Remembrance Day
On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the First World War drew to a close. Fourteen million people, perhaps ten million soldiers and four million civilians died in that terrible conflict, a horrifying war which forever altered perceptions of armed conflict. Instead of a glorious campaign of a few months, millions of young men died, many literally drowning in mud in the hellish trenches, which only a few years before had been bucolic fields in Belgium and Northern France.
Yet, there is one thing about the First World War that almost seems quaint compared to modern conflicts. The great majority of its casualties were soldiers. In the Second World War, the dead would include two civilians for every soldier. And besides war itself, there are numerous twentieth-century and emerging twenty-first century examples of horrifying government brutality against its own civilians. Hitler killed over ten million in the Holocaust, about five million Jews and five million of a wide variety of other groups. Stalin butchered twenty million in the Soviet Union, through the gulags, shootings, purges and arguably by deliberately causing famine. The death toll of Mao's China will never probably be known for sure, but it could not have been less than twenty million, and possibly closer to forty.
We need a new holiday, not in the commercial sense of Christmas and Easter, but closer to its original meaning, 'holy day'. I don't mean this in a specifically religious way, but in a general sense as a day of quiet contemplation. And I want this to be a day of contemplation and realization that not only soldiers die in war, and that civilians are killed by their own governments even in peacetime. In other words, I want a commemoration of the tens of millions of civilians who have died in war, genocide and the various other state-created or aided calamities of the last century, and that threaten to spill over into this century.
I want an official holiday in which banks are closed and life does not go on as usual. To spend a good portion of that day reflecting on those people, so much like us, that were killed by enemy states, their own states or militias abetted by states. The motto amongst the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust was 'never again'. Sadly, it has happened again. Again and again.
And we need to have a day where we can think about this. The twentieth century was by far the bloodiest and cruellest in human history. I can only hope the twenty-first will not be even worse.
Yet, there is one thing about the First World War that almost seems quaint compared to modern conflicts. The great majority of its casualties were soldiers. In the Second World War, the dead would include two civilians for every soldier. And besides war itself, there are numerous twentieth-century and emerging twenty-first century examples of horrifying government brutality against its own civilians. Hitler killed over ten million in the Holocaust, about five million Jews and five million of a wide variety of other groups. Stalin butchered twenty million in the Soviet Union, through the gulags, shootings, purges and arguably by deliberately causing famine. The death toll of Mao's China will never probably be known for sure, but it could not have been less than twenty million, and possibly closer to forty.
We need a new holiday, not in the commercial sense of Christmas and Easter, but closer to its original meaning, 'holy day'. I don't mean this in a specifically religious way, but in a general sense as a day of quiet contemplation. And I want this to be a day of contemplation and realization that not only soldiers die in war, and that civilians are killed by their own governments even in peacetime. In other words, I want a commemoration of the tens of millions of civilians who have died in war, genocide and the various other state-created or aided calamities of the last century, and that threaten to spill over into this century.
I want an official holiday in which banks are closed and life does not go on as usual. To spend a good portion of that day reflecting on those people, so much like us, that were killed by enemy states, their own states or militias abetted by states. The motto amongst the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust was 'never again'. Sadly, it has happened again. Again and again.
And we need to have a day where we can think about this. The twentieth century was by far the bloodiest and cruellest in human history. I can only hope the twenty-first will not be even worse.