The audio file above is a debate on The Morality of Remembrance held on BBC Radio 4 (The Moral Maze). First up is Ben Griffin representing Veterans For Peace UK, he is followed by Helen Hill representing The Royal British Legion.
The pictures displayed are a sample of the ways in which Remembrance Sunday is promoted. The true nature of war is hidden behind this nonsense .
The full program including Michael Morpurgo the author of Warhorse and Sir Hew Strachan a professor of the History of War can be found here
http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b03gg7nh/
Veterans For Peace UK 
Bravo Ben, However, I would have not been so cool with portilo.
That man is a pathetic liar, for a real insight to what he was involved in on the run up to 7-7 you have to watch “the ripple effect” on the richplanet website with Richard d Hall I would have made him feel pretty small.
He is a hypocritical little worm, an oxygen theif.
The link above appears to be to the wrong episode of the Moral Maze – discussing poppies and remembrance day but not with the speakers you indicate
Keep listening. They introduce the panel first, then the guests.
Ben, thank you for putting up a powerful and articulate defence against a couple of romanticists who should know better.
For every soldier that dies, hundreds of of civilians are killed and maimed. Is there a special remembrance day for these millions? Or are we civvies just not interesting enough in our jeans and t-shirts when we get splatted. My hometown of Sidon in lebanon was half flattened in 1982. The dead there are remembered because the mass grave they were thrown into is underneath the large roundabout at the southern edge of town. Only weeds grow on the surface but we still don’t forget.
Anyway, keep up the good work.
Kareem
Owen, and possibly other “war poets” were fighting “prussianism”, that is, the militarisation of life, where soldiers are the finest specimens of mankind. Ahead of nurses, doctors, firemen and simple blokes and women who try to live decently and non-aggressively, whatever the regime. the last time I was close to tears was in front of the grave of a 17 year-old German, in Normandy.
I would like to see a facebook link on your site so we could automatically share your posts to that site. Thanks!!
Linus Pauling Chapter VFP #132 Corvallis, Oregon
Hey Don, good suggestion, have a look back at our site.
Many Thanks!
As a fellow member of Veterans For Peace, I was thoroughly impressed with how Ben Griffin handled himself on that BBC panel discussing the display of the red poppy on Remembrance Day in the UK. His level of comprehension and insight regarding causation and the connections of events resulting in the outbreak of war was superior to all the Tory participants on the panel with him. As we say here, he spoke truth to power and as our black Veterans For Peace members would say “Right On Brother!” Stay the course Ben! Your brother VFP members in the USA are with you 100% —- Philip Reiss, Co-chair, Thomas Paine Chapter 152 Veterans For Peace in the Lehigh Valley of Penna.
Indoctrination is what the powers that be engage in at all levels within the public domain. The orientation is that elected officials have more and better information than the rest of us. So, don’t question anything they say or do because they have the best answers to all problems – not you!. The masses are carefully manipulated to believe that premise thanks to the corporate controlled media here in the USA.
The UK allows enlistment at 16? I didn’t know that, that’s disgusting! The under classes are always recruited to military service to serve the interests of, in John Perkins’ words, the corporatocracy, This is the reality here in the USA. As I said in my book, ‘Blue Eyes On African-American History,’ Americans who chant USA,USA,USA, at Olympic events are just as brainwashed as those who responded with chants at Nazi Nuremberg rallies in the mid 1930s. My hat is off to the thinking veterans in the UK capable of seeing war for what it is and whose interests it really serves. Here in the USA if the Veterans For Peace membership equaled those of the American Legion, our foreign policy wouldn’t be as misguided as it is at present. No where in the world is the USA, as Noam Chomsky recently suggested, winning the hearts and minds of non-Americans.
just listened to the Moral maze and thought Ben Griffin’s testimony was articulate and powerful.
The major frustration one was left with at the end of that programme, and the major point that needs to be made, is that the fact that Owen, Sassoon etc were in a minority at the time in their negative view of the war does not prove the validity of the positive view of the war. If we looked at the diaries of German soldiers in the Second World War no doubt a majority would be expressing a belief in the rightness of their war, either as a result of their government’s propaganda or because of a natural need to believe that your sacrifice is necessary. I’m sure the panel would not draw the same conclusions from that!
with good wishes Helen