It’s 90 years today since the Armistice that brought a temporary halt to fighting on the Western Front of the Great War. The War had already brought forth the horrors of Bolshevism and fighting in Russia continued well beyond the Armistice. Within a few years, Fascism and Nazism were also on the march. Full-scale war resumed in the 1930s, first in Spain, Abyssinia and the Far East and then throughout the world. The War brought nothing but evil, and its evil has persisted through almost a century since it began.

Even today, the echoes of the catastrophe can be heard in the futile, squalid and bloody war between Georgia and Russia. A pair of authoritarian strongmen, rehearsing the bloodstained lines of irredentist and imperialist rhetoric in a last fight over the remnants of the Russian Empire that did so much to create the War, have brought death, destruction and misery to hundreds of thousands of people who just wanted to live in peace. And, sad to say, there are plenty in the West and East who have been happy to repeat the rhetoric of 1914, with tripe about “gallant little Georgia” being matched by claims of a plot to deny Russia its rightful “place in the sun”. This time, though, the mass of ordinary people seem less willing to send their children to die for such bad causes.

On this Armistice Day, let us remember all those who have died as a result of the crimes of the rulers of the world, and do our best to save more from dying.