This Remembrance Day we will once again be invited to live inside the Battle of Britain and be grateful for the armed forces that defended us against invasion, as though that was the typical form of British militarism. We will be expected to forget that the Battle of Britain in 1940, and the Spanish Armada in 1588 were the only times we have been threatened – twice in 950 years. It is time to take fuller stock of our long national military stance.

The background is not good. We see ourselves as defensive, but historically we have been the opposite. In the modern era we have invaded more than 80% of the countries of the world with cannon and machine gun to impose our will on them. The British Empire militarily conquered a quarter of the world land area, and over 400 million people were bent to our will by the gun. The British Empire involved mass slavery, the opium trade and vast economic exploitation, but we were genuinely convinced that we were the goodies. Actually, our aggressive militarism and cruelty has been widespread and prolonged; we attacked others and dominated them into submission.

We also started and pushed the industrial arms trade more than any other state, introduced the Concentration Camp and mowed down natives with the Maxim gun. By 1914 British arms companies, along with others, had stoked four arms races that produced the Great War, running scares and media campaigns, especially against the Hun. After the War we continued to back our international arms trade against disarmament. In 1932 the Tory Cabinet deliberately stalled the Great Geneva Disarmament Conference and the proposals of President Hoover to cut all arms by a third and eliminate the most aggressive weapons; backing it would have prevented Hitler coming to power. Then in the late 1930s the same Tory Nazi sympathisers, the Appeasers, allowed him to accrue military power and start WW2. British Fascism helped bring about WW2.

Since then, the UK, linked to the dominant US, has promoted the Cold War, opposed nuclear disarmament and sold weapons around the world including to many oppressive military dictatorships. Frequently our State stokes international antagonisms, ramps up fear deliberately and chooses military escalation. Nor is it over. We have just occupied Afghanistan for twenty years leaving it in a desperate state when we finally lost the war, but trying to blame the Taliban for its disarray. We currently parade an aircraft carrier fleet around and around the China Sea in a show of military bluster.

The great ritual of Remembrance at this time of year, while focussing on honouring the beloved members of the armed forces who have died and been injured, is really aimed at obliterating all questions around our militarism. We bully, create enemies, are aggressively nationalist, undertake wars, have shady allies, scaremonger, fail to support the UN and sell weapons to psychopaths, yet, it is implied, we are merely protecting the homeland. We focus down on our national losses, trying to ignore the 200 million who have died around the world in war in the last hundred years, the higher number who have been injured, and the billion or more who have been traumatized by war. We are supposed to blank the fifteen years of total world national income wasted by war in the twentieth century. But this time we will not be fobbed off, but face the biggest failure on the planet.

We are asked to give unconditional support to Our armed forces and Our militarism in these inarticulate acts of remembrance, but even that is distorted. In 1918 much of the world was convinced that the Great War should be the War to end all Wars through disarmament, but we are asked to forswear disarmament as the obvious way of ending militarism to keep the arms companies in business. But militarism has killed 200 million and growing. It always fails and produces another war, because arms companies need wars and for much of the last two hundred years they have been inside government and steering policy towards one war after another, as they are now in the UK. They have led us astray into bereavement and destruction. Soldiers coming home from war say, “Never again” or are already dead; now we listen to them, listen to all the dead, injured and traumatized in depth. The lesson of every war is not who is in the wrong, though we have been in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Yemen this century, but that war and its weapons fail us all. The US Superpower and the UK poodle have dominated the world since 1945 but only to expand fear, arms sales and dubious wars. They have refused multilateral disarmament, especially after 1990 when they had the power to lead it.  Patriotism is not enough; it is self-focussed. The world and its peace need our attention.

We will also remember that world disarmament is crucial to address global warming. Militarism generates 5-10% of all CO2 through armaments, wars, bombs and destruction. That must be cut out to save the planet. The military are keeping their heads down at COP26 pretending this vast waste does not exist. But it does, and is actually the easiest to eliminate, the lowest hanging fruit. We will be asked blinkered to glorify our troops and our militarism at the Cenotaph, a whitewash state ritual, but we can do multilateral military disarmament.

Indeed, given that the UN treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was passed with 122 states in favour and 1 against, is now in force (and we are, with the US, disobeying it), World Multilateral Disarmament would almost certainly be accepted by an overwhelming majority of states, especially with US/UK backing. We only need to see that worldwide disarmament in five years is urgently required and practical for the planet. We will honour the dead in the only honest way through full world disarmament all the way to peace. World disarmament is far easier than the opposite in every way.

This year we will examine ourselves more deeply. It was wrong to attack Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003; we have devastated much of the middle east. We have worked on both Russia and China to assume the role of enemy that US/UK militarism requires if it is to be profitable and dominant. We play a big part in generating world tensions. More deeply, US/UK superpower policies have spread militarism and undermined democracy, leaving hundreds of millions of people with poor and corrupt governments. But we will repent and see it all.

This year we will remember them, we will remember all of them – all those who have died and suffered around the world. We will look at our enemies with honesty and recognize that often they have been wronged by us. We will recognize, as all good historians do, that mainly the USSR won WW2, not Britain or the USA; the 25 million who died in the USSR in their great battles against Hitler were fifty times more than the casualties of the UK or the US. We will repent what the arms we have sold have done and are doing. We will address the plight of those who are dying now through our wars. We will know that military elites and politicians do not die in wars, but ask others to, and hold them to account. We will face the devastation war has been on the earth and our fixation on making weapons and know it must end.

This year we will understand how Jesus words, “Those who take the sword perish by the sword” speak across the earth that militarism is the greatest failed experiment in human history. And we will weep and turn to the easy task of disarmament, for it is actually far easier to mutually disarm than to arm, unless you put the military in charge. Lancashire and Yorkshire worked it out half a millenium ago. Disarmed peace ends failed states, refugees, military dictators, wars, deaths, destruction and vast clouds of CO2 and honest people can do it. It is good for us that nation speaks peace unto nation. This Remembrance Day will address the task for which it was really set up – to disarm and end all wars, to bring about the healing of the nations. We need learn war no more, and we can agree to be ruled by, not the Lion or the gun, but the Lamb.