Posted on 11/10/2018 6:39:56 PM PST by Nextrush
What do you think about during the two minutes silence? I used to think of men at war, and hear in my head the shouts and the clash of arms. Now I see a narrow street of small houses at dusk. A young man in army uniform is embracing his wife and little children in a lighted doorway. He will not return.
I recently learned that, on the first day of commemoration, in 1919, the silence was often far from silent. In many places, when the traffic and the factories stopped, the sound of uncontrollable weeping could be heard in many towns.
Nearly three quarters of a million young men had died far away... they'd had no funerals. For the first time, the bereaved had an opportunity to grieve properly.
This commemoration is above all about the First World War......
I knew. when I first learned about it, that the 1914 war was a chasm between us and another world.
I rather like the look of the world that had been lost-calmer, slower, more solid than ours. I had a feeling we were now a smaller people than we had been.....
...I am so often told that those who fought in 1914 did so for our freedom, that we are far less free as a people, from all kinds of government interference, than we were before the war. It was 1914 that began the era of heavy taxation, surveillance, regulation and general snooping and bureaucracy which now stifle us.
It was also 1914 that swept away the restrained and quiet world of yesterday, and the great, stuffy cumbersome empires of Austria, Germany and Russia, replacing them with the slick murderous modern empires of the Nazis and the Bolsheviks. Was this progress? Give me the Kaiser and the Tsar, any day.....
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Peter Hitchens remembers those who died and the death of civilization he sees coming out of the First World War.
Excellent article.
Ping.
Even the post -WWII recovery was blighted with signs of moral and spiritual death.
And that is still with us, with a vengeance.
In the forward of Adolphus Huxley’s book “Brave New World”, Huxley talks about W.W. I. He mentions The Fifth Marquis of Lansdowne, a man he called the last great Conservative. In 1917 he wrote a letter to the Times stating that the time had come to sue for peace.
This had been the way that Europeans Wars had been settled for 100’s of years. The powers would meet, draw up a peace treaty, divide the spoils so to speak and end things. Lansdowne was shunned for writing and making such a proposal and the war dragged on to it’s sorry conclusion with a great loss of life.
Bears repeating:
I do believe that WWI was the beginning of the end of civilization. A true historic turning point. I don’t think Europe has recovered, or will ever recover. On every level -— political, social, physical, emotional, cultural, spiritual -— it was smashed. WWII came roaring on its heels like an opportunistic disease taking down an already wretched, weakened sufferer.
Even the post -WWII recovery was blighted with signs of moral and spiritual death.
And that is still with us, with a vengeance.
What else would you expect from a war that killed, on average, nearly ten-thousand men a day, seven days a week, for over four years?
Countless others greivously maimed.
And a year later, Rudyard Kipling wrote “Gods of the Copybook Headings”, predicting with great accuracy the events of the next century.
The number of artists, writers, composers, engineers, visionaries, etc murdered during the Bolshevik years is also staggering. The loss to civilization and culture can never be duplicated.
His words express quite eloquently, my own thoguhts on the subject.
WW2 was not the most evil or fateful event of the 20th century.
It shouldn’t have happened, indeed, wouldn’t have happened, had it not been for WW1.
WW1 destroyed an orderly world and set in motion all the evils that have bedeviled mankind since - the rising of Communism, Fascism, Naziism, WW2, genocides, The Cold War, expanding statism and its suffocating bureaucracy in the West, the metastising problem of Islamism and the cancer of Cultural Marxism that is eating the West alive.
Two minutes of silence are not enough to remember the best and brightest lights, the favorite sons, of the nations that bled them - and lost their futures as a result.
WWI was pure horror. It did not end all war, it led humanity to possibly destroy itself up to this day and beyond. WWI may have destroyed America under Wilsonism.
It really comes down to demographics. Losing so many men to death and injury resulted in a big drop in the birth rate. This big drop that rippled though the decades.
In France for example, people had big families before WW1. After the war, the birth rate decreased because there were fewer men, but the birth rate continued to be depressed well after the war because families had fewer children. The decline of the cultural influence of Christianity, overall rising affluence, and birth control are cited as the chief factors for lower bith rates. This became the norm which has persisted to this day.
The Muslim invasion is the final nail.
An excellent book on the origins and first months of W.W. I came out in 2014 called “Catastrophe” by Sir Max Hastings.
Islam is not the last thing, or the worst thing.
If Islam ever does dominate the world, everything will be fire, death and chaos.
The horror will be so complete that something new, and far more horrible, will be born after gestating within the seething mire.
Something that makes Islam look like a recipe for cupcakes.
It wasn’t only Britain. All of Europe lost her best and brightest, and they have never recovered.
Auschwitz was the final straw.
Man's eternal state is war. It is war that defines us, war that is the rule, not the exception. The brief moments in between are nothing more than preparation for the next.
It will always be “The Great War.”
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