Remembrance on Veterans Day

By Frank Moraes 

I got this picture from Wikipedia. The caption reads, "Joseph Ambrose, an 86-year-old World War I veteran, attends the dedication day parade for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1982, holding the flag that covered the casket of his son, who was killed in the Korean War." This is not just how I think about Veterans Day; it is how I think our country should think about it. Let us honor veterans but let us also regret that we have them.

In most countries, today is Armistice Day: it marks the armistice that ended World War I in 1918. It is also referred to as the more appropriate Remembrance Day. It is a day to remember those who have died in our wars. It is a solemn occasion. And it should be. Even the "good" war, World War II, should not be looked back on as a great adventure. It was a tragedy for the world. Over 60 million people were killed in that war. And for what? A bad economy that allowed a megalomaniac to gain power in Germany?

It's my opinion, based upon nothing but a fair insight into human nature, that most people just want to live their ordinary lives with their families and friends and the occasional barbecue and backyard party. And that's as true of people in the army as anywhere else. I put the number at 95%. It's that 5% of the population that fucks everything up. And I'm not just talking about Hitler here. Why did we started the Iraq War? It certainly had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction—that was just a cover. And I don't think it had to do with oil either, but that doubtless played some role. I think it was just another example of a small group of men who thought it would be super keen to take out big bad Saddam Hussein.

In the United States, of course, we celebrate Veterans Day. The idea of it is not bad. We need to honor our veterans, although I think better than a single day would be an everyday approach to providing them their earned benefits. But it seems that Veterans Day to most people is just another day to celebrate what a kick ass country the United States is. Except because it references veterans, there is more explicit jingoism. To most people, it is a time to celebrate the fact that the United States spends 46% of what all the 171 countries of the world spend on military. It ought to be our great national shame, especially when even the Democrats want to cut food stamps for the poor.

But back to that picture. That's how we should think of Veterans Day: an old veteran from one of our many useless wars with a symbol of his son who died in another of our useless wars. To call the wars useless is not to disrespect the veterans. It is no disrespect to Achilles and Hector to note that the Trojan War was useless and tragic. To see wars clearly is a reminder of what a precious thing life is and how we should value it just as much before the war as after it.

Have a safe and thoughtful Veterans Day.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

Remembrance Day / Veterans Day 2013

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(This is a reprint of the post I've put up the last couple of years, but with a different Great War poem. Two years ago, it was the justifiably famous "Break of Day in the Trenches" by Isaac Rosenberg, one of the greatest of all war poems (of any war, not just WWI). Last year it was "Dead Man's Dump," a remarkable portrait of the brutality of war, also by Rosenberg. Going back further, to 2009, I went with Wilfred Owen's powerfully anti-jingoist "Dulce et Decorum Est." Today I turn to Siegfried Sassoon, whose wonderful poetry I have previously featured.)

Today is a day to remember those who served, those who fought, those who gave their lives. But it is also -- and we must not lose sight of this -- a day to remember the horror of war. While many of those who served did so nobly, war itself is not noble, even when somehow justifiable, and undeniably necessary, as was World War II.

Even if we should remember today not just the so-called " Greatest Generation" (a made-up American concept/conceit) that fought that war but also the countless innocent civilians who suffered and died (in that war as in all wars), as well as the incredible devastation of that war, not just on "our" side but on "their" side as well, from Dresden to Hiroshima. There may be ideals of good and evil, but there is an awful lot in between.

But World War I, the "Great War," the specific war this day commemorates? That was a pointless, generation-destroying abomination that resulted in nothing but another war, a continuation of the war, 20 years later. It was a war of dying empires, heavily militarized after a century of relative peace following the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna, the generals and their political masters moving pieces around on their gameboard, the lines moving a bit this way, a bit that way, all for some greater glory that existed only in their illusions and delusions, while thousands upon thousands were dying for nothing at all on the fields and in the trenches. Think of the Battle of the Somme, one of the Great War's key turning points, with a death toll over a million. It was one of the worst, but it was also one of many such devastations. It is impossible, I think, to come fully to terms with such horror.

Let us, then, think not of the usual red poppy but of the white one, which symbolizes peace (and not so much military valour and certainly not the "nobility" of war).

