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Below is an op-ed piece that appears in the Nov. 11, 2008 New York Times. Today I also begin a short section on Holocaust Studies in my World of Ideas class at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, and I'll provide a little information about the Treaty of Versailles which was signed in June of 1919. So I thought this might be an appropriate piece for all of us to read. Your blogmeister, DeWitt Clinton
from The New York Times
November 11, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
A Holiday to End All Wars
By ALEXANDER WATSON
Cambridge, England
TODAY is the 90th anniversary of the armistice that ended the First World War, and it will be commemorated very differently on each side of the Atlantic and across the borders of Europe. It’s a reminder that not all “victors” experience wars in the same way, and that their citizens can have almost as much difficulty as those of the vanquished states in coping with the collective trauma of conflict.
For Americans, Veterans Day celebrates the survivors of all the nation’s 20th and 21st century wars. In France and Britain, by contrast, the mood is altogether more somber. In these countries, it is the dead who, since 1919, have been the focus of the ceremonies.
Why this difference? After all, for citizens of all three countries the date marks a shared victory. In the jargon of the time, Nov. 11, 1918, was the day of their soldiers’ triumph over “Prussian militarism,” the vindication of a “fight for civilization” and the successful finish of a “war to end all wars.”
In the years after the war, official ceremonies in the United States reflected these victorious ideals and celebrated “world peace” — it was only after World War II that the day was dedicated specifically to veterans. The touchstone of loss and suffering for Americans remained the Civil War, the world’s first industrial conflict, which 50 years before World War I had taken the lives of more than 600,000 soldiers. Memorial Day (or as it was originally known, Decoration Day) was first instituted in May during the late 1860s to commemorate these fallen.
In contrast, it was only in August 1914 that the horrors and shock of modern warfare came to Europe. The Great War, as the conflict is still known in France and Britain, was a prolonged and vicious struggle demanding the commitment of nations’ wealth and manpower on an unprecedented scale.
Over four years, armies millions of men strong clashed indecisively in horrendous conditions. For the first time on this scale, genuine home fronts formed, as civilians were targets of bombings and food blockades. British war losses, at more than 700,000 men, remain the heaviest in the country’s history. French and German dead were even more numerous, totaling 1.4 million and likely 2 million, respectively.
It was the need to come to terms with this immense loss of life that shaped European commemorations of Nov. 11. On the armistice’s first anniversary in Britain, a two-minute silence was observed at 11 a.m., the time the fighting ended; industry was shut down, traffic halted and people across the country fell quiet to remember the nation’s dead. In France, public grief was expressed more loudly, local communities gathering every armistice day to hear the names of the dead read out by a war orphan, and responding in unison, “mort pour la patrie” — “died for his country.”
Cenotaphs were built to comfort the bereaved whose relatives had no known resting place — the bodies of hundreds of thousands of men had been lost on the battlefield or eviscerated by shellfire. In 1920, “Unknown Warriors” were chosen and entombed in London and Paris; Rome followed suit in 1921.
In towns and villages more modest memorials and plaques to the fallen were erected, becoming an enduring feature of Europe’s landscape. At veterans’ insistence, Nov. 11 was declared a national holiday in France in 1922, and Germany too introduced an official “people’s day of sorrow,” or Volkstrauertag, in 1925 to honor its war dead.
Today, the commemoration of Nov. 11 varies greatly across Europe. For Poles, the holiday is not a day of mourning but rather of celebration, commemorating the rebirth of their nation in 1918 after more than a century of occupation by Austria-Hungary, Prussia and Russia. In Italy, the war dead are remembered on Nov. 4, “the feast of the fallen,” the day in 1918 that fighting came to an end on its battlefront. Across Central Europe though, the greater horrors of the Second World War have subsumed those of its predecessor within popular memory; in Germany, for example, commemoration of the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities now takes precedence over the losses of the last century’s first conflagration.
