The mini-industry growing up around this sickening centenary is now in full flow. It’s all there, the centenary books, the school trips to the battle fields, the Imperial War Museum exhibitions, and right on cue, the replay of the England-Germany 1914 Christmas truce football match. And guess who has been drafted in to head up the England team no surprises, it’s the recently retired David Beckham. All this would not be quite so stomach-churning if we had genuinely learnt anything from that grotesque imperial slaughter in which an entire generation of young German, Russian, English and French men saw their foolish dreams buried knee deep in imperialist mud and blood.

No, it seems we have learnt nothing as a new generation of largely unemployed working class men from England and America charge off around the globe naively doing the dirty work for Uncle Sam and his faithful neo-colonial British lap dog. And so ideologically numbed are these young men and their families that they actually imagine that they are ‘heroes’. They are not. They are little more than mindless mercenaries doing the bidding for US imperialism.

With the enlightened exception of Lenin’s Bolshevik Party and a handful of their European and American supporters, almost nobody at the time was able to accurately describe what the essence of the First World War was. But Lenin got it spot on, and on the basis of his searing analysis, his Bolshevik Party was able to sweep away centuries of Russian autocracy and stultifying feudal backwardness. This general failure to precisely describe the four year slaughter as an inter-imperialist war led the victors to punish the entirely wrong section of German society. Instead of helping the progressive forces within the newly established social democratic Weimar Republic to see off the old German imperialist class, they foolishly undermined the progressive forces by saddling them with ridiculously onerous reparation payments thus indirectly laying open the door to German Fascism. A GSCE History student could have seen the mistake that was being made but not our glorious leaders in Westminster.

World War Two, just 21 years later, was little more than the second act of World War One and a bloody act that was entirely avoidable. But if you don’t get the analysis right, history becomes nothing more than ‘one damn thing after another’. And in this case it has been one damn imperialist aggression after another. No sooner had hostilities ground to a halt in World War Two, European forces were streaming back into their old colonial outposts eager to carry on precisely as they had done for centuries.

But unfortunately for them, there was a new kid on the block and one that had gotten damn rich by manufacturing weapons for the main combatants of the two world wars. While the European colonial powers were exhausted from their imperial exertions, US imperialism was only too ready to fill any post war vacuum that might arise. And this they did with blood curdling efficiency. Some two million Koreans were to lose their lives at the hands of US imperial ambitions, three million Vietnamese and a further one million Cambodians. Their crime? They dared to demand self-government, democracy and independence the very things that the imperial propagandists told us that two world wars had been all about.

You might have thought that after the US imperialist defeat in Vietnam the US imperialists may have been a little chastened and a little more circumspect in their imperial pursuits. Not a bit of it. They launched an entire range of aggressions at every opportunity and on every continent. And somewhat pathetically, large sections of the impoverished working class in the imperialist centres went along with the imperialist propaganda that this was all a war for democracy. Under this fateful cold war banner the US set up some of the most barbaric dictatorships in Africa, Asia and South and Central America. In pursuit of cheap resources, secure markets and regional power the US piled up the body count that began to match the body count of the First World War. Nothing learnt.

And still it goes on. From Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Lybia, Yemen and Somalia the slaughter continues unabated, the only difference being the slaughter is increasingly being carried out with lethal unmanned drones. And still in Britain, young men and women sign up to do service for Queen, Country and US imperialism. Still, like their counterparts in World War One, they are being duped by shadowy corporate forces that they cannot see or comprehend. But duped they are. The ‘foreign’ families that they routinely destroy are every bit as worthy as their own families but our ‘British heroes’ cannot see past the government lies. So blinded are they by imperialist propaganda, they will no doubt proudly join the centenary marches that are being planned as we speak. I dread those marches because it will be a sickening reminder that the one percent has still got the ninety- nine percent caught in their web of imperialist aggrandisement and war. And simple, deluded Beckham will be there willing cheerleader.