Here is "Survivors" by Siegfried Sassoon, written at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland (where he met Owen) in October 1917. A decorated soldier, having received the Military Cross in July 1916, Sassoon had understandably turned firmly against the war by then, and this short and deeply moving poem reflects his unwavering contempt for the still-raging war:

No doubt they'll soon get well; the shock and strain
Have caused their stammering, disconnected talk.
Of course they're "longing to go out again,"--
These boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk,
They'll soon forget their haunted nights; their cowed
Subjection to the ghosts of friends who died,--
Their dreams that drip with murder; and they'll be proud
Of glorious war that shatter'd all their pride...
Men who went out to battle, grim and glad;
Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad.

This day in history - Dec. 7, 1941: The Japanese attack Pearl Harbor

By Richard K. Barry

Well, of course, that's what happened on this day in history. The Wiki on this reads:

The Imperial Japanese Navy attacked the United States Pacific Fleet and its defending Army Air Forces and Marine air forces at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, causing a declaration of war upon Japan by the United States. Japan also invaded Malaya, Thailand, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and the Dutch East Indies at the same time (December 8 in Asia).

When I was growing up in the '60s, every kid knew that date. Perhaps they still do. I don't know. That's not a critical comment. Time passes, consciousness of historical events shifts. It's like the fact that kids entering high school now are probably too young remember 9/11, which seems like it happened last week to me. 

Remembrance Day / Veterans Day 2012

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(This is a reprint of the post I put up last year, but with a different poem by Rosenberg. Last year it was the justifiably famous "Break of Day in the Trenches," one of the greatest of all war poems (of any war, not just WWI). This year it's "Dead Man's Dump," a remarkable portrait of the brutality of war.)

Today is a day to remember those who served, those who fought, those who gave their lives. But it is also -- and we must not lose sight of this -- a day to remember the horror of war. While many of those who served did so nobly, war itself is not noble, even when somehow justifiable, and undeniably necessary, as was World War II.

Even if we should remember today not just the so-called " Greatest Generation" (a made-up American concept/conceit) that fought that war but also the countless innocent civilians who suffered and died (in that war as in all wars), as well as the incredible devastation of that war, not just on "our" side but on "their" side as well, from Dresden to Hiroshima. There may be ideals of good and evil, but there is an awful lot in between.

But World War I, the "Great War," the specific war this day commemorates? That was a pointless, generation-destroying abomination that resulted in nothing but another war, a continuation of the war, 20 years later. It was a war of dying empires, heavily militarized after a century of relative peace following the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna, the generals and their political masters moving pieces around on their gameboard, the lines moving a bit this way, a bit that way, all for some greater glory that existed only in their illusions and delusions, while thousands upon thousands were dying for nothing at all on the fields and in the trenches. Think of the Battle of the Somme, one of the Great War's key turning points, with a death toll over a million. It was one of the worst, but it was also one of many such devastations. It is impossible, I think, to come fully to terms with such horror.

Let us, then, think not of the usual red poppy but of the white one, which symbolizes peace (and not so much military valour and certainly not the "nobility" of war).

Here is the intensely powerful "Dead Man's Dump" by Isaac Rosenberg, a somewhat lesser-known Great War poet (compared to the likes of Owen or Sassoon) but still a very fine one:

The plunging limbers over the shattered track
Racketed with their rusty freight,
Stuck out like many crowns of thorns,
And the rusty stakes like sceptres old
To stay the flood of brutish men
Upon our brothers dear.

The wheels lurched over sprawled dead
But pained them not, though their bones crunched,
Their shut mouths made no moan.
They lie there huddled, friend and foeman,
Man born of man, and born of woman,
And shells go crying over them
From night till night and now.

Earth has waited for them,
All the time of their growth
Fretting for their decay:
Now she has them at last!
In the strength of their strength
Suspended--stopped and held.

What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit?
Earth! have they gone into you!
Somewhere they must have gone,
And flung on your hard back
Is their soul's sack
Emptied of God-ancestralled essences.
Who hurled them out? Who hurled?

None saw their spirits' shadow shake the grass,
Or stood aside for the half used life to pass
Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth,
When the swift iron burning bee
Drained the wild honey of their youth.

What of us who, flung on the shrieking pyre,
Walk, our usual thoughts untouched,
Our lucky limbs as on ichor fed,
Immortal seeming ever?
Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us,
A fear may choke in our veins
And the startled blood may stop.

The air is loud with death,
The dark air spurts with fire,
The explosions ceaseless are.
Timelessly now, some minutes past,
Those dead strode time with vigorous life,
Till the shrapnel called 'An end!'
But not to all. In bleeding pangs
Some borne on stretchers dreamed of home,
Dear things, war-blotted from their hearts.

