11/11

[kindkit]

I was stumped for something to say about Veterans Day/Remembrance Day/Armistice Day. It's strange, I spend a lot of my time learning about the world wars and normally I can hardly be made to shut up about them. But today brings me in mind of the dead, as it should, and in the face of so much death it's hard to say anything.

About 17 million people were killed in the First World War, a total that includes civilians, and also those soldiers who died in the influenza pandemic before the war ended. About 60 million people were killed in the Second World War, including the roughly 10 million murdered in the Holocaust.

With that on my mind, I went to Google to look up something unrelated and I was confronted by this graphic:



It's so fucking jolly and celebratory and I loathe it. Admittedly, the US separates Veterans' Day from Memorial Day, which happens at the end of May and is officially the day to honor wartime dead. But I hate the way this separation not only co-opts the anniversary of the end of WWI and wrenches it away from its inherent meaning, but also tries to separate war from its cost. Veterans' Day is a militaristic holiday in the US (much more so, in my impression, than Remembrance Day in the UK, even though Remembrance Day is more controversial). It tries to reframe war in the old, discredited terms that the First World War poets so ferociously rejected. Duty, honor, glory, and for God's sake don't ever question what the war is for.

Here's a more appropriate image Google might have gone for:



That's a small fraction of the 11,000 (mostly British) WWI graves at Tyne Cot cemetery in Belgium. And those 11,000 graves are only a small, small fraction of all the dead.

Comments

[lilacsigil]

Remembrance Day is still taken very seriously over here (it's a sombre occasion, even more so than ANZAC Day), especially in country towns, some of which lost their entire young male population.

Until recently was in the UK, too, though British friends tell me that nationalists (read: racists) are trying to hijack it.

[kindkit]

I think part of the reason the US is so ready to "celebrate" is because the wars we've fought in the last century and a half have affected us so little. Not only have we not had a war on our own soil since 1865, but we're come out of other wars relatively unscathed. Even in the Second World War, our losses were proportionately small. Wars seem "winnable" to so many US-ians because we've never had a generation of young men wiped out. Nor have we had our roads and cities destroyed or our farms filled with artillery shells and land mines.

nationalists (read: racists) are trying to hijack it

*sigh* I hate the world sometimes.

[lilliburlero]

I am glad I did not see that Google graphic.

[kindkit]

It looks like only people in the US saw it. The British page yesterday featured a poppy, which apparently has also caused controversy because some people complained it was too small!

[lilliburlero]

I've seen the British one now (I don't think there was anything for google.ie), and even I couldn't be offended by a poppy that looks like a poppy and not the stylized British Legion emblem. I don't want to support the British Legion, and I will never wear one of their poppies. I don't wear a white poppy either; out of an inchoate sense that I'm not exactly a pacifist and that the white poppy insufficiently represents my anger at the whole business of war.

(Edited for html fail)

[kindkit]

I'm not surprised that google.ie didn't have any Remembrance Day symbol, since the historical and political issues in Ireland would be even more complicated and painful than elsewhere. (Slightly related note: a book I'm reading about World War II criticizes Irish neutrality--which is fair--and says something to the effect of "it's true that there were historical tensions between Britain and Ireland, but . . ." I almost laughed, because historical tensions is such an understated way to describe colonialism, oppression, and a recent, bitter war.)

I'm glad poppy-wearing isn't a US practice, because I'd hate to have to decide what to do.

[heliophile]

Some good discussion here http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/11/11/who-deserves-honor/
A mixed bag of course, but some good points. Came to mind because they are also pissed off about that stupid jingoistic happy-clappy google-doodle, among other things!

(not sure if posting is working for me, plz xcuse if double-posted (or even triple. tried on lj, doesn't seem to work, Sorry!!!)

[kindkit]

Hmmm. I think the Pharyngula article bothers me from the other side: for one thing, the way it equates soldiers with gun-toting Texas right-wing thugs is, to put it mildly, unfair. The thing is, I'm not a pacifist. I think there are, on rare occasions, necessary wars, and the people in the comments arguing that pacifism could have stopped the Nazis make me want to either laugh hysterically or headdesk a lot.

These are, I think, tremendously complicated questions. What's the line between honoring the service of those who fought and honoring/justifying war itself? When should or must military force be used, and how can we tell? (The appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s used arguments that honorable opponents of war still use, ones that I've used myself, and that makes me profoundly uncomfortable.) I debate in my own head about things like the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, and the carpet-bombing of German cities. So I distrust easy or simple answers, and I distrust anyone else's confident certainty on these points, even if I'm inclined to agree with some aspects of their views.