One thing that really struck me on my US (and Canadian) travels was the respect given to the armed forces past and present.
Not the silly over the top devotion some people exhibit (I actually dislike that) but the silent respect and appreciation exhibited (like, for example signs announcing uniformed service men get into XYX free/cheap or the way uniformed people were generally treated or the seriousness devoted to days like today)
If there is one thing I could bring back here to the UK and instill it would be that.
One thing you could do is actually thank a member of the armed forces in person. I have done this in the past. A few months ago I saw a uniformed RAF man standing at Green Park tube waiting for the train: I simply walked up to him and asked him he was returning from a deployment overseas. He told me that he was returning from Afghanistan and I simply said "Thank you" to him.
One night this past summer I was driving home after midnight and I saw a very inebriated older man waiting for a streetcar. Something about his bearing struck me, so I stopped and gave him a lift home. We chatted, and he was indeed a veteran. When he tried to thank me for the lift, I told him that I owed him the debt of gratitude.
I was at the Dallas airport recently waiting for my flight to board when a large group of soldiers dressed in desert camoflauge debarked from their plane. As the walked by every single person in the terminal stood up and applauded until the last of them had left. It was great to see everyone honor the soldiers in this way.
As both a veteran and somebody who does it, I will.
It's really tough, I won't lie to you. Walking up to a total stranger and saying something from the heart, to me at least, is very unnatural.
Usually I ask them a bit about where they are stationed, what they've been doing, whether or not they've been deployed. Just small talk. But before I leave I try to make physical contact -- patting them on the shoulder usually -- and say something like "Hey, I just wanted to say thank you. You guys are doing an awesome job."
Every time I've done it I get the weirdest reaction. At first they're totally convinced I am going to say something ugly right afterwards. Then they look confused for a couple of seconds. Then it's like the sun opens up from behind clouds: it's really, really cool. Makes you feel good the rest of the day (and I'm sure it makes their day as well)
The reason the Russian army isn't in western europe is not due to the heroic effort of the Queen's Cavalry - it's due to the ability to knock two pieces of Plutonium together.
It's the nerds/geeks at Aldermaston/LLNL/Los Alamos/ Sarov/Zheleznogorsk that have kept the world safe for you.
This is the hang up I have too; I dont personally do things like that. Though I do try and take time to talk politely to service men in situations like that (but I dont think I would directly thank him/her)
(edit: the [deleted] was someone asking, basically, why "thank you" specifically).
I wouldn't have said the UK lacked it. Every year when I was a kid I would take part in the Remembrance Sunday parades as a Girl Guide, and there was definitely a massive feeling of respect and admiration for these brave men. I'd always get tears in my eyes when an octogenarian bent double under the weight of his medals recited Wilfred Owen.
I guess less so with the current armed forces, since the threat was further away, and fewer of us were touched by it personally (most people I know have grandparents who were involved in one of the Great Wars; not everyone knows a modern-day serviceman). Plus the issue of the war itself; I believe anti-war sentiment about the recent wars is higher than it was for WWI and WWII, and what there was then is very much blurred by time, victory and countless readings of war poetry in high school. Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori.
I wonder if that is just a trick played by society to make more people assume bad jobs? The emphasis of heroism and personal sacrifice just makes the rest of society become freeloaders. Sorry that I can not formulate it better.
I hope the pay for soldiers in the US is OK - maybe the height of the pay correlates with the "solemness"? Like suppose every soldier would get 1000000$ per year, would they still be solemnly thanked?
It's not possible to pay soldiers a reasonable amount of money. If you pay them too much, you basically get an army of mercenaries, while the personal sacrifice any soldier send into harms way endures is impossible to truly translate to money.
We entrepreneurs often talk of our way of life as something we choose quite explicitly over financial security. I'm pretty sure the success of an army depends a lot on it's soldiers thinking roughly the same way about their chosen path.
Finally, my impression is that the United States is build on a certain mentality that's difficult for us Europeans to fully grasp. The country was founded by people fleeing from prosecution and suppression, and it's first war was fought against that same suppression trying to catch up. That mentality lies pretty deep in Americans, as I understand. It has nothing to do with cheating people into collecting our garbage and manning 24-hour convenience stores.
