{"id":3133,"date":"2013-11-10T17:20:12","date_gmt":"2013-11-10T17:20:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=3133"},"modified":"2013-11-10T17:20:12","modified_gmt":"2013-11-10T17:20:12","slug":"remembrance-sunday-thoughts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=3133","title":{"rendered":"Remembrance Sunday Thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today (at least it is when I’m writing this) is Remembrance Sunday<\/a> in the UK; traditionally a day to commemorate the sacrifice of ordinary men in the two world wars.<\/p>\n

I did not watch the ceremony at The Cenotaph<\/a>, or attend any of the more local ceremonies, although I have in the past. But one thing that is a noticeable change since my childhood – there is a much greater emphasis on the sacrifices made by our armed forces in\u00a0all<\/em> wars up to and including the present.<\/p>\n

Fair enough; I don’t have a problem with commemorating the war dead from any war, but the the armed forces already have a day –\u00a0Armed Forces Day – and Remembrance Sunday is special. It is special because it remembers the two world wars when ordinary men were called to service in their droves; whereas other wars involved soldiers, sailors, and airmen who had\u00a0chosen<\/em> to be shot at for a living.<\/p>\n

Before WWI, there was nothing like Remembrance Sunday despite all the wars that the UK fought before – nothing for the Boer War, the Crimean War, the Napoleonic Wars, and nothing before. There were war memorials constructed – as a resident of Portsmouth, I can visit an unusually large number, but as for national ceremonies … excluding the burial of heros such as Nelson<\/a>, they had to wait until after WWI.<\/p>\n

Perhaps we need to move the Armed Forces Day to next to Remembrance Sunday to more clearly distinguish between the two days.<\/p>\n

Perhaps we also need to make the commemorations somewhat less military in nature – encourage those whose relatives served in the two world wars to attend in place of them. After all the number of world war veterans is dwindling; it won’t be too long before none of them are left, and it would be a great shame to leave Remembrance Sunday to the politicians and the present-day military.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today (at least it is when I’m writing this) is Remembrance Sunday in the UK; traditionally a day to commemorate the sacrifice of ordinary men in the two world wars. I did not watch the ceremony at The Cenotaph, or attend any of the more local ceremonies, although I have in the past. But one […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[7,6,3],"tags":[1154,1153,30,167,103],"class_list":["post-3133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-history","category-politics","tag-armed-forces-day","tag-remembrance-sunday","tag-uk","tag-wwi","tag-wwii","category-7-id","category-6-id","category-3-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1f2KI-Ox","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3133"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3133\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3135,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3133\/revisions\/3135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}