Today is Remembrance Day in Canada, and Veterans Day in the United States…. This day marks the 95th anniversary of November 11th, 1918, when at 11am European time, the guns on the Western front went silent and the fighting of World War I officially came to a bitter end….It is not my place to vilify those brave individuals that gallantly fought for their nations in these conflicts…. Many believed in the cause and they had faith in their leadership and at the time went off to fight and die under the assumption that they were fighting for liberty, freedom, and justice….. But now that we have the means to finally realize the truths about our history, these conflicts are indeed looked at in a whole different light!I came across the following article, from a fellow Canadian blogger, Penny, who writes "Penny For Your Thoughts", at www.pennyforyourthoughts2.blogspot.ca, that puts this entire "Remembrance Day" under a whole different light…. It is entitled: "Poppycock - Why Remembrance Rituals Make Me See Red", and contains excerpts from an article written by Robert Fisk…. I have Penny's important article right here for my own readers to view for themselves, and of course my own thoughts and comments to follow:
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2013
Poppycock- Why rememberance rituals make me see red
Excerpts from Robert Fisk :
On the briefest of visits to London, I was appalled to notice that our television presenters and politicians and dignitaries have almost all resorted to stereotype by wearing those bloody poppies again – even though I suspect most of them would not know the difference between the Dardanelles and the Somme. How come this obscene fashion appendage – inspired by a pro-war poem, for God’s sake, which demands yet further human sacrifice – still adorns the jackets and blouses of the Great and the Good? Even Tony Blair dares to wear a poppy – he who lied us into a war, which killed more people than the Battle of Mons.
I know all the reasons they give us. We must remember our dead. “They” died for us and our freedom. The cost of sacrifice. Remember Passchendaele. Never forget. At school I used to wear a poppy – without the leaf which now prettifies this wretched flower – and so did my Dad who, as I often recall, was a soldier of that Great War, in the trenches of the Third Battle of the Somme, 1918, and at Cambrai. But then, as 2nd Lieutenant Bill Fisk grew older and became sick, he read the biographies of that most meretricious of officers, Earl Haig – butcher Haig of the Somme, whose wife gave her name to the original poppies – and came to regard the wearing of these sickly and fake petals as hypocrisy. He stopped wearing the poppy for 11 November, and so did I.
It appears I am not alone.
At Ypres four years ago, I was honoured to give the Armistice Day lecture just before 11 November; but I did not wear a poppy and politely declined to lay a wreath at the Menin Gate – that “sepulchre of crime” as Sassoon called it – and I discovered, as the clergy purred away beneath the names of the 54,896 Great War soldiers with no known grave, a headstone atop the city’s old medieval wall. Nothing could equal the words which his family had courageously inscribed above the final resting place of 2nd Lieutenant Arthur Conway Young, who died on 16 August, 1917: “Sacrifice to the fallacy that war can end.”
So is there not some better way to remember this monstrous crime against humanity? The pity of war, as Wilfred Owen described it, must, for individuals, have a finite end, a point when time – looking backwards – just runs out. British men and women – and children – who visit the Somme battlefields and their vast cemeteries, still cry, and I can understand why.Here lies indeed the flower of youth cut short, only just over a generation distant. But we do not cry when we visit Waterloo or Agincourt. At Flanders Fields, the tears still flow. But not at Flodden Field. Who even weeps for the dead of the Boer War? No poppies for them. Only when you move into religious ecstasy can the long dead touch our souls. Watch the Christians walking the Way of the Cross in Jerusalem, or the Iraqi Shia remembering in the oven-like heat of Najaf and Kerballa the martyrdom of Imams Ali and Hussain. The tears splash down their clothes.
Perhaps in war, it’s the names that count. Dead soldiers had no gravestones before the Great War, unless they were generals, admirals or emperors worthy of entombment in Saint Paul’s or Les Invalides. The soldiery were simply dumped into mass graves. At Waterloo, the remains of the dead were shipped off to England to be used as manure on the fields of Lincolnshire – sometimes tilled, no doubt, by their unsuspecting farmer sons. So much for our remembrance of the “thin red line”. No posthumous glory for them.