Maniac Earth! howling and flying, your bowel
Seared by the jagged fire, the iron love,
The impetuous storm of savage love.
Dark Earth! dark Heavens! swinging in chemic smoke,
What dead are born when you kiss each soundless soul
With lightning and thunder from your mined heart,
Which man's self dug, and his blind fingers loosed?

A man's brains splattered on
A stretcher-bearer's face;
His shook shoulders slipped their load,
But when they bent to look again
The drowning soul was sunk too deep
For human tenderness.

They left this dead with the older dead,
Stretched at the cross roads.

Burnt black by strange decay
Their sinister faces lie,
The lid over each eye,
The grass and coloured clay
More motion have than they,
Joined to the great sunk silences.

Here is one not long dead;
His dark hearing caught our far wheels,
And the choked soul stretched weak hands
To reach the living word the far wheels said,
The blood-dazed intelligence beating for light,
Crying through the suspense of the far torturing wheels
Swift for the end to break
Or the wheels to break,
Cried as the tide of the world broke over his sight.

Will they come? Will they ever come?
Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules,
The quivering-bellied mules,
And the rushing wheels all mixed
With his tortured upturned sight.
So we crashed round the bend,
We heard his weak scream,
We heard his very last sound,
And our wheels grazed his dead face.

Flight Lt. Alex Cassie (1916-2012)

By Richard K. Barry

Stalag Luft III

I've said before that I have resisted posting obituaries. I'm not sure why the aversion, but since they fascinate me and I'm the one doing the writing, why not?

One of my local newspapers, the Canadian Globe and Mail, used to have a "Lives Lived" section. It was usually about the passing of someone not famous. In fact, it was frequently about someone who would not merit an obituary in the main section of a major newspaper. It was always written by someone who knew the person and it was usually done very well. It was, in essence, about the kind of lives most of us lead.

On the other hand, there are obituaries about people most of us would know. That's fine too. Those things get plenty of coverage, not that there's anything wrong with that.

My interest tends to be somewhere in the middle: the person who, perhaps only fleetingly, had a role, perhaps quite small, in some aspect of our shared history or culture. In any case, it's about people we wouldn't generally consider famous, as subjective as the term "famous" is. It's about the person you might pass on the street or meet at a social gathering, who would be so interesting if you'd only bothered to ask. 

Alex Cassie

Take RAF Flight Lt. Alex Cassie, for example. Cassie was a prisoner of war in the supposedly escape-proof Stalag Luft III in Germany during WWII, beginning in the fall of 1942. An escape attempt from the compound was made famous by the 1963 movie The Great Escape.

Cassie's role in the break-out was to, along with several others, forge all the necessary documents that would be required by the men once they were outside the prison and making their way back to friendly territory.
The New York Times writes:

In their pockets, the escapees carried what looked like officially stamped documents, identification cards, business cards and even letters written in German from purported wives and sweethearts, all of which were intended to make it possible for them to befuddle a hapless guard or police officer stopping them on their way to freedom.

Knowing that he was claustrophobic and not wanting to slow the other men down as they made their way through the escape tunnel, Cassie opted to stay behind. As you may recall from the movie, of the 76 escapees, 73 were soon recaptured, and 50 were executed on orders from Hitler.
Cassie later said:

All five of my hut mates had been shot. Often I've asked myself, "Why didn't I go?" I can't shake off the vague feeling of guilt, that why should I have been the lucky one?

Clearly the risks taken to manufacture the required documentation make him a hero, but I suppose feelings of guilt under the circumstances are understandable.

As to how they made the documents, Cassie told The Sun:

We got the best of the paper from the flyleaves of books which arrived at the camp through the Red Cross. The rest — ink, photography, timetables, etc. — was bribed from the Germans. It was amazing what a few cigarettes could do.

He also said they somehow got hold of a typewriter with a German typeface and used cold tea to age documents. He etched official-looking stamps from boot heels.

No great surprise but Cassie also added that there was no "jaunty, baseball throwing, Steve McQueen-like American leading the breakout." No, that's Hollywood.

After the war, Cassie worked as a psychologist in the British military. He retired in 1976 as a senior principle psychologist. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Psychological Society.

He died recently at the age of 95 and is survived by a son, a daughter, and four grandchildren to whom he must have had stories to tell.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

This day in history - June 6, 1944: The Allied invasion of Normandy

By Richard K. Barry

Having been born just over a decade after the end of WWII, I grew up hearing stories about the war and watching documentaries like The World at War and Victory at Sea. I suspect that few of my generation would be unable to identify June 6, 1944 as the day of the Allied invasion of Normandy, which began and essential part of the bloody process of defeating the Nazis on Continental Europe.

