Our freedom?

[chickenfeet]

I am getting really pissed off with the WW1 commemoration nonsense.  If I hear one more person talk about people who "sacrificed" their lives for "our" "freedom" or "way of life" I may have to punch them in the nose.  I can respect the people, on both sides, who fought and died in that war but that's as far as it goes.  The world's great imperial powers managed a monumental cock up that started a war.  None of them had the guts or gumption to find a way of backing out of that cock up until millions had died.  The cock up they made of the peace treaties created both the necessary conditions for the second, even more murderous, world war and the modern middle east.  The real legacy of WW1 is being played out in Gaza, Syria, Iraq and the Ukraine.  I'm not celebrating.  The only "lights out" I'd like to see tonight are the ones punched from the leadership of Hamas, ISIS, Israel, the CIA stooges in Kyiv and Putin's psychopaths.

Comments

[onyxlynx]

Hear, hear.

Obviously, there will be commemoration--centennials don't happen every day. But I thought all the cant about sacrifice and stuff had been buried--that was the point of the '20s. Wasn't it?

[kalypso]

If I hear one more person talk about people who "sacrificed" their lives for "our" "freedom" or "way of life"

I may be lucky, but I don't think I have heard anyone talking about that - most commentators have been explaining that the war was important because it shaped the world we live in now, with all the consequences you mention.

And of course there's a layer of sentimentality over the commemorations, but that's because it's only just slipping out of living memory; because of the scale of the casualties many people know of someone in their family who died, and it's modern enough for that to be reinforced by the preservation of photos, letters etc, so they remember it as their great-uncle's war (for instance), and they remember the great-uncle as an individual they might have met if he hadn't been killed. The scars are still visible in a way that those of the Napoleonic wars aren't.

[chickenfeet]

It was a few people on Twitter. What I hate is that the sentiment gets used to legitimate current wars. It's a sort of John McRae effect. "They" died to protect "our way of life" so it must be OK to go on killing and dying to do the same. Even though WW1 had nothing to do with protecting anybody's "way of life" and nor did the war in Afghanistan.

[ironed_orchid]

I'd like to hear more about the people who sacrificed their lives because of conscription.