Lest We Forget. We sang Kipling’s Recessional as a hymn, at school. And…we did forget. Today we’re told lest…

Lest We Forget. We sang Kipling’s Recessional as a hymn, at school. And…we did forget. Today we’re told lest we forget means to not forget the ‘sacrifice’ of those who died. But Kipling’s poem asked us to not forget the futility of empire and war. /1

To not forget the ‘captains’ and ‘Kings’ who lead the slaughter of people, in war. A slaughter in defiance of God. Those who died in wars weren’t ‘noble sacrifices’, they were mostly cannon fodder for the godless captains and Kings. We’re asked to be ‘humble’ and ‘contrite’…/2

…before God’s great sacrifice, of his own son. Whether you’re Christian or not, today’s meaning of ‘Lest we Forget’, as the death of millions to protect our ‘freedoms’, is not what Kipling was talking about. It’s the jingoism Kipling was criticising, the rallying cry of... /3

…all sides of these conflicts. They were all fighting for their own version of freedom. Kipling asked us to not forget that the only true freedom was to surrender these desires for human empires, to succumb with humility to the greater glory of a higher power. /4

Lest We Forget. But we did, forget. We forgot the exact thing the Recessional asked us not to. And every year we celebrate the forgetting of our forgetting. /end