Today marks the one hundredth anniversary of the end of The Great War. It was supposed to be the war to end all wars. And it's true that, since 1945, there have been no world wars. But there have been plenty of proxy wars -- in Korea, in Vietnam and in Afghanistan -- the longest war of the modern era.
The Great War was supposed to Make The World Safe For Democracy. And today democracy is threatened around the world.
So, what are we to make of today? Some might say that we've made precious little progress. And, on my darker days, I'm inclined to agree. Perhaps we've just been lucky. My father -- a veteran of World War II -- used to say that he survived because of "pure dumb luck."
In many ways, the history of war is a chronicle of pure stupidity. But it's worth remembering that the United Nations was founded as an antidote to war. And, despite its failures, it still tries to rein in our darker angels.
Something to think about on this Remembrance Day.
Image: Filipino Caregiver
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The following should be required reading every November 11.
War Is A Racket
By Major General Smedley Butler
https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html
For the stuff we aren't told about WWII in school:
Profits über Alles! American Corporations and Hitler https://www.globalresearch.ca/profits-ber-alles-american-corporations-and-hitler/4607
Simply put, without American financial and industrial support Hitler's wars would have been short and local. Attacking England would have been impossible.
There is a lot of documentation on war profiteering. Trading With the Enemy is another good source.
Yes, we need remember the soldiers and others who sacrificed so much. We also need to remember the profiteers.
.. hmm .. my mother (Navy) & father (Artillery) came back from WW2 overseas service.. and met post war - thus my sister & I came to be.. and got to be opinionated to boot.. An uncle and two cousins did not return, we never met them.. they were never to plow the fields again, take the field and catch a pass or see the wind. A great uncle somehow survived the WW1 trenches.. We know he 'saw the wind' .. though he tended to the family's prairie wheat fields & never spoke of the horror, nor the staggering loss of his eldest nephew, a command pilot at 20 years of age, hunting German submarines at night in a Wellington bomber, a wingtip from the waters off Calais
I myself wish Canada had nothing whatsover to do with manufacturing weaponry or munitions.. hell, any technology of war. Feed the world I say, help to irrigate the planet, preserve our waters and our remaining species, develop & distribute the seeds of life and the technology or heritage to ensure healthy forests, keep the tundra frozen. Sadly, I also believe Canada needs to look first to its borders and to its own environment. We have zero standing re the broader world if we fail to preserve or enhance Canada.
We are letting our wild fisheries collapse while subsidizing foreign owned farmed fisheries. We subsidize development, operation and expansion of foreign owned resourse extraction.. for export. Where is our secondary lumber industry if all trees are shipped with bark intact, to China? What is next ? Strip the topsoil from the prairies and sell it to Asia or Russia ? where does this all end ? Some sort of 'tactical' nuclear warfare ? To defend whom ? And what is Canada's role.. we have submarines that can't float .. our Department of Defense can't defend our coasts, we really can't provide effective Search and Rescue in our extreme environments where the shit truly hits the fan. World Class Oil Spill Cleanup is a fantasy.. and our concrete infrastructure is dissolving, collapsing.. yes, bridges, sewers, roads, sidewalks, roads..
Budget for military & wars is how much ?
Budget for reality is about zero ..
Our precious young people died for.. What ?
Partisan politics to enjoy free speech ?
I agree, Toby. Those who manufacture weapons always do well.
The Great War was the last act in the drama that was called Global Free Trade one hundred years ago, sal. Those who refuse to learn from history . . .
Remembrance Day has become a ritual designed to make everyone feel noble and remind them of their superiority to the losers. It is also dirt cheap and sentimental to a cringe making degree. It is not about thinking about why war happens and how to prevent it. Hint - how do we at least modify global warming which is pretty much guaranteed to lead to conflict. This might interrupt the lovely wallow in sentimentality and the feel good aura.
I see Jeremy Corbyn wore his raincoat with it practical hood to the ceremony at the Cenotaph in London and the British conservative establishment is all aflap about this scandalous breech of etiquette. If Remembrance Day meant anything, they wouldn't even notice what Jeremy Corbyn was wearing.
Owen, many of the captains of American industry financed and armed both sides of their wars. Henry Ford was reported that he did not want WWII to end; he enjoyed the profits from arming the US England and Germany and wanted them to continue indefinitely. I think Ford and the heads of GM, IBM, Standard Oil, Texaco, and GW Bush's granddaddy, Prescott Bush, should have spent their latter years in prison for trading with the enemy and deliberately prolonging the war. A lot of people died for their profits.
I agree, ffd. It's not about what you wear. It's about what happened -- and ensuring that it doesn't happen again.
Automobile companies switched from making cars to airplanes, Toby. War was good for the bottom line.
We've never come to terms with our martial history over the past century. We gather once a year to commemorate supposed heroism in a way that, on balance, winds up glorifying war. Those who have experienced war, including their kids and their spouses, rarely see much glory in it. If it was such a glorious undertaking I doubt we would see the number of combat casualties to what has been called everything from shell shock to PTSD. We were lucky. Our dad came back horribly wounded but his wounds were physical. Our uncle came back with darker wounds in his mind that plagued him until his recent death.
What is noble or heroic in being the one guy out of a dozen who just happens to be standing where the bullet or red-hot chunk of shrapnel arrives? That's not heroism. It's really bad luck. It's a horrible waste.
Unfortunately for every soldier on the bleeding edge there were far more behind the lines keeping the machine ticking over who never saw enemy bullets stitch their aircraft or incoming artillery shells rake their line. Yet having worn the uniform safely removed from danger they often were the most ardent supporters of post-war celebrations. My dad called them "line-shooters." There's nothing uniquely Canadian about this.
Look at the states. We're still paying for the bellicose Bush/Cheney administration's foolishness. Dick Cheney, with five draft deferments under his belt, was insanely warlike. With Powell pleading for caution, these chickenhawks launched America into perma-war, wars without end or result. Andrew Bacevich, a veteran army commander turned historian, writes that America has by any measure the most powerful military and yet All the King's Horses and All the King's Men fail to achieve meaningful outcomes.
Now we have another five deferment executive in the White House, Trump. Light rain is enough to keep him from appearing at America's most important WWI war cemetery. Yet he loves to threaten other nations, especially America's historic allies.
The Great War was a fuck-up. It began as a fuck-up and it ended a fuck-up. Nobody wanted that war. They just backed into it. Countries that were each other's best trading partners went at it hammer and tong. And it ended with an inconclusive but deeply punitive armistice that paved the way for a second chapter of world war just 21 years later. Can it be said that any side won WWI? Oh yeah, that's right, our side got to do the marching, the victory parades.
We find ourselves today in a situation in which many war studies types believe we could repeat what we did a century ago. We could back ourselves into another Great War only one that could make the previous two look like a barnyard bare knuckles match.
If we paid half as much attention to averting another terrible war as we do to celebrating hollow victories from the past all those deaths of all nations whether military or civilian might have some meaning.
T
I can add little to what you've written, Mound. The only thing I will add is that, when my father got home, he went to the Legion. That was his only trip there. "I wasn't," he told me, "going to spend my time sitting around telling war stories."
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