War may be hell for some but it is heaven for others.

Military marching, patriotic parades, martial music - they are mostly intended to give the impression that it’s ‘your’ country, that you should be proud of it, that your leaders are there to protect you, that the division into rich and poor is pre-ordained (perhaps by some god or other) and there’s nothing you can do about it.

You may well, indeed, take pride in the place you live – its landscape, architecture, people, etc, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But in terms of possession, ownership and control, it’s the rich elite, the few percent in any country, who collectively own the world’s land and resources (including what you think of as your country), and they would naturally prefer people to hold the view that this is an immutable state of affairs, all the more to hold on to their power, backed up by governments and armies. It’s utter tosh. They only keep their power (and send millions of us to die in wars to help them do so) because the majority allow them to, and continue to let themselves be duped by militaristic displays and patriotic twaddle.

Sir Richard Evans, Regius Professor of History and President of Wolfson College Cambridge has raised the question of “How can you possibly claim that Britain was fighting for democracy and liberal values when the main ally was Tsarist Russia? That was a despotism that put Germany in the shade and sponsored pogroms in 1903-6.” He also pointed out that unlike Germany where male suffrage was universal – 40 per cent of those British troops fighting in the war did not have the vote until 1918.

An English officer, R.J. Fairhead, saw the evil of war, but not in the soldiers. They just had to fight. He strongly attacked the political structure in Europe and looked above the taught national stereotypes. His learned hatred for the Germans was converted to a general hate for the whole situation and the system which made a war like this possible.

“Politicians do not listen to those whom they claim to represent and the failure to take notice of the fragile peace declared for that brief period led to the anti-government revolution throughout Europe.”

Lieutenant A.P. Sinkinson described similar experiences:

“As I walked slowly back to our own trenches I thought of Mr. Asquith’s sentence about not sheathing the sword until the enemy be finally crushed. It is all very well for Englishmen living comfortable at home to talk in flowing periods, but when you are out here you begin to realize that sustained hatred impossible.”

Sinkinson saw that Germans were not worse people than himself. Only the people at home, far away from the cruelties, the brutalities, from death and from the war’s real grimace, could keep their hatred.

That the opinion toward the enemies had changed after the Christmas truce is emphasized by Westminster Rifle Man Percy. The new experiences he had with the Germans whom he met made him rethink everything he had heard about them. He wrote that:

“They [Germans] where really magnificent in the whole thing [Christmas Truce] and jolly good sorts. I now have a different opinion of the German. Both sides have now started firing, and are deadly enemies again. Strange it all seems, doesn’t it?” Obviously Percy recognized how surreal the situation was. He started to rethink his attitude toward the Germans but he did not think about stopping fighting them.

After having met the enemy between the trenches, many soldiers started thinking about all they had read and heard about them. For many, the former hatred was vanished. They now recognized the soldiers from the other side of the trenches as human as themselves. They were not mercenaries, no inhuman monsters eager for war, just humans. The stereotypes they know from the time before the war and before they met their enemies did not fit after meeting their enemies. Not all Germans acted like it was described in the newspaper and were not as arrogant as the German Kaiser.

On the other hand not all the English soldiers were mercenaries fighting for material well-being. These soldiers started to reflect their own experiences and started to compare their experiences with what they knew before about their enemies. The conclusion they made was that their prefabricated picture and the experiences they gained did not fit together. It was hard for the soldiers, faced with the reality of the war, to maintain the black and white propaganda picture.

Workers have NO country. Abolish the wages system and share the world in common with your fellow workers. We really need to consider how to get rid of capitalism, if we want to get rid of arms dealers, nuclear weapons and war, which is concomitant upon capitalism along with poverty and waged slavery. In a world of a potential superabundance of wealth, it is rationed out to the producers and resources are fought over to be squandered by states in the interest of their dominant capitalist interests.

Currently there is now a North Pole war-dance going on for resources under the sea as well as in the South China Seas where old protagonists are eyeing each other up once again.

