The Need To Remember

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Title:     The Need To Remember
Author: Richard King [More Titles by King]

For myself, I consider that it would do the world good if it had one whole _day_ of silent remembrance each year. And if it be depressing--well, that will be all to the good. The world will come to no harm if it be depressed once a year--depressed for such a noble cause. After all, we give up one day per year to the solemn remembrance of the One who died for us--it would not, therefore, do anything but good if we were to give up one day a year to the memory of those millions who died for us no less. Sunday, too, is kept as a quiet day, in order that the world may be encouraged to contemplate those ideals for which it has erected churches in which it bows the knee. Well, one whole day in the year given up to the memory of those who died that the civilised world might live--who also died for an ideal--will help us to remember that they died at all. Without some such enforced remembrance, the world will, alas! only too quickly forget. And in forgetting _how_ they died, will also forget _what they died for_. Some people--the vast majority perhaps--will never remember unless remembrance is forced upon them. And if the world ever forgets the Glorious Dead, and the "heritage" which these Glorious Dead left to those who still live on--well, don't talk to me of Christianity and civilisation and the clap-trap of those high ideals which everyone prates of, few understand, and still fewer strive to live up to. If the war has not yet taught the political and social and Christian world wisdom, nothing ever will; and, moreover, it does not deserve to learn. Yet, only the other day, I heard some elderly gentlemen discussing the next war--as if the last one were but a slight skirmish far away amid the hills of Afghanistan. Well, better an era of the most revolutionary socialism than that the world should once again be plunged into such another tragedy as it has passed through during the last five years.

[The end]
Richard King's essay: Need To Remember

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