take the sword continue to perish by the sword.

But often the shell-shocked remained in silence, covering the hell they had experienced, seeing murder, being ordered to murder and living on the edge of death. They too were and are unheard. Recent documentaries mentioned that one British ex- soldier a week commits suicide and eleven US veterans a day. We will remember them and their experience of war.

3. MILITARISM AND WAR IS THE BIGGEST FAILED EXPERIMENT ON THE PLANET.
Again, on most assessments, Militarism is the world’s greatest failed experiment. From the Great War there have been some two hundred million war dead and even more seriously injured, mainly the young. Some 10-20% of all economic activity has been wasted. Destruction, poverty, and tens of millions of refugees have been visited on the planet. We have committed to militarism because the arms companies have pushed it, but we have been destroyed by it. We have taken the sword and perished by the sword. WW1 was followed by a flu epidemic started among the troops and spread as they returned home across the world. It killed 50-100 million more people, tragedy upon tragedy. WW2 was worse, and we have only to remember George W. Bush’s stupid Mission Accomplished Speech about Iraq in 2003; the region is still in chaos. Contrary to what the arms companies say, wars do not work and they are devastating the world. Militarism is a lie, as real soldiers and the bombed know. It pollutes the planet with 10% of our CO2 and disperses poverty, famine and death. It is the Four Horses of the Apocalypse – Conqueror, War, Famine and Death.

4. WARS NEED NOT HAPPEN. Wars are not fought for territory since the end of empires. They are fought over weapons. “Those who take the sword perish by the sword.” The First World War was preceded by four arms races pushed by the arms companies; one of them sparked and the War blew up. The role of the arms companies in WW1 has been suppressed almost completely in our remembrances. We and the French armed Russia, so that Germany faced hostility from both sides, as Lloyd George recognised. Our arms companies repeatedly lied about German rearmament to increase their own contracts. Hear Lord Edward Grey, possibly the best authority on why the war started. “The enormous growth of armaments in Europe, the sense of insecurity and fear caused by them – it was these that made war inevitable. This is the warning to be handed on.” Hear Lloyd George, “Thus great armaments made war.” Dozens of great people, including Gladstone, Campbell Bannerman and Keir Hardie identified the problem of the arms and naval companies pushing people towards war. The false Dreadnought scare “We want eight and we won’t wait” became a public frenzy.

Ah, you say, “What about World War Two?”. There were more than a hundred American companies in Berlin selling weapons too the Nazis in 1935 and the Americans were even paying for Hitler’s arms with vast loans. And that was after the arms companies had strangled the Great Disarmament Conference of 1932 when it was moving towards success and would have prevented Hitler coming to power. Hitler was supported by Fritz Thyssen part of the German arms machine, as the Kaiser had been supported by Krupp. Arms companies need wars, but they can be prevented. We armed Saddam and he went to War. We disarmed Saddam and we went to war because the arms companies wanted it. So, these vast millions need not have died. The arms companies, militarists and politicians pretend not, but wars can be stopped. We have convinced ourselves that individual murder is a crime, but been brainwashed to accept mass murder is OK. We are taught that militarism is realistic and peace is idealistic, but actually the opposite is true. No weapons: no War. Peace works in Coton without us each having guns under our pillows. Stopping war requires closing down weapons, and it can be done.

5. OUR MEMORY OF THE WAR IS ROMANTICIZED. Finally, we remember our dead. There were 888,246 poppies outside the Tower of London. But we do not remember or add up those we killed, probably a similar number or more; in all the memories of today they will be hardly mentioned. Soldiers are trained to kill; it is practised on the firing range up the road. Thankfully there are standards and principles of warfare, but the enterprise is organised murder. Usually soldiers do not want to kill, but they are following orders – our orders. Britain has been an aggressor in most of the countries of the world and has killed there on a vast scale.

So, the whole world-wide enterprise of militarism, fermented by the arms companies and the militarists, is a vast destructive failure. We have been brainwashed by them into buying this $5-10 trillion a year tragedy across the globe. We gloss the reality with nostalgia, and bury the truth. Out of respect for the dead, the Great War and all our wars, cannot be sanctified. More than that militarism must be fully ended. The planet requires that it is.

The prophet, Isaiah, already saw the problem and solution two and a half thousand years ago. It requires swords into ploughshares and that people do not learn war any more. It requires unconditional respect for God’s commandment, “Thou shalt not kill”. The tools of killing, armaments, are similarly evil, always destructive and never capable of good. But it is to Jesus that we must look, far beyond the warning that those who take the sword are destroyed by it.

SO WE LISTEN TO JESUS FOR THE FULL PICTURE. For Christian peace is a whole worldview. It dethrones power as control, domination and the threat of attack. Right at the beginning Jesus resisted the temptation to go for control and power over the kingdoms of this world and charted a different way.

We are to love our enemies and try to understand what the other side is on about; perhaps they are terrorists because we have bombed their countries to bits.
We are to settle quarrels early as the Sermon on the Mount teaches us.
We are to make peace; it is an active, blessing process.
We are to allow our peace to rest on others, to establish relationships of peace. We will never threaten, the common currency of today’s politics. Giving peace and being trusted costs nothing and can go round the world.
We are not to fear those who kill our bodies, but only fear God. This disarms the hold the militarists try to have on us through fear. “Do not fear.” insists Jesus.
We are to put away weapons, disarm, turn swords into ploughshares, refuse conflict, reconcile with one another. As Paul added, The armour we put on is justice, peace, truthfulness and faith.
We are to live law-abiding lives, as Bush and Blair failed to do when they invaded Iraq.
We are to understand that power is the power to do good and serve rather than control. Worldwide, we dismiss superpower self-importance and the military games they play, and recognize that the gentle Lamb is on the Throne, a threat to no-one.

Over two billion Christians world-wide implicitly understand this. Now we must be explicit for world multilateral disarmament.

World Disarmament is far easier than our present World Armament. It saves death, trillions, cuts poverty, restores economies, cuts CO2. It is God’s way for us. We all agree to cut military expenditure by 10% a year for a decade until it is all gone, policed by the UN. We all quit weapons. It nearly happened in 1932. It can happen now. There are 2.3 billion Christians around the world and we could do it. Faith can move mountains. We need the gentle rule of Christ to replace the aggressive superpowers and arms interests who run world politics. We little people must do it, because the arms companies and the military are inside most governments. Supreme Allied Commander and then President Eisenhower, a Christian, said it. “I believe that the people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than any governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days, governments had better get out of their way and let them have it.”

Those who pay lip-service to Christianity but do not do it in world affairs need to be held to account. We owe it to the dead we now remember. We need to mobilize Christians for disarmament across the globe. “My peace I leave with you”, said Jesus. Already we are two thousand years late.