'In America trillions of dollars go to military and homeland security companies. Perpetual war represents perpetual profits for business and government interests. According to Morgan Keegan, a wealth management and capital firm, investment in homeland security companies is expected to yield a 12 percent annual growth through 2013 - a high return when compared to other parts of the depressed US economy. Former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff pushed the purchase of the heavily criticised (and little tested) full-body scanners used in airports. People were unaware that the manufacturer of the machine is a client of the Chertoff Group, his highly profitable security consulting agency. The US "black budget" of secret intelligence programmes alone was estimated at $52.6bn for 2013. That is only the secret programmes, not the much larger intelligence and counterintelligence budgets. America has now have 16 spy agencies that employ 107,035 employees. This is separate from the over one million people employed by the military and national security law enforcement agencies.

In the first 10 days of the Libyan war alone, the Obama administration spent roughly $550m. That figure includes about $340m for munitions - mostly cruise missiles that must be replaced.

There is only one way to prevent war and if it breaks out to end it, namely, by the overthrow of capitalism, the real root from which war springs. The solution rests in the power of the working class. If world capitalism has no solution for its problems excepting new and more horrible slaughter, it is time this insane system were ended. The fight for socialism is the fight for peace. Destruction and carnage can be ended, not by the victory of one or other of the combatants which would merely lay the basis for new wars and is not in the interests of the workers of any country, but by the victory of the workers over capitalism.

Some 50,000 non-combatants are estimated to have died as British and American planes bombarded France in preparation for the invasion of Europe. 20,000 French civilians were killed in the two-and-a-half months from D-Day, 3,000 of them during the actual landings. On July 9, 1944, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, the top British general in the D-Day offensive, ordered 450 aircraft to begin a devastating bombing campaign on German positions in France as the Allies advanced. Henri Amouroux, a French academic, calculated that about 20,000 people died in Calvados alone as towns and some cities, including Lisieux and Le Havre, were all but wiped out. In his book on the landings, Antony Beevor, the British historian, condemned the air raids as "stupid, counter-productive and above all very close to a war crime". In fact, during the whole war, US and British armed forces killed many more French civilians than did the German army and airforce. You don't hear much about that but, then, the victors get the right to write "history".

"Think of the hundreds of tons of bombs destroying entire cities and wiping out families. But the suffering of civilians was for many years masked by the over-riding image - that of the French welcoming the liberators with open arms" Christopher Prime, Historian

Cpl LF Roker of the Highland Light Infantry is quoted in a book about the civilian impact of the campaign, ‘Liberation, The Bitter Road to Freedom,’ by William Hitchcock.

"It was rather a shock to find we were not welcomed ecstatically as liberators by the local people, as we were told we should be... They saw us as bringers of destruction and pain," Roker wrote in his diary.

Another soldier, Ivor Astley of the 43rd Wessex Infantry, described the locals as "sullen and silent... If we expected a welcome, we certainly failed to find it."

Hitchcock raises another issue that rarely features in euphoric folk-memories of liberation: Allied looting, and worse. "The theft and looting of Normandy households and farmsteads by liberating soldiers began on June 6 and never stopped during the entire summer," he writes.

One woman - from the town of Colombieres - is quoted as saying that "the enthusiasm for the liberators is diminishing. They are looting... everything, and going into houses everywhere on the pretext of looking for Germans."

The evidence shows that sexual violence against women in liberated France was common. According to American historian J Robert Lilly, there were around 3,500 rapes by American servicemen in France between June 1944 and the end of the war.

Apologists of capitalism would claim the Second World War was a just war. Regardless of the stated intentions, of the apparent excuse for beginning a war, the only reason ever is the pursuit of the interest of the capitalist class, which they will enforce without reserve upon the working class. Hoping that war can be carried out in a gentlemanly way, that it can be carried out without inflicting suffering on the working class is pie in the sky.