mourning

I speak for the whole country in mourning the loss of brave, dedicated and professional and patriotic soldiers who have given their lives for our country and in our gratitude to all our armed forces for the service and professionalism they give.

Gordon Brown, in sombre mode.

No, Gordon Brown, I'm afraid you do not speak for me.

Because while I mourn the loss of 201 British lives, I mourn still more the loss of several tens of thousand forgotten and uncounted lives in Afghanistan - most of them destroyed, forgotten and uncounted through our actions, or those of our allies.

We do not stop our holidays to mourn the Afghan lives; nor do we even stop to think about the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis who, just like the Afghans, have had to see their country pulverised to satisfy our greed for oil and power, and for nothing they have done themselves. So - no, I am not grateful for the 'service' of our armed forces, when their service is to take the lives of others and shoot their homes and hospitals and sewage plants and roads and jobs and hopes and schools to dust.

If we were civilised, as we profess to be, then we might mourn the turning of our young men into killers, the profaning of their minds, the mutilation of their psychological integrity. We - and they - should know that more of them are likely to die by their own hands than are killed by 'the taliban', if past records are an indication1. But we don't mourn that, or notice those who have gone mad and killed themselves, because they couldn't cope with what no-one should ever have to cope with.

We might mourn the lost idealism of the UN Charter, drawn up when Britain was still fresh from being at the receiving end of war and fully in touch with its horrors, and by which we pledged never to wage war again, except in two clearly defined instances2 - not satisfied for any of the wars that we have waged since then.

We laugh at the idealism, but we do not mourn it. You cannot not wage war today.

Or we might mourn the lack of any principle worth standing for, in those who make these terrible, life-ending plans to go to war (life-ending not for them, of course). Mourn their hypocrisy. Mourn their preaching of equality and tolerance, their talk of human rights and democratic pluralism; and then their hoisting of themselves and their compatriots - at least those who behave, and swear allegiance to our wars and flag and Queen - up on a pedestal for human beings who are considered to be more than equal.

Well: if we are to deliver human rights to the rest of the world at the barrels of guns and tanks, then we should know that human rights means this:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 1

Human rights means that a British life is no more valuable than an Afghan life. So if we can blow up Afghan lives then so can we blow up our own. And if we would not shoot up or blow up our own lives, because life is sacred, irreplaceable and not to be destroyed by other human beings, then nor can we blow up the citizens of other lands.

Are we civilised if we can kill the Afghans, and then not seem to notice that their families are in mourning - real mourning? Are we civilised when we refuse to count their losses, name their losses, and do not even try to stop their losses? Are we civilised to carry on our rich indulgent lives, while our armed forces bomb the hell around the globe? And are we civilised when we instruct the nation to be proud of this, and reprimand those people who would dare to say that others are as valuable as us, as worthy of our mourning as our 'own' - our boys.

Is this what civilisation was supposed to be?

Mourning does not arrive, then pass, as soon as the count of bodies reaches and then passes 100, or 200, or 20,000. Mourning is a constant state of anguish, loss, and pain, often accompanied by helplessness and hopelessness. Mourning takes the body over. Mourning makes it hard to walk the streets and see the other smiling faces, apparently not caring that you or others hurt.

It is hard to walk the streets today, and watch the news, and see the failure of so many fellow citizens to seem to notice that our boys who kill are killing others. It is hard that we have built a world where killing others seems to be acceptable, and to be told that we should toe that line, and grow up, and discard such principles as fairness and respect for human life - that we were taught as children, by the grown-ups.

Now we are taught by politicians and the media that killing is the lesser evil, as long as those we kill are not like us, and far away. We are told that we at home should get on with our lives, while others carry out the lesser evil, and use the taxes we have paid them to destroy the lives of foreigners. We at home are told to shop, and smile, support the country, and fill our 2 cars up with petrol - petrol stolen from the bodies of 500,000 dead Iraqi children. We are told to buy another ipod, book a holiday abroad, buy fashion magazines, soak up junk tv or go out and enrich ourselves with culture and high-minded thoughts. Then every 7 years we stop for 7 minutes and remember those we sent off with our money and our weapons to ransack a foreign land and kill the people's children. And even then we do not mourn those children, nor the people they have left behind and who will never pick their lives up again. We mourn and name and count and build memorials to those we taught to kill, and armed to kill, and sent to other people's lands. To kill.

I wish that we were mourning more, and much more often. I wish that we were a nation in mourning every day and every hour of every day. At least then we would show that we were human; maybe even civilised.

• 1. Suicides after the Falklands have taken more lives than the war itself. Link
• 2. Chapter VII of the UN Charter allows for acts of individual or collective self-defence 'if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security'. In all other cases, armed force must be sanctioned by a resolution of the Security Council. The invasion of Afghanistan did not satisfy the first condition, and nor was it sanctioned by the UNSC. Iraq famously satisfied neither condition.