NO gravestones for the cannon fodder. Buried in mass graves or shipped back to England to be used as manure for the fields
Wyndam Lewis, the master of Vorticist art who became a soldier at Ypres, wrote of the Great War that it “went on far too long… It was too vast for its meaning, like a giant with the brain of a midge. Its epic proportions were grotesquely out of scale, seeing what it was fought to settle. It was far too indecisive. It settled nothing, as it meant nothing. Indeed, it was impossible to escape the feeling that it was not meant to settle anything – that could have any meaning, or be of any advantage, to the general run of men.”
Tolstoy caught the other side of this “non-meaning” of war in his critique of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. An “event took place”, he wrote in War and Peace, “opposed to human reason and human nature. Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes, frauds, treacheries, incendiarisms and murders, as in whole centuries are not recorded in the annals of all the law courts of the world, but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as being crimes.”
In Flanders Field. A poem I recall regurgitating as part of my state sponsored indoctrination. Oops sorry, my 'education'
For they are better, surely, than that terrible, almost orgiastic poem by the Toronto doctor John McCrae who died in 1915, and whose words inspired the armies of poppy-wearers. “In Flanders fields, the poppies blow/ Between the crosses, row on row...” McCrae begins – but then his dead soldiers exhort the living to “Take up our quarrel with the foe…/ If ye break faith with us who die/ We shall not sleep, though poppies grow/ In Flanders Fields.”The poppies were there to remind us of our duty to kill more human beings.
And what did I see on television a few hours before writing these words? Why, the mayor of Toronto – McCrea’s own city – admitting to the smoking of crack cocaine. “I sincerely, sincerely, sincerely apologise,” he burbled to us all. And what did I see in his jacket button hole? A bloody poppy!
Ahhhhh..... Rob Ford. Shakes head. So many issues. So little time. Remembrance Day suggests to me that society as a whole is insane. People wear poppies and pay lip service to previously implanted memes like "fighting for freedom" and "honour" Where is the honour in invading other peoples home lands, terrorizing them in multiple horrific manners while reassuring the brainwashed back home that this is being done to bring freedom and democracy to those being attacked, maimed, raped, pillaged and killed? The acceptance of this obviously discordant group think speaks to how very well perception management, mind control or brainwashing works. Not just on individuals but on entire societies. The continuing acceptance of this discordant group think, reinforced year after year in a ritualistic fashion, is what keeps the masses not thinking, not questioning, just shuffling blank faced along.
Brainwashing - The application of a concentrated means of persuasion, such as an advertising campaign or repeated suggestion, in order to develop a specific belief or motivation.
Stop shuffling along.Posted by Penny at 5:28 AM NTS Notes: I have long known the truth about the global wars, and the fact that they were definitely fought for all the wrong reasons… I could spend entire articles going into great detail of the true facts behind all the wars fought over the last few centuries, and how we fought on the WRONG SIDE and for all the WRONG REASONS in these conflicts…. I ask that readers take the time to research for themselves via the internet to find out some of the truths about our history…..It is also a fact that the ONLY winners from these conflicts were the Jews, and their criminal banking networks that have fleeced nations for centuries… It is a fact that by financing both sides in the major wars of the last century, they made out like bandits to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars… And have left us slaves to their Usury debt system ever since….People quickly forget that Germany was only finally able to pay off its World War I debt to these criminals very recently, and other nations will be still paying for World War II until at least the middle of this century, if not forever! Again, I am not here to dishonour those who fought for what they believe was the right thing to do… My job has always been to reveal the real truths about our history, and to make sure that everyone understands exactly who was behind the great conflicts, so as to make sure they are not able to get us to fight for their criminal goals again…. I have always said that if we do not learn the truths about our real history, then the crimes committed in the past will only be repeated again in the future!More to comeNTS