It's a shame that thankfulness to esp. US and UK troops isn't better founded in western European minds, and that it's only brought up when trying to justify a new war. Fact is that 400.000 Americans died in WWII, without whom my German would probably be a lot better. There's a D-day burial ground in Normandy. Any European should make a point of visiting it sometime (I haven't yet) -- especially before making high-brow intellectual rants against war.
As long as you remember that it's a mentality of sacrifice that led to 183,000 Americans dying in Europe, but it's facist totalitarianism that led to 10.7M Russians doing the same.
4 out of the 5million German military casualties were on the Eastern Front, The Russian army had a not insignificant role in Germany's defeat.
That's a fair point, probably clouded by the fact that the Soviet Union was, at first, an ally to Nazi Germany, and eventually celebrated its victory by forcibly annexing eastern Europe and the dozen of million people living there as a buffer against western Europe.
Sorry, it is a touchy subject and I am certainly thankful to the troops who freed us, too. I don't have a good answer - not all wars can be avoided, but I certainly wouldn't want to encourage anybody to become a soldier. If I really believed in the cause, I might become a soldier, too, though.
I think many soldiers are from poor backgrounds, though. Not sure how many chose to become a soldier for the excitement, or because it offers them a good chance at a better life. Again sorry, I don't have good answers. Overall, though, I think words are cheap and improving pay is maybe better. Soldiers provide a service to society, society should pay.
According to one Heritage Foundation study[1], US military enlistees tend to come disproportionately from middle class backgrounds. They found that only 11% of enlisted recruits came from the poorest quintile of neighbourhoods in the US.
While the Heritage Foundation is not an entirely neutral institution, its methodology in this study seems fairly sound. And its findings don't support the popular belief that American soldiers are disproportionately poor and ill-educated and only joined because they had no alternatives.
Anecdotally, I've found this to be true for all of the American soldiers I have met and spoken to about their backgrounds and their reasons for enlisting.
The US and Canada don't have troops on their streets recently shooting at their own population (or at least that sector that believe in transubstantiation)
On Public Radio this morning there was a story about a college student in Wisconsin who was mugged at gunpoint early this morning. When the muggers took his wallet, they noticed he had an Army Reserve ID card. They apologized, gave him his wallet (intact) back and took off.
Strange, but it does illustrate how many of us respect those who serve.
At the risk of being moderated straight in to the pits of hell, Raganwald, why did you decide to post this here ?
Much as I can sympathize with the material it feels to me like it is decidedly not hacker news, and even though it scored an astronomical number of votes I still feel that way and can't seem to find a reason why this should be here at all.
The problem I have with it is if this is so much in vogue that opens the door to lots of people whose posts got killed (past and future both) to point here and say, look: this is hacker news.
I flagged it pretty much when you posted it and am quite surprised to see it still up, I do sympathize with the sentiment of your post, I just can't make the connection with HN.
To me the entire Hacker Ethos, Culture, and quite possibly the majority of its inhabitants are here today for the same reasons I am here today. Try to imagine an alternate history where the Fascists controlled Europe. Look around. Do you see you colleagues and customers? Would there be a Silicon Valley? What would America be like?
The question of fighting for true freedom and equality is deeply connected with the motivations behind startups and hacking in my brain.
That's why I posted it here but not on reddit.
update: In the USA it is Veteran's Day, not Remembrance Day. So there has been quite a bit of discussion here about thanking living veterans and veterans of all wars, some of which are controversial. But my post thanked an unnamed soldier who died in a conflict where we were fighting for human justice. I had WWII in my mind when I wrote it very specifically.
Even if you disagree whether it belongs on HN, I hope you now understand why I thought the question of what our world would be like had Fascism prevailed and who would or wouldn't be here and who would or wouldn't fraternize with each other would be "Of interest to Hackers."
I won't down vote you for that, I have no problem with questioning the political reasons why wars are waged. But that doesn't stop me also honouring the men and women who fight in them. To me these things are quite distinct.
So, I might think that Britain's involvement in Iraq was a mistake and should not have happened, but I would shake the hand of any British serviceman who served there and thank them for doing so.