Yet in France, where the death toll of 1914 to 1918 exceeded that of 1939 to 1945, the dead of World War I retain a strong grip on the national conscience. Across the country today, local mayors will lead remembrance services, the names of long-buried soldiers will be read out, military bands will play and citizens will sing “La Marseillaise.”
In Britain, where an estimated three-quarters of the population paused during the two-minute silence on the armistice’s 80th anniversary and where, in 2002, a BBC poll rated the Unknown Warrior as the country’s 76th greatest citizen, public memory of the war is even stronger. Visit the country (or its former dominions including Canada and New Zealand) in November and you will still see paper poppies being widely worn — a reference to the blood-red flowers which grew on the shell-torn battlefields and to John McCrae’s poem “In Flanders Fields.”
The brainchild of an American educator, Moina Michael, the poppies have been sold since 1921 to support war widows and veterans; a record 37 million were purchased in Britain in 2006. Even 90 years after the war’s end, the rites and symbols of what George Kennan termed “the great seminal catastrophe” of the 20th century retain their poignancy.
Alexander Watson is a research fellow at Cambridge University and the author of “Enduring the Great War.”
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
My Friends, Our Long National Nightmare is Over
MY FRIENDS, OUR LONG NATIONAL NIGHTMARE IS OVER
Somewhere in the hazy craw of childhood memory, I can still see Dwight Eisenhower “inspecting the troops,” a Boy Scout Jamboree somewhere in safe Republican Kansas in the late 1950’s. I’m sure, as nearly always, he “carried” Kansas in the Electoral Votes, but I do recall someone saying how he scowled at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy. I’ll admit I can still see Tricky Dick, but mostly due to the occasional documentaries on History Channel, as well as a slightly improved memory of his decision to bomb Cambodia, to prowl around in Democratic offices looking for scuttlebutt, and being somewhat paralyzed, as we all might have been who are still alive, by the Watergate Hearings.
Those Victory hands still pop up occasionally in my abdulla oblongata, or somewhere up there, when I see presidential candidates ascend or descend from planes from various political trips made across the world, or here in the U.S. I’ll admit I remember more from President Ford on Saturday Night Live, than I do of his presidency, but mostly I connect a few wires to the Fall of Saigon, and the Aftermath, which is still a nightmare.
Mostly, I remember Ronald Reagan as amusing, as someone who didn’t seem to attack civil liberties, or undermine the Constitution, though we still need to investigate more of the Iran Contra scandal, though most of us would just like to forget it, but perhaps not the Nicaraguans. For eight years we lived under his doting leadership, and though the specific days are just about as hazy as when Dwight Eisenhower walked by, we probably did not seem to revile the actor, but we tolerated him, knowing he earned the respect one has to accept for a landslide victory, or was it two?
George Elder was a statesman I suppose, and though no one wants to really consider that Kuwait was a legal province of Iraq before European powers separated it from the northern provinces, shortly after WWI, I still sense that George Elder was not motivated by madness as his son would be regarding who actually owns the oil fields. So as poor as my memory is, life under Republican presidents up to George the Younger was not miserable, in fact, some of those days since Dwight must have been pretty good.
But that all changed eight years ago today. I can remember “Florida, Florida, Florida,” as Tim Russet so ably put it. And then we were off to the Supreme Court to decide who would lead us into the Age of Terror(ism). The memory of 9/11/1001 is, of course, burned, singed on all of our memories, much more than any aching memory of being overrun by North Vietnamese regular Army soldiers who captured for a few minutes one mountain top somewhere in South East Asia. Soon, without precedent (perhaps I can be corrected on this) we learned that all laws and justice, a bit to our surprise, would emanate from the White House, even if they were illegal and unprecedented.
Soon we were going to muscle our way against the world, intimidating everyone, as if we were not behind George the Younger, then we were against him. Actually I didn’t want to be behind him, or in front of him, as he was such an intimidating cowboy with such unusual swagger and smirk. Well, I’m no White House historian, but looking back, it seems like the eye of Hurricane Katrina was actually hovering inside George Bush’s Office, and so the level of devastation and destruction is nearly impossible to record, but many writers will begin the herculean task.
