Freedom to fight and kill people in war
I had these thoughts while watching the Remembrance Day commemoration at Whitehall (on the telly):
If people / humankind have had to fight so hard and lose so many lives over this concept of freedom, is it possible that the freedom we’re talking about may not be the state we’re naturally meant to experience? What is the right equilibrium? Or is the fact that we’re sentient and have the ability to communicate enough to justify wars fought on the basis of liberation or freedom?
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Seems like war generally leads to loss of freedom, doesn’t it? For both the winning and losing sides - the winners because of the powers ceded to the state during the “emergency”, and the losers for obvious reasons.
I think that if you’re lucky, your country’s going to battle for its national interest, and if you’re unlucky, it’s because a politician’s afraid of losing power. It’s almost never because of some abstract concept like “freedom”.
… although they all claim it’s for ‘freedom’, don’t they?
Will Self on the Politics Show, or was it the Andrew Marr show, didn’t have a plastic poppy on on Sunday, and pretty much said he didn’t disagree with commemorating the soldiers, he just had a problem with Remembrance Day being co-opted by the politicians (or something like that, I’m working from memory here).
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