What We Owe the War Dead . . . "If death in war is only to be lamented, and its cause decried, then far from paying honor to the "victims" (i.e., dead soldiers), as our self-righteous lamenters claim to be doing, we are actually only absolving ourselves of the truest and ultimate honor we owe the dead, which, to paraphrase the most popular war poem from the age before the folk music leftists got at the topic, is to take the torch from their failing hands and hold it high – that is, to honor the fallen by honoring their cause and their sacrifice with similar, though perhaps never equal, moral seriousness.
"This does not mean we must support an unsound or wasteful political decision about a particular war of which we disapprove, merely because soldiers have died in that war. ("A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it," as Oscar Wilde wrote.) What it means is that men who died, even if unnecessarily, in the name of the general cause of defending the freedoms we enjoy – or rather the freedoms upon which our societies were founded, though we have largely forsaken them today – ought to serve as reminders of the true value of those freedoms, and also as inspiration to rededicate our own lives to preserving or revitalizing them." . . .
"On this Remembrance Day 99 years later, recall that some 750,000 British soldiers, marines, and sailors were killed in WWI; nearly 400,000 more in WWII.
"The most heralded British war poets, emerging in 1915, were not practitioners of armchair verse. They were officers, and men, at the front in the trenches. Over four years their tone changed from lofty patriotic apologetics, to stark portraits of everyday horrors, and instant death within arm’s reach.
. . .
"Who is Winston Churchill to this generation? An historical trifle, another dead white guy reeking of privilege, and toxic masculinity? Or instead will anyone remember Churchill as the last defender of the western canon, his singing Sunday service hymns with FDR in 1941 on the deck of HMS Prince of Wales at Placentia Bay, Newfoundland? Who will remember?
"If the generation born in this decade can somehow recall the exploits of their great-grandfathers, and the reasons why those exploits mattered, they may be willing to emulate those historical offerings of a holy gift, for a noble purpose. If not, submission will lead to subjugation, and slaughter. And no one will remember."
Armistice Day: Nation falls silent to remember war dead . . . "Among those remembering, 99-year-old Les Cherrington (pictured, right), of the Staffordshire Yeomanry Queen's Own Royal Regiment, who was the only survivor from his tank crew in the North African desert in 1943. "Mr Cherrington's Sherman tank was left a flaming wreck by a German field gun, but he managed to escape despite being badly burned and his left arm nearly severed by shrapnel." . . .
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