I think some don't realize that they should separate the soldiers who fight the wars from those who make the policy and decisions about where and when and what to fight.
Our service men and women are committed to fighting to better our country and the world. They trust their superiors to make the right decisions. You can disagree with the bad decisions of those superiors, but the service men and women will be there fighting regardless of whether it was right or wrong because the cost of missing the right call is too high.
You can disagree with the bad decisions of those superiors, but the service men and women will be there fighting regardless of whether it was right or wrong
Apologies for invoking Godwin's Law, but this is quite precisely where the analogy is applicable.
From The Twilight Zone episode "Death's Head Revisited":
"They just heard you offer the apology for all the monsters of our time . We did as we were told, we functioned as ordered, we merely carried out directives from our superiors. Familiar, is it, Captain? It was the Nazi theme music at Nuremburg. The new lyrics to the Gotterdammerung. The plaintive litany of the master race as it laid dying.
We did not do, others did, or someone else did it.
We never even knew it was being done or
We did it, but others told us to."
> service men and women will be there fighting regardless of whether it was right or wrong because the cost of missing the right call is too high
Thank you, this is the first time I've seen it argued the people enlisting realize and accept the country is likely to squander their time and risk their lives over nothing worthy of them. I could never reconcile their somehow overlooking that with the dedication they bring to the work.
As if the cost of carrying out the wrong call isn't too high either?
The worst case isn't that soldiers' time is squandered or that they risk their lives over nothing worthy, it's that they kill and destroy needlessly, but I guess we don't really tend to come to terms with that fact as well as the people we're fighting.
The politicians only exist because of the troops. The republican party isn't going to launch an attack against you themselves just because you didn't follow the rules.
I'm rather the other way around; I've never really understood why some people see them as being meaningfully distinct.
For example: would we make the same distinction between the bureaucrats and policymakers in China, and the programmers who make the Great Firewall actually work? From my perspective, the person who actually carries out the action, not the one who tells them to, is the one who is responsible for it, good or bad. We don't praise politicians when a firefighter does their job; why should we blame the politicians when a soldier does theirs?
Not that I pretend to understand any of it, mind you. God knows I have no bloody clue what it's like to be in a war, so perhaps I'm entirely off-base.
Unfortunately a lot of people can't afford to be picky about how they earn a living. I bet a lot of people on HN have stories about working for sleazy companies and having to do things they didn't believe in. People enlist in the military for many different reasons. I've never heard anyone say they joined because they enjoy killing people.
Apologies if I came across as being judgemental about it - I'm not, really. My personality doesn't suit the military, and I'm lucky enough to be able to find employment elsewhere, but obviously there are people for whom one or both of those is not true. Fair enough.
(As an aside, I'm not going to comment on the moral legitimacy or lack thereof of soldiers, wars, etc., because in this context it's more a matter of personal moral beliefs than anything else.)
What bothers me is the notion that people are not responsible for their own actions.
Milgram's experiment, provided it is correct, demonstrates that people like to pretend they are not responsible for their own actions. This result is orthogonal to the question of who is responsible (not who we want to think is responsible) for the action.
Edit: We are, of course, assuming the existence of some objective notion of "responsibility" here, which is a point that could be debated. That said, I think I'm going off topic now, so I'll be quiet.
I have never followed that logic. If a mob boss orders a henchman to kill a rival, who should be prosecuted for murder? I would feel that it should be both. I cannot see how it should be the mob boss and not the henchman. I also struggle to see how the henchman should be honored.
Periodic hit on it when they said "the service men and women will be there fighting regardless of whether it was right or wrong because the cost of missing the right call is too high."
I believe those who hold that logic, myself included, have different expectations of the responsibilities of the soldier and the henchman. The soldier is in a strict hierarchical organization that demands its members follow orders for the organization to continue operating. Members lower in the organization are expected to begin working before they understand why, so they aren't held responsible for everything they do. The henchman may also be a part of an organization like that, but he is just another citizen, working for his organization and own betterment, and is expected to be responsible for his actions. Also, he can hardly say that his organization is working on behalf of his entire nation, as the soldier can.
edit: I should add, that this perspective does eventually reach a breaking point as time passes servicemen begin to see what the goals of their leaders are, and if they disagree with them then they may be obligated, morally or otherwise, to excuse themselves or switch sides.
