So Many Unknown Soldiers

For years I have observed each Armistice Day,
when what has become an old loss
gets rewritten as a source of renewal. 
And the media of my country,
reflects a self absorbed vision
in which other countries are merely
battle grounds in which we lost soldiers.

But mine is not the only country
to make self absorption seem patriotic,
around the world there are more than eighty
monuments 'to the unknown soldier',
with America having five on it's soil
the earliest dating from the civil war.

Nor was my country one of the earlier
nations to celebrate/mourn it's losses
-Denmark was the first in 1849,
with it's statue to the brave soldier
created by Hermann Bisen
after the first Schleswigg war.

From Argentina to Zimbabwe
across every inhabited continent,
Europe, Africa, Oceania, and Asia
and North and South America,
history is measured by the deference
to the statues to the anonymous fallen
from countless wars with countless fallen
where the living are surprised at being alive.  

But my country was surely the first
to wrap it's flag so tight around a past
so closely centred around loss and death
that it's history now reads like a dementia case,
where a major part of it now solely lives
below the soil in some foreign field,
or far away, engaged in tax avoidance,
and a history where history is built on dishonesty.