Remembrance Day

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.
~ Dwight D. Eisenhower (born: 1890-10-14 died: 1969-03-28 at age: 78)

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Instead of John McCrae’s maudlin In Flanders Fields, how about an honest war poem to commemorate the day?

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
~ Wilfred Owen (born: 1893-03-18 died: 1918-11-04 at age: 25) Dulce Et Decorum Est
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori is Latin for sweet and honourable it is to die for one’s country.

WW II

In WW II, soldiers fought for the freedom of Asia, Europe and North America. There were three whacko leaders in the Axis bent on world domination. It is right and fitting to honour those who died in that struggle. It is a shame the world did not squash the axis before the problem escalated to world war, but the world leaders of the era did not have the benefit of hindsight.

There was no Sacrifice

The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
~ George S. Patton (born: 1885-11-11 died: 1945-12-21 at age: 60), General

It is not right to accuse those WW II soldiers of “sacrificing their lives”. They had no intent of sacrificing their lives. They wanted the enemy to lose their lives. If North American soldiers died in the process, that was just the breaks — not something done deliberately like the Japanese Kamikaze pilots.

Dishonourable Wars

Soldiers in other wars such as Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan were not fighting for anyone’s freedom. They were fighting for the economic interests of North American corporations or for the global hegemony of the USA. They may not have understood this, but it does not make them heroes. Their conflicts were no more honourable than Mafia turf wars. To honour them in the same breath as the WW II vets, profanes the WW II vets.

Remembrance day each year becomes more elaborate and more maudlin. The governments of the USA use to whitewash the national shames of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars by trying to trick the populace into conflating those who enlisted to go fight in Iraq out of a personal sense of adventure and sadism with those in WW II who were truly defending their country.

collecting opium from poppies in Afghanistan

The proper symbol for those who partook in the Afghan war in the opium poppy. Canada, (with a little help from Britain and the USA) installed the biggest drug lord on the planet, Hamid Karzai as leader of Afghanistan. He took heroin production from almost nothing to the #1 spot, producing $1 trillion worth a year, more than all the world’s junkies could consume. So they started selling the excess as cheese, cheap orange heroin, to elementary school kids in the southern US.

Fêting Evil

Remembrance day is the weirdest celebration of the year. All of a sudden nearly the entire population takes leave of its senses and forgets everything they have learned since Napoléon about the evils of war, and suddenly start acting like a bunch of crusty old mustachioed generals in the stationed in India at the time of Queen Victoria. They glorify killing and killing machines. They even glorify getting wounded, absessed wounds and death. It is a far more ghoulish celebration of the macabre that anything that happens on Halloween.

For all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.
~ Matthew 26:52

Anachronism

Remembrance day is an anachronism and must stop. If we have another global war it will be the last. We must not teach the young the path to glory is through butchery. It is a suicidal obsession. Stephen Harper in Canada has been promoting death and killing, including Remembrance day, as honourable so he can prolong his Afghan war for some very ignoble motives, including stupendous drug trade profits, and con more naïve loosers to volunteer for glory and respect.

Remembrance day snubs society’s true heroes, the police, the fighfighters, the rescue workers and their families who give up so much on a momenent’s notice. They are the ones with the true motivation to serve.

Either End or Transform Remembrance Day

Let us end this madness of glorifying war, killing and death!

And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
~ Isaiah 2:4

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