Looking back at your comment I see that you're speaking of henchman and mob bosses only, but as a proxy for state leaders and the military. But my point is that people don't see them the same.
I agree that fighting an invading enemy, on your own soil, as was the case for many willing and unwilling soldiers of WWI and WWII, was the right thing to do. I also appreciate that the armed forces must have a strict hierarchy that follows orders in order for the organization to function effectively.
I am worried though, that when an enemy is not so clear and obvious, this line of reasoning can be used by unscrupulous leaders to further their own goals. When the threat the "enemy" poses is so vague and unclear, as is the case for the conflicts that we (the US; I am an American and can only speak for the US), have been involved with since WWII, it becomes harder to swallow that all of the deaths our soldiers cause are anything but murder and volunteering to be placed in such a position is anything but honorable. Thus, the analogy of a mob boss and a thug.
The henchman should be honored, because without the honor, there would be no reason for the henchman to kill - the personal risk is too great, and the personal reward too little. But the mob as a whole clearly benefits from killing rivals, so by introducing honor (which, for someone without it, is worth a lot), everyone can expect a positive payout (except for the rival).
I think you'd probably object to my ignoring the totality of the situation - a murder has been committed. But what's the harm in murder as long as it's happening external to "our civilization"?
Pacifism works if everyone in the world is a pacifist. Barring that, there always exists the possibility of a situation where you will have the blood of many on your hands by refusing to take action against a single person.
That doesn't really make sense. The only reason Britains involvement in Iraq was possible is because there were a bunch of servicemen ready to go out and murder for the man.
What exactly are you thanking the serviceman for if not for carrying out acts you oppose? And how are we ever going to stop politicians from starting some pretty horrendous wars if we can only thank the armies who's job is to carry out their orders, no matter how awful.
While, say, the outright cruel attacks by some anti-Vietnam protestors to returning vets was unhelpful, I don't see why I should celebrate people who are fighting wars of conquest for the sake of oil. I don't think they're bad people, and understand that they probably imagine they are fighting to protect our freedom, but I think, if anything, I do them a disservice by honoring their violent actions, however well-intentioned they may be.
I'll upvote you for sincerity, and I have thought about my message for a long time. I encourage everyone else to think about what it really means to go to engage in war and when you should or shouldn't do so.
My situation may be different from yours. Perhaps I am being too selfish: I sincerely believe I would not be here today had the Canadians sat out WWI and WWII. I sincerely believe that almost everything I love about Hacking and Hacker Culture would not exist in Canada and the USA had Fascists dominated Europe. If I make a list of people in this industry that I admire, I keep coming up with ethnicities and gender preferences that would have been oppressed and/or exterminated.
My message is somewhat overwrought and emotional, but I'm very clear on how I am the recipient of the greatest gift of all.
World War I and World War II are wars that were not sought by many of the parties involved, and I think they deserve special consideration.
Most of the other wars that have produced countless veterans were wars of aggression though.
I know two vietnam vets personally (I don't have that much exposure to the US other than online and from when I lived 'nearby'), and neither of them is at all proud of what happened and sincerely despise politicians and everything associated with that era. They didn't have much choice about being there though, and at the time they thought it was a good thing.
The lesson I guess is that you should not let stuff like this blind you, and you should always be on guard that you do not become someone elses tool.
War is evil and ought not to be entered into lightly. It is somewhat boring to make that observation because everybody agrees with it. Yet looking at history forces me to conclude that we would not have been able to build our civilization without engaging in this evil a few times. And I think our civilization is one worth celebrating - certainly it has made a dent in many of the other evils that have plagued mankind since the first ape dared to walk upright.
Moreover, it takes courage to enter into the armed forces and be one of the people who sacrifices their personal goals to protect our civilization. So we have a holiday set aside for those people.
