This morning it is reported that the Government is withholding a swathe of official documents from the Iraq inquiry, set up four years ago to help us gain at least some lessons from the disaster that was Iraq.
There is a gritty refusal to learn from Iraq, to acknowledge political failure, and to allow a glimpse into the shabby rush to war which keeps our arms trade, notably BAe Systems, so financially perky.
It is still the case today that we eagerly sell arms around the world, turning a patriotically Nelsonian eye to the end result of the sales drive.
And the end result ?
The great and the good annually standing in disciplined and healthy silence to remember those young and hopeful people whose lives were messily ripped apart by whatever the then current national vanity and the failure of their generation of politicians.
The cenotaph - for so goes the life-long indoctrination - remembers those courageous dead who gave their lives so that we could be free. And I have relatives among them.
But that remembrance seems to be me to insult their memory, to pay them cheaply for their lives so wastefully squandered, so easily expendable.
What we need to remember is not the fantasy of tidy courage, but the reality of the careless damage done by war and wars and recorded with the superhuman objectivity of Owen, Sassoon, and Keith Douglas.
And we need to challenge and rechallenge our political and ruling classes to find more creative ways of resolving petty temporal conflicts by destroying life, and its potential for freedom.
The silence is shouting to a determinedly deaf generation today.
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