The declaration of war in Europe, the bombing of Pearl Harbour, VE-Day, and VJ-Day all occurred on dates many of us still recall.

As I've remarked before, WWII has been called the last good war and it does seem to have been the last war about which so many of us took any significant interest in learning the history.

I don't exactly know what it means that so few of us have taken the time to learn much about our current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Are there likely to be remembered dates and battles that will be significant to people in 10, 20, 50 years? (Aside, of course, from 9/11, which is different).

It's not my intention to glorify war, it's only that the costs are so high that if we paid more attention we'd be in a better position to judge if the sacrifices are worth it. It is surely not something we should take for granted.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

Postcards from a sad edge

By J. Thomas Duffy

If the Teabaggers think they have it tough, being called names, dissed, and otherwise, not taken seriously, it's a walk-in-the-park compared to others.

At least they are not being murdered for their opposition, for slandering the President, the government



Roger Cohen, in today's NYT Op-Ed page, has a great read - "The Banality of Good";

What was it like? I would ask myself, the years I lived in Berlin. What was it like in the leafy Grunewald neighborhood to watch your Jewish neighbors — lawyers, businessmen, dentists — trooping head bowed to the nearby train station for transport eastward to extinction?

With what measure of fear, denial, calculation, conscience and contempt did neighbors who had proved their Aryan stock to Hitler’s butchers make their accommodations with this Jewish exodus? How good did the schnapps taste and how effectively did it wash down the shame?

How's them apples for an opener?

Cohen quickly elucidates;

Now I know. Thanks to Hans Fallada’s extraordinary “Every Man Dies Alone,” just published in the United States more than 60 years after it first appeared in Germany, I know. What Irène Némirovsky’s “Suite Française” did for wartime France after six decades in obscurity, Fallada does for wartime Berlin. Like all great art, it transports, in this instance to a world where, “The Third Reich kept springing surprises on its antagonists: It was vile beyond all vileness.”

Fallada, born Rudolf Ditzen, wrote his novel in less than a month right after the war and just before his death in 1947 at the age of 53. The Nazi hell he evokes is not so much recalled as rendered, whole and alive. The prose is sinuous and gritty, like the city he describes. Dialogue often veers toward sadistic folly with a barbaric logic that takes the breath away.

"Vile beyond all vileness ..."

I don't know if you can even begin comprehending, processing such a magnitude of evil.

The book is based on the true story of Otto and Elise Hampel, whose postcard campaign — “Hitler’s war is the worker’s death!” — frustrated the Gestapo until the couple’s capture in October 1942 and subsequent beheading. Fallada, a sometime morphine addict who lived in and out of asylums, got hold of the Hampel police files through a friend in late 1945, wrote a journalistic account that year, and then, in a burst of creativity, the novel.

[snip]

The book pulses with the street life of a terrorized city, full of sleaze, suspicion, drunkenness, desperation and murder. It proclaims the bestial sadism of which man is capable and the enormous moral stature of decency. It has something of the horror of Conrad, the madness of Dostoyevsky and the chilling menace of Capote’s “In Cold Blood.”

Yikes!

From Elizabeth Bachner;

If Primo Levi told me to crawl underneath the Brooklyn bridge, naked, and read the graffiti there -- if he were here to suggest that -- I’d be swinging over the side of that bridge right now, even though it’s 30 degrees and the middle of rush hour.

[snip]

So when I heard that Primo Levi had declared Hans Fallada’s long-obscure Every Man Dies Alone to be “the greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis,” I tucked into its 500 pages with a feeling of razor-sharp glee mixed with dread, worried and hopeful that it would make me unable to live in the same way anymore.

[snip]

Himmler planned on the Holocaust being an “unwritten page of glory.” Every unearthed manuscript or reprinted book like Every Man Dies Alone defeats that plan.

Go check out Cohn's entire article, it's a good one.


Bonus Links

Hans Fallada, From Wikipedia

Video of Anne Frank Surfaces on YouTube




(Cross Posted at The Garlic)

(Another) Craziest Republican of the Day: Kristia Cavere

By Michael J.W. Stickings

You've probably never heard of Ms. Cavere. I hadn't either, until this.

She's a Republican candidate (and Tea Party favourite) for New York's 19th Congressional District, currently held by Democrat John Hall. On Twitter, she describes herself as a "Proud American, Christian, Conservative, Republican, Writer, Equestrian." Good times.

Basically, she's just the sort of ignorant teabagging extremist we've come to expect from the GOP. And, it would appear, she's a moron. As The Albany Project reported over the weekend, she recently said this:

The Republicans are the ones who liberated Europe in World War II.

