LET’S take a look at how we’re commemorating the centenary of the First World War. In the agitation and propaganda department which passes for state education in England, children are routinely instructed to despise our country, its historical achievements and its traditional values.

Pupils are ordered to repent for the slave trade, but not told that it was English Christian gentlemen who abolished the slave trade and that the ban was policed by the Royal Navy.

But the worst example of this institutionalised, treacherous self-hatred is the First World War and our part in it. Blackadder is the only version on offer. Lions led by donkeys.

A terrible waste. An appalling slaughter.

But there is another, and truer, version of the events of 1914-18. The war was worth fighting and it was our duty to fight it.

Austria and Germany were to blame. Austria set out to destroy Serbia and for this the Germans wrote them a blank cheque. Both Austria and Germany ignored the likelihood of Russian intervention on the side of the Serbian Slavs. All this was backed by Prussian militarism which had been in evidence since Bismarck.

Add to this sinister brew the mental instability of the Kaiser and his view – remarkably anticipating that of Adolf Hitler – that Britain would stay out of the war, that he could secure a quick victory over the French and then turn his attention to Russia. We faced a barbarous enemy, as the atrocities in Belgium made shockingly clear.

But as RG Collingwood said in 1939: “We looked at the records of this barbarism, as people look at what they call ‘history’, with eyes half shut, blurred into something romantic.”

Of course, the schools’ attitude towards the First World War – shared by the BBC and much of the media – extends to war in general.

War is always regarded as a bad thing.

And, indeed, it is a bad thing. But there are worse things. And there is such a thing as a just war. We hear now of disgraceful episodes in which our returning soldiers are insulted and abused in the street – as if their fighting on our behalf were some sort of psychopathology.

Well, I have never been a soldier. But my father served in the RAF during the Second World War and my father-in-law at El Alamein. I have numbered soldiers, sailors and airmen among my dearest friends and colleagues all through my career. In all this time, I have never met a soldier who wanted to go to war.

Yet every soldier I have had the honour to meet always knew the truth of Edmund Burke’s saying: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

I have been sickened to see how Remembrance Sunday has been hijacked in the schools by trendy teachers and in the churches by the sackless pacifist clergy. The only war poetry that gets read is the maudlin, cowardly stuff by Wilfred Owen. And in most churches on Remembrance Sunday, the prayers are always about the horror of war.

Now every soldier knows more than these armchair politicos about the horror of war and the evil of war. But what the soldier also knows is that there are worse evils than warfare.

Worse than warfare is non-resistance in the face of the aggressor who would kill or enslave you, your family and our nation.

We need always to hope and pray for peace, but keep our powder dry.