Now that all the WWI veterans have gone to their final rest, maybe it’s time to find something else to commemorate on November 11. Of course, this year it’s not just 11/11, it’s 11/11/11…and it doesn’t even matter if you write your dates American style or European style. So there’s a group of Facebook pushing to make this November 11th Nigel Tufnel Day. Sounds good to me, though maybe these Scotsmen might have a complaint.
Ninety-one years ago, in a railroad car in Compiegne, France, an armistice was signed between Germany and the Allied Powers that ended the conflict we now call the First World War. Several months later, as Woodrow Wilson sailed to France to preside over the negotiations to formalize the peace and impose reorganization and reparations on the demolished empires of Europe, he did so with the promise that the conflict would become “The War To End All Wars”. His grand designs would, of course, sow the seeds of the Second World War to come twenty years later, which, in turn, would result in thirty years of confrontation that threatened a Third World War big enough to destroy the entire planet.
And so it comes to pass that today the Chancellor of Germany, herself a prisoner of that unwaged war, would become the first leader of Germany to stand side-by-side with the President of France at the Arc de Triomphe to commemorate the fallen soldiers of both nations in the very same week when she also stood in Berlin to mark the end of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of the reunification of her country.
Though Wilson was disasterously wrong in his schemes at Versailles, in the long term the notion of a Europe in peace, with self-determination for many of the people who for centuries had been subjects of empires, has largely come to pass. Even the upheavals in the Balkans, which were the precipitating events that led to World War I in the first place, have not seriously threatened the security of the continent. Today, the European Union, largely driven by the co-operation of the French and the Germans, covers the breadth and width of the continent. As the last remaining veterans of that War To End All Wars have finally been laid to rest, perhaps so has a war-driven Europe once and for all.
Meanwhile, on this day we have co-opted to celebrate our military might rather than to reflect on the horrors of war, the current President of the United States stands poised to send tens of thousands of troops to a war initiated by his predecessor eight years ago, with neither an achievable objective nor a justifiable rationale for continuing a struggle that has cost several thousand soldiers their lives, bankrupted the nation, and called into question whatever moral authority this country might once have had. How many wars will this nation fight until it realizes that in the long term the way of peace is the only right one?
Eric Bogle sings, with a photo montage of the latest crop of young men and women to be offered as sacrifice to a pointless cause.
Photographer David DeJonge has been photographing the few remaining veterans of the War To End All Wars. Last time I checked, only one American veteran is still alive.
One hundred years from now, may our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren remember the futility of the present war with the same thoughtfulness that these two artists remember the Great War.
All Original Content Copyright © BrianKaneOnline
All Other Content Copyright © Its Original Authors
Built on Notes Blog Core
Powered by WordPress