I decided after coming back from worship to watch Saving Private Ryan. It is the end of this film that leaves me with a profound sense of sadness and foreboding. As the captain lays dieing he whispers in Private Ryans ear “earn this” and then we cross fade to the same Private Ryan some 50 years later in one of the great war grave cemeteries before the Captains grave stone, asking his wife whether he was a good man and had led a good life.

I found this scene very upsetting, as I feel that Spielberg is asking us the very same thing, have you earnt the life that others died to give you, have you been a good person. Although the world seems to be coming round again to subtle forms of totalitarianism, depending on whose side you are on, we find ourselves without the SS and a death camp outside every town, with out the massive pits filled with lime and bodies or the rounding up of all those we see as anomalous.

Have we earnt it? I am not sure we have. I do no think we would be coming full circle to the corrupt, totalitarianism of global capitalism in the form of todays western government, Chinese communism, Russian and eastern European gangsterism or Muslim invincible ignorance, if we had really been living good lives.

When we remember the dead of the great wars and some after, the need is often to ask what they died for, a better question is whether they died in vain and and can we stop their deaths being in vain. Not by appeasement as happened after the first world war but in speaking truth to power. How can we reach those not living good lives, but lives of greed and avarice, who are happy for others to die for them as long as they and theirs can continue in what they have.

I would urge everyone today to remember the living not the dead and our responsibility to make those deaths worthy, rather than sordid, to remember that our lives, our freedoms, the few the we really own were bought with the lives of others.

In Phillip K Dicks, Nebula Award winning: The Man in the High Castle, a world where Germany and Japan win the war is described.

“The Man in the High Castle (Penguin Modern Classics)” (Philip K. Dick)

In many ways it is little different from the one we know, in fact the Japanese influence is seen as more civilising. The Germans when alluded to are mentioned in the same breath as something dreadful they have done in Africa for more lebensraum. It is a fantasy and we can not be proud of our work in Africa. My point here is that the murderous nature of Nazism knew no bounds and would have effected all non-aryan races, colours and creeds eventually. Muslims today also have to thank the dead of the great world wars for their continued existence and perhaps they too need to ask standing shoulder to shoulder with ourselves …have we earnt this?

As we turn full circle and see more camps and mass exterminations, and death by bullet and bomb, we might also have to ask was any of it worth, can war really bring peace, it if we do not give value in peace to the things people beleive they died for?

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