I don't think the wars in Vietnam or Iraq were very wise, either. But it seems out of place and immature to sound that drumbeat on this holiday, like an atheist who feels compelled to demonstrate outside of churches on Christmas.
Our civilization is one worth celebrating because we have engaged in progressively less war. This, not our use of one evil to flail against another evil, is the cause of our success. If you haven't read Steven Pinker's essay A History of Violence (or seen the related TED talk at http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...), I would recommend taking a look.
I would be careful about taking Pinker's argument too uncritically. It relies on a very particular selection of secondary academic sources, such as Keely's "War Before Civilization." But Keely's book, while a reasonable response to the "myth of the peaceful savage", has been criticized for creating a "myth of the warlike savage".
> it takes courage to enter into the armed forces and be one of the people who sacrifices their personal goals to protect our civilization
Remembrance day commemorates WWI.
Soldiers who had the courage NOT to enter the forces in WWI
were shot.
The aim of WWI was not to protect civilisation, it was a disagreement over the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires' role in the Balkans.It got somewhat out of hand because the various armies had not noticed that technology had moved on a little since the battle of Waterloo.
Sorry, I'm in America where it is Veterans Day. My comments are not applicable for countries where the holiday is treated as a memorial to World War I.
War is often a necessary evil. Yes there are the cliched arguments that all wars are about resources,etc, but I believe that war arises sometimes because there is a genuine need to defend [oneself,family,civilization] from harm from evil people (or, more PC and nihilistic, from people that would take it away). Life is about living, not dying. But sometimes we have to fight and kill, in order to live.
I don't know what to say... this is a very emotive subject on both sides and I have conflicting forces pulling me in both directions. But for something that is stunning beyond compare, is the equal of any and all great things ever said, I can recommend few things with more passion than Charlie Chaplin's Great Dictator[0]. It's a film that sums up the genius of the man, and the power of film. But, more importantly, it speaks of the nobility of the human heart... I'll let him say it better than I could ever hope to. He apparently regretted making the film as it was made before he was aware of the full horror and attrocity of the concentration camps... but it's a beautiful and timeless piece of cinematography that inspires me.
I appreciate the thoughtful responses, especially from raganwald (my original comment was directed primarily at this discussion thread rather than his post).
The common thread in your responses seems to be that politicians, not soldiers, are responsible for wars. My response to this idea is that one must not conflate "dying for freedom" with "killing for freedom". We should certainly oppose the enemies of liberty, but not by glorifying violence. It has always been, and will forever be, possible to oppose something without killing your fellow human beings. For this to succeed, however, you must have the courage to enter the fray with your arms at your sides.
What I think is most telling about that is McNamara's response to Morrison; rather than attempting to paint all dissent as traitorous, or to claim (as would surely be claimed now) that Morrison 'hates the troops', McNamara accepts the moral responsibility for the killing being done and attempts to come to terms with it.
I think a day like today has as much room for Norman Morrison as it does for the soldiers currently suffering and dying on our behalf. I'll remember both, if I can.
I agree with you that there are wars I wish we had not fought. But at the same time, far more fought and died in wars where I believe our cause was just.
This was pretty fascinating to an outsider. When I read the blog, it didn't make any sense and seemed to be missing some crucial background to make the pieces fit. But it still got voted, by a big margin, to the top... It wasn't until I looked at the comments here that I understood what it was all about. I had no idea that this was such a big deal in the US, and that even techies are so engaged in the celebration (it's my impression that most techies don't tend to be overly flag waving in every day life).
Over here in Sweden we don't have a similar holiday, which is probably connected to the fact that the veterans from our last war died well over a hundred years ago (not counting UN peace keeping operations).
Thank you, my father's brother, George Weissman, KIA, and my mother's brother, Max Marcus, KIA, and to all the cousins who never were. They made the ultimate sacrifice so that we could have a better life. Let's not let them down.
War remains an ugly part of life. As it becomes increasingly remote for the majority of the West's inhabitants it is especially important to honour those who have sacrificed and those who continue to make sacrifices on our behalf.
Although on a positive note we are becoming more and more peaceful as a global society! That the wars of the past seem remote and detached is, in one way, a good reflection on modern times.
"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."