Our world shrank after the dismissal of the Kyoto Accords, and whether it was graft, or stupidity, or just proof that absolute power does corrupt even born again Christians, to a certain degree, (and you can decide how much), we became an old crumbling Roman Empire, with too many enemies from too many borders. But last night something changed, a sea shifted, and so without tearing up, I’m just glad to have lasted as long as we all did in our makeshift foxholes. Perhaps we can join other earthlings in learning how to live together again.
Somewhere in the hazy craw of childhood memory, I can still see Dwight Eisenhower “inspecting the troops,” a Boy Scout Jamboree somewhere in safe Republican Kansas in the late 1950’s. I’m sure, as nearly always, he “carried” Kansas in the Electoral Votes, but I do recall someone saying how he scowled at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy. I’ll admit I can still see Tricky Dick, but mostly due to the occasional documentaries on History Channel, as well as a slightly improved memory of his decision to bomb Cambodia, to prowl around in Democratic offices looking for scuttlebutt, and being somewhat paralyzed, as we all might have been who are still alive, by the Watergate Hearings.
Those Victory hands still pop up occasionally in my abdulla oblongata, or somewhere up there, when I see presidential candidates ascend or descend from planes from various political trips made across the world, or here in the U.S. I’ll admit I remember more from President Ford on Saturday Night Live, than I do of his presidency, but mostly I connect a few wires to the Fall of Saigon, and the Aftermath, which is still a nightmare.
Mostly, I remember Ronald Reagan as amusing, as someone who didn’t seem to attack civil liberties, or undermine the Constitution, though we still need to investigate more of the Iran Contra scandal, though most of us would just like to forget it, but perhaps not the Nicaraguans. For eight years we lived under his doting leadership, and though the specific days are just about as hazy as when Dwight Eisenhower walked by, we probably did not seem to revile the actor, but we tolerated him, knowing he earned the respect one has to accept for a landslide victory, or was it two?
George Elder was a statesman I suppose, and though no one wants to really consider that Kuwait was a legal province of Iraq before European powers separated it from the northern provinces, shortly after WWI, I still sense that George Elder was not motivated by madness as his son would be regarding who actually owns the oil fields. So as poor as my memory is, life under Republican presidents up to George the Younger was not miserable, in fact, some of those days since Dwight must have been pretty good.
But that all changed eight years ago today. I can remember “Florida, Florida, Florida,” as Tim Russet so ably put it. And then we were off to the Supreme Court to decide who would lead us into the Age of Terror(ism). The memory of 9/11/1001 is, of course, burned, singed on all of our memories, much more than any aching memory of being overrun by North Vietnamese regular Army soldiers who captured for a few minutes one mountain top somewhere in South East Asia. Soon, without precedent (perhaps I can be corrected on this) we learned that all laws and justice, a bit to our surprise, would emanate from the White House, even if they were illegal and unprecedented.
Soon we were going to muscle our way against the world, intimidating everyone, as if we were not behind George the Younger, then we were against him. Actually I didn’t want to be behind him, or in front of him, as he was such an intimidating cowboy with such unusual swagger and smirk. Well, I’m no White House historian, but looking back, it seems like the eye of Hurricane Katrina was actually hovering inside George Bush’s Office, and so the level of devastation and destruction is nearly impossible to record, but many writers will begin the herculean task.
Our world shrank after the dismissal of the Kyoto Accords, and whether it was graft, or stupidity, or just proof that absolute power does corrupt even born again Christians, to a certain degree, (and you can decide how much), we became an old crumbling Roman Empire, with too many enemies from too many borders. But last night something changed, a sea shifted, and so without tearing up, I’m just glad to have lasted as long as we all did in our makeshift foxholes. Perhaps we can join other earthlings in learning how to live together again.
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