20 years ago, this blog observed the Pearl Harbor anniversary by noting the annual gathering of hundreds of survivors – and the time, men in their late 70s on up – and noted the jarring statistic that at that time, the generation of World War 2 veterans was passing on at a rate of about 300 per day. This blog observed the demise of the last known World War 1 veteran – a man who’d enlisted as an ambulance driver after lying about being 14 years old – probably 3-4 years after it started, half a generation ago. .
Today, perhaps a dozen doughty, well-nigh indestructible centenarians will have made the trip to Hawaii. Today, the death rate has slowed, if only because, according to VA statistics, about 98.5% of those who served have died.
And, unconscionably, much of the knowledge that the Greatest Generation had seems to be passing with them.
War is hell.
Some things are worth fighting for.
Mankind is not inherently good, but is in fact capable of horrors beyond human comprehension that are simultaneously utterly banal and commonplace.
Some things are worse than fighting – but not many.
Sometimes, you need to get past the things that divide us to survive and prevail.
I fear our nation – really, the whole of Western Civilization – has Santayana’d itself; forgotten its history, and thus condemned itself to repeat it.
UPDATE: I’m not going to say the Millennial and Z Generations don’t have people like this.
I’m saying the zeitgeist is not favorable for creating a lot of them.
If those men could have seen what this country would become, they’d have scuttled their own ships.
“Some things are worth fighting for.”
That’s true, but what’s worth fighting for in the USA?
Buttsex?
Child molestation?
Mutilation of children’s genitals?
Thoroughly corrupt government?
Thoroughly corrupt judicial system?
Thoroughly corrupt electoral system?
White genocide?
CIA and FBI black bag operators?
NSA spying?
Murderous 13% black population?
Female p3nis?
Male pregnancy?
Ukraine?
Israel?
What do you think is worth fighting for today, Patriots™? What cause would you encourage your sons to go fight and die for; serious question.
This is an excerpt from a “greatest generation” poem I wrote long ago, and have shared here before. It does line up with what you are saying in this post.
At reunions we’d regroup and note
the new gaps in the line;
death now a sniper as we fall one by one
and just as inevitably.
Does He see our faces in the scope
as He lines up the head shot,
or only the meat as he selects
heart, lungs, marrow?
Then we advanced because we had to,
we had to win,
we had to make our losses mean something.
We thought we had won, at the end,
but it was only the war and not the battle
and the lives were just a down-payment
on peace and breathing room
until the enemy returns
with installments paid in different ways
in the days and nights to come.
Sometimes in later years,
when I felt the moistness of my wife,
I would suddenly think of Steinie,
of pushing his guts back inside him
after he was burst by the 88.
Those were the nights, then,
when I would sit up at the kitchen table, smoking,
until you kids came in for breakfast,
keeping watch, remembering the faces,
wondering how many others might also be sitting up
that night, remembering the same faces.
I don’t wonder so much anymore.
Meanwhile, the fat sales director,
who sat out the war In England
in the Quartermaster corps, would say,
“Boys, we’ve got to take that hill” and
we would take that hill, fill that quota,
and make another payment on the Dream
because we had seen Evil and had our fill
and thought it was finished and that
the world had been reborn shiny and new.
Surely it had to have been,
given the cost;
surely evil had to have been driven away,
and we came back to build a new world
for you our children,
a world where you would never have to
face what we faced;
see what we saw,
do what we had done.
We were naive, of course,
but don’t blame us
for wanting it to be so.
Did we do wrong, my children?
Thinking no one would dare open that door again,
did we neglect to prepare you,
to give you valuable perspective?
You´ve seen the pictures,
And heard the words,
but you can´t know the smell
or the taste,
of walking into that concentration camp,
so your Hitlers are effigies and
Nazis are bogeymen,
mere cursing but not a curse.
I´m sorry, I´m sorry, I´m so sorry.
There’s much I would have you know,
things I should have said, and
lessons you’ll have to learn on your own.
I don’t know why I’ve lived so long
when so many died around me,
unless it’s because something of their
unused futures was somehow transferred to me
in the spray of their blood.
I’ve tried to use it well.
May you do the same.
Very good Night Writer. One of the benefits of being a conservative is knowing that nothing is ever truly lost, including faith.
I agree, MP. I have faith in the knowledge that we, or our children, can and will someday live in a country that is populated by people with common beliefs, morals, traditions, ethics, history and ancestry.
Blade, I listened to a podcast this past weekend about the corruption of the sciences. For years, from WW2 until the present, the linguists and anthropologists have been telling us that language and customs are of the mind, not the body. Language and customs were separate from ancestry.
Apparently now, with the new tool of genetic analysis of ancient remains, it is obvious that this is not true. The invasion of one nation by another, in prehistory, was not an invasion of language and custom, but an actual invasion of physical beings who eradicated and replaced the original inhabitants.
There is, these days, a disbelief in nationhood, that nations are a creation of early modern man (esp. Western European man) that no more defines a human condition than, say, a culture that has a tradition of slavery.
But this isn’t really true. The original idea of a nation was that a nation was a group of people sharing a common language that supported distinct cultural differences. IMHO, language is the key. A person with German as their only language thinks differently than a person with English as their only language. People who speak multiple languages translate languages into whatever their native language is.
History is an interesting thing, and the more you read of it, the more you can begin to understand some of what happened despite modern day filters.
For example, I always thought of the internment of Japanese-Americans as a racist act without merit or cause. That’s what we’re expected to believe, right? We’re so much more enlightened these days, aren’t we?
More recently, I read of the Niihau Incident, where a Japanese pilot had his plane damaged in the attack on Pearl Harbor and was forced to crash land on Niiahau, which the Japanese had designated as an unoccupied island for use in such cases. The island was occupied, the pilot captured after the residents found out about attack (he was treated as an honored visitor before they found out about the attack).
To cut it short, the pilot got the 3 Japanese Americans to help him try to escape and destroy his damaged plane. There’s much more to the incident that’s interesting, including bloodshed, capture, overcoming captors, midnight rowboats for help, but the point I want to make was that at the very start of the war, and with no previous anti-American expressions, the entire population of Japanese-Americans, including one native born American, switched their loyalty back to Japan instantly. And yes, this was known almost immediately back in Washington and included as part of the report on the attack of Pearl Harbor.
Strange that this story was a big deal at the time, yet nobody mentions it now. It kind of colors the interment decision in a different light, doesn’t it?
MP, you understand the difference between a country and nation perfectly.
I hope more of our people come to the same realization.
Blade;
My uncle served in Europe and was lucky enough to survive. He handled the mental aspects OK, too. Until the day he died 6 years ago, he lamented all of the good men that died for those countries that have now adopted Nazi and communist policies. In his words; “We should have let Hitler have the whole damn continent!”
Night, that was an excellent post. The message is clear. All of those men, who experienced the horrors of war, did the following generations a great disservice by not talking about them. As a Vietnam vet, I know that we are just as guilty, with those of us willing to talk, ridiculed and accused of not really having been there.
Finally, I wonder how many wars could have been avoided if there was a requirement for ANYONE running for federal elections, to have served at least four years in the military? Sadly, these low life jack weeds are “Fortunate Sons”.
ummp, would you agree this is how a country is built:
individual
couple
nuclear family
clan
tribe
nation
nation-state
And this is how its destroyed
nation a
nation-state
nation b
divided nation-state
civil war
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Bigman, you can’t really classify the reprobates as a “nation”. They’re a disparate pile of trash comprised of all races and ethnicities, banded together to assure their access to their own individual satisfactions. Whether it be degenerate sex, mooching, drