Shadows of War
20 11 07 - 12:56War used to be a means of continuing the natural cycle of life: two armies met, one was defeated, both had losses and those left hopefully created something better from the ashes of the battlefield.
Recently people marched in remembrance of people who died in the two world wars last century. While such an event is often advertised merely as a way of remembering the dead, in reality it seems to be a way of manipulating the living. Nobody will admit that 11th of November parades are based around an ideology, but should you refuse to wear a poppy, people show their true colours. Making people see it your way is real easy if you fill their televisions and newspapers with graves and old crippled men, backed by a commentary that emphasises words like “Sacrifice” and “Freedom“.
When we become suffocated with emotional blackmail and crass symbolism we are unable to look past the cause of these and analyse their necessity. Death is a natural part of life, as is war. When we spend our time weeping at the horror of it all we hide from reality and are incapable of seeing our heart strings being pulled. Far from a genuine showing of grief and humanity, these parades are nothing more than schemes used to back up the same tired ideas that are seeing humanity as a whole heading down proverbial toilet.
November the 11th is the day many people will march in order to remember the dead. Far beyond just remembering the dead, we remember the ideas and freedoms they died for. If those goddamned Nazis won, they tell us, we'd be doing peculiar things like looking out for each other or cleaning our cities... I mean, regularly sending cripples, Jews and Negroes (oh my!) to the gas chambers, breaking the legs of dissidents and other Anti-Freedom things. Yet, thankfully, they didn't, so we don't. Instead we are free to roam in our progressive freedom-filled Utopia. Or are we?
Let us look for a second at the outcome of the second world war. That is, not the immediate outcome as that never tells the whole story. If we were to view events by their immediate outcome then heroin wouldn't only be legal, it'd be mandatory, complete bliss and isolation from the world, sounds good eh? Similarly, defeat of an enemy that has murdered our men, women and children (we murdered their's, but eh, forget about that), sounds good eh?
What we must look at is the long-term effect, how we live today. Our world-views have become binary: something and its associations are either absolutely good or bad. The National Socialists thought people shouldn't be able to live just however they wanted, seems pretty reasonable. They also (allegedly) believed in some more extreme things that people found less reasonable. Instead of separating the better ideas from the worse and trying to build better ideas, people trash the whole lot. It's like scrapping because of a tiny, easily correctable error. and I don't know about you, but I'm not willing to do that to mine. Seems a bit insane.
Anything that remotely reeks of anything other than post-liberal democracy comes under the fire of the wailing masses and self interested:
A: Uh, dude, are you sure you should pour that toxic waste in there? I mean, there's fish in there and everything. Some guys downstream might want to catch them.
B: Are you telling me what to do? This is cheaper, how dare you tell me what to do?! Are you some kind of vicious Nazi?!
Instead of a sane society, capable of making rational decisions regardless of if it offends somebody or not, we have become whimpering cowards in the dark. A decision is not weighed on whether it is good or harmful to society but what kind of people said something similar. If it will cause people to call us Nazis/Fascists/Terrorists/Communists/Dissent Group Of Your Choice then it will not be made.
The death of all those men did require some minerals on their part, no doubt, even if a lot of them did so under force of jail, violence or worse. Yet they did show a commitment to a cause that lay outside of themselves and their immediate interests. They were told their actions would help to create a better future for those generations that were to be born later. Such a message appeals to any kind of decent human being, I think.
However, what we must realise now is that the people who told them were either wrong or outright liars. I don’t think anyone thinks this country is the ‘Great’ Britain envisioned in past centuries, yet people seem to be happier if we pretend it is.
Don’t wear a poppy next year, don’t make meaningless gestures by gawping at a stone structure filled with names of people you’ve never met. If you want to honour these dead people, why not try doing for society what they thought they were?
Choosing not to wear plastic flowers or mumble some kind of feigned greatness for your ‘freedom’ isn’t insulting the sacrifices made. Backing up the rhetoric of politicians who sent millions to their death is.
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