November 11, 2018
100 Years Ago Today...
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All those who fought in that war are dead, as are most who remember as children seeing everywhere the maimed and blind the shells and gas had produced.
...the the carnage that broke the soul of the west ended. There was peace.
Yay.
The second, more well known world war that this miserable, pointless conflict gave birth to has likewise seen most of those who remember it firsthand pass on. A dwindling minority know what a real war, against a peer nation is. For all of the courage of the armed forces of the U.S. and our allies, we've been fighting foes that are clever, tenacious, and murderous, but nowhere near our peers.
The conflicts that threaten to visit us, whether our opponents be foreign, domestic or both are nothing like the War on Terror.
If these conflicts come to pass, they will find us on equal terms or starting at a disadvantage. This is an experience that few today can conceive of...which makes the actual war more likely as there is neither the institutional nor cultural reference for what a conflict between equals entails. We encounter no large groups of people with their eyes boiled out by Lewisite...
...or their limbs blown off by explosions. Even a later generation, with Keloids inflicted by a flash brighter than the sun has passed on, with their most poingniant testimonials having faded over time.
So there is, all around, much bravado born in the special courage that comes from ignorance.
Today is the 100th anniversary of an armistice that ended a terrible war. We would do well to remember not the victory parades, but why people had them and what they were celebrating the end of.
War is a dreadful thing.
Of course Auschwitz and Dachau stand in mute testimony to the fact that war is, sometimes, VERY necessary. But we should look honestly at how perfectly dreadful a war between peers is, lest we step into the breach unnecessarily as the west did 104 years ago.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at
12:10 PM
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