Armistice Day

The guns fell silent right now in 1918.

Every establishment that is having a "Veteran's Day Sale" should be picketed. For reasons that I've written about in other years.

We seem, as a nation, to be on a rough cycle to have a really stupid and pointless war every fifty years or so. It would be nice if our leaders over the centuries were capable of some modest understanding of the long-term costs of war. The shattered families. The poisoned soil. The devastated economies. The echoes of all that reverberates for a very long time, long past the point that people read about the causes of a war, scratch their heads and wonder what were they thinking.*

Maybe the Great War would have happened anyway. The Slavs wanted to be free of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There would have been some other incident, sooner or later, that would have caused much butthurt to the Hapsburgers, who would have then attacked Serbia, thus drawing in everyone else into a continent-wide charnel house.**

It was still a stupid war and, based on the number of casualties and wrecked nations, it might have been the high-water mark for stupid wars.***
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* As far as I know, the VA is still paying one Civil War pension, almost 150 years after that war ended.
** Too bad alliances weren't written on the terms of "if you're attacked, we'll come to your aid, but if you start a war, it's on you."
*** So far.