Interesting. I had no idea that FDR was a Republican, and that the Republican Party wasn't a party of isolationism (and fascism), a party that, in wanting to stay out of the war (or to side with Germany), appeased Hitler (among other anti-freedom types), and that all those who landed on the beaches, all those who gaves their lives, were Republican.

Thanks for clearing that up, Ms. Cavere. Now please crawl back under that rock whence you came. Those of us who live in the real world have no need for your truth-denying nonsense (which, of course, makes you a great fit in the GOP).

Nationalizing Wal-Mart

By Capt. Fogg

So let me get this straight, President Obama, or if you're a Republican, just plain Obama, is a dangerous leader because when someone tried to blow up a plane he took hours before mentioning the magic word "War." That was bad. Never ever talk of criminal activity when you can describe it as an act of war, unless of course it's our criminal activity. The non-sequitur correlate of this principle is that no rules apply when the words are coming from on official right wing spokesman, like Rush or Sarah. So it's OK for him to call people "retards" on the air, but just disgusting for Rahm to use it in private. Likewise it's OK for Rush to insist there's no war on while all the rest of his party continue to justify each and every contradiction. Actually no rules apply to Rush at all, since he can get away with such statements as insisting that the president has already dealt the U.S. a more devastating blow than we suffered in World War II without being called a liar, an ignoramus or the worst enemy Truth ever had.

But let's start at the beginning, Rush claimed yesterday that Wal-Mart was lobbying heavily to keep "Obama" from nationalizing the company. Lord knows they have lobbyists, but it takes a certain kind of person to broadcast that there is any likelihood of such an action and a really special kind of person to believe it. Now why would that be something awful you might ask Rush? Because there's no war on, says he, driving home the point that whether there is or isn't is situational and specific to any particular argument he's trying to make. There's a war when you can attack the president with it and there isn't when you can attack the president with it and both times Rush will be right.

The last time this happened was World War II, but that was because there was a war on and it made sense.

The last time what happened, Rush? It may make sense to him, but not only are we losing men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan, we did not nationalize Wal-Mart then or ever, nor is anyone contemplating it but Rush.

Country is under assault, more so than we were during World War II, other than the Japanese. But the Germans never attacked us, the Japanese did,

he continued and I'll leave it to you to figure out what alternate universe these "facts" come from. I suspect there are numbers of people who will simply accept that the current administration is more dangerous to our national security than what in the late 1930s was the most powerful military on Earth, will simply nod and accept that Germany didn't declare war on us and didn't over-run Europe and attack England and that we didn't lose almost half a million troops or that untold tens of millions of people didn't die -- Obama is dangerous and has already done us more harm than the Axis powers and without a doubt is going to nationalize Wal-Mart.

Does anyone reading this believe that Rush Limbaugh isn't stark raving mad with power, thinking he can invent alternate histories, create alternate realities and use them to attack the government and the people of the United States of America? There are millions who do and it may be that one or two of them will take it upon themselves to do Rush's bidding and rid us of the man who has already ruined everything for everyone.

Of course it's a United States of America where the president's imaginary "gun grab" has already taken place, where people who just got a tax cut are protesting an imaginary increase, where people who can't afford a check-up much less treatment for a serious illness are screaming about "Obama" taking away their ideal situation and somewhere, somebody is plotting acts of violence because after all, "Obama" is not only a Nazi, but a more dangerous one than Hitler. Thus spake Limbaugh.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

Pat Buchanan, Hitler apologist

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Yes, Pat Buchanan, he with the punditocratic platform at MSNBC, who blames Britain for starting WWII and essentially absolves Hitler of any and all responsibility for the war.

He doesn't deny the Holocaust, thankfully, but his history is revisionist fiction, including this:

Hitler wanted to end the war in 1940, almost two years before the trains began to roll to the camps.

In other words, the Holocaust wouldn't have happened -- or at least wouldn't have been as large -- had Hitler gotten his way. The implication, of course, is that not just the war but the Holocaust was Britain's fault.

Hitler only wanted peace, don't you know. He gave the British ample opportunity -- forget his war of imperial conquest everywhere else.

This is appalling, among the worst I've ever heard or read from Buchanan. Why he still has his platform in the MSM is beyond me.

For more, make sure to check out Matt Yglesias's excellent rebuttal. See also Steve Benen (who rightly notes that Buchanan's "status in the media establishment [will go] unaffected"), dday at C&L, and Adam Serwer.