Says the man who lent his good name to the Manhattan Project. I saw a pretty detailed documentary about this, explaining how he was eventually persuaded that the dangers of Hitler getting the bomb first outweighed his initial reticence to promote the project. If Einstein had not signed the letter sent to FDR suggesting development of this weapon, FDR probably would not have taken it seriously, and the bombs would not have been available to drop on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at least at that point in time.
I wonder if this quote came before or after the Manhattan Project.
Looks like before, in 1931. He follows with "My opinion of the human race is high enough that I believe this bogey would have disappeared long ago, had the sound sense of the peoples not been systematically corrupted by commercial and political interests acting through the schools and the Press" ... Why would there ever be peace when we celebrate war and warriors, on the highest pedestals?
The wars that are generally found on pedestals are not wars of revenge, but of defence.
Non-violence works best when you are a large majority against a small, civil minority, which was the case in India, as well as for the civil right movements Ghandi inspired. Ask Chamberlain how well it worked against a large, angry, un-civil nation.
It's all too common that scientists, and engineers in particular, consider society to be a machine that can be tinkered with, oiled, something that, through progress, can be made to run better.
As well articulated Einstein's observation is, it is hopelessly naïve, as well as ironic, considering his membership of a group that owes it's very existence today to large-scale heroism at command and killing under the cloak of war.
Einstein was a great physicist. But try this test: if you saw this posted, without attribution, as a comment on Reddit about an article on Veterans' Day, would it seem out of place? (Except for the Edwardian idiom, obviously.)
As a vet I ask that if you want to thank a vet you do so by fulfilling your duties as a citizen and demanding our leaders get the troops out of these meaningless wars at once. Thank yous and letters of appreciation and "Veterans Day" are a slap in the face to people who choose to risk their lives with the belief that it will only be done in the most dire and extraordinary of circumstances.
I enlisted a year before 9/11 so I am just speculating here but I chose to enlist because I was done with HS and had very few prospects for a job and I knew I would just flunk out of college. So I chose the military as something to do to see the world and learn some skills that would help me in the future. The patriotism/ protecting my family/ country was a distant second.
So my theory is that kids that enlist are in the same boat as I was. They have just completed 12 years of statist indoctrination, watched all the movies celebrating war, are praised by friends and family for the idea of enlisting, and have few job prospects (especially with today's economy).
It's not 'peace' that you are paying for (with bloodshed and violence), it's interests of giga-million(?) corporations which might coincide with yours e.g. cheap oil/resources.
Everything else is propaganda and lies you've been telling yourself so you can sleep at night.
Stupid question: are the Germans allowed to commemorate their dead as well? or did we take both victory and moral upper-hand in this, giving the pesky deutsche-dudes full freedom to improve their lives and work for a better future, instead of living a life of militaristic nostalgia.
My girlfriend is German-Canadian (her grandfather immigrated to Canada after the war), and this topic always comes up around this time of year. Basically we think this:
Remembrance day is about honouring the terrible sacrifice of soldiers, and reminding ourselves of the horror of wide-spread warfare. All soldiers, regardless of their allegiance, were compelled to fight by forces out of their control, and driven by political motivations they had no hand in. Therefore I honour the Germans as easily as I honour and remember my own grandfather who fought in Italy.
I think your comment was more directed at Germany as a country, but I thought I'd throw in my two cents.
> Stupid question: are the Germans allowed to commemorate their dead as well?
Who would have the authority to forbid it? Naturally, they don't do it on the 11th of November, they have [Volkstrauertag](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkstrauertag) (the "national day of mourning") which takes place "two sundays before the first of Advent", which yields the Sunday nearest to the 16th of November (can be any time from the 13th to the 19th, this year it'll be on the 15th).
The 11th is actually the starting date of the German Carnival.
I don't think there is much carnival activity yet, the 11th is just chosen out of silliness (11/11 at at 11:11 am). I don't even think it is an official thing. Most carnival action is in february afaik.
That is indeed a stupid question. If you're just asking it anyhow for info, ok. If you're trying to imply something nasty, you've picked a horrible example. The Germans, without our prompting at all, have very... mixed feeling about their involvement in WWII, and in particular the atrocities so many of them were complicit in committing. There are very few groups of people who A: lost a major war but lived to tell the tale as a group B: in which they committed one of the most notorious ethnic cleansings in human history (note I said "notorious", not "largest", though it was up there in size) and C: which the populace has enough conscience to regret the results. I think they are far more ambivalent about the whole thing as a result of those factors than they might otherwise be, and that has little or nothing to do with the attitudes or compulsions of the victors; it comes from within.
(Further edit: It is, in some sense, a credit to them. I had to include C because there are many examples in history of ethnic cleansings conducted with no evident regret, before, during, or after. The Germans may be disturbed by their history, but anyone who has taken the time to learn how it happened must also come away disturbed, as it is so easy to see it happening in other places as well, even right where you live, and stopping it is easier said than done.)
Dont forget the war ended for them that day too: whether a winner or loser in the war we are all winners in the long term (i.e. our ancestors survived!) - that is worth celebrating and remembering those less lucky. :)
So, yeh, they do commemorate but not today.
(although it must be said that whilst sombre remembrance is an excellent thing a carnival is, in my eyes, no less of a celebration; being of the belief that the best way to honor the dead is celebrate/appreciate life :))
Of course they are, this day is not a celebration of victory, it's a sombre reflection on the costs of war and an opportunity to honour and thank veterans of past wars for their service on behalf of our respective countries. It is for example not uncommon for Allied and German veterans of WWII, once enemies, to unite for Remembrance Day services throughout the British Commonwealth.
Whether there are public tributes to soldiers in modern Germany is obviously a different issue, given that country's understandable ambivalence to its soldiers who fought in WWII, but that does not take away from the fact that, in the West, the events marking today are neither triumphant nor overly militaristic. In fact, today's events were started as a commemoration of the end of WWI, a war which had shaken the world to its core with its till-then unprecedented horror, brutality and human toll.
There is a Russian song from the 80's called "The Black Tulip" - the helicopters that transported the fallen Soviet soldiers out of Afghanistan were called that. By the time the singer got to the verse about Kandahar, most people already had tears on their eyes.
Every time I turn on the news and hear about Kandahar and Jalalabad I remember this song, written almost thirty years ago. What in the hell is wrong with humanity? Do we really need to go through this all over again?
Thanks to all those who serve so that we can go to sleep without fear every night and wake up peacefully every morning!
Very well said. But please remember that today is VETERANS DAY, the day we honor the Veterans. Memorial Day is the day we honor the dead.
I personally know a guy who had half his face blown off in Iraq. He also just spend 10 months looking for a new job. All during that time he maintained his good spirits and generosity. He is a role model to his adopted kids (one of which is in ROTC) and his community.
I thank him and everyone like him for their service, sacrifice and the example they set for others.
OP is Canadian, where Remembrance Day is observed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_Day). We honour all those who have sacrificed for their country, including veterans and those killed in service.
I, too, have been saying this for several years now. I think it's worthwhile to remember what we fight for (peace) and why we thank our veterans for doing it; WWI didn't turn out to be the war to end all wars, but maybe that day will still come.
(Beats spending the day grumbling about how I am still opposed to the US being in Iraq, at least.)
nationalism is a disease. using people's pride in arbitrary lines is just another in a long list of ways those in power get dumb kids to kill and be killed for their power games.
Isn't Raganwald in Toronto? In Canada, it's celebrated as Remeberance Day. I grew up in Toronto, and I've been living in the U.S. for 16 years or so. It has a slightly different flavour in Canada, at least while I was growing up. It was more about remembering the horrors of war. The great sacrifices that Veterans have made were part of that, an important part, but not the whole thing.
I'm a Canadian as well, and I didn't realize there was a difference in how Canadians and Americans commemorate this day. Would someone mind explaining the difference?
Not the silly over the top devotion some people exhibit (I actually dislike that) but the silent respect and appreciation exhibited (like, for example signs announcing uniformed service men get into XYX free/cheap or the way uniformed people were generally treated or the seriousness devoted to days like today)
If there is one thing I could bring back here to the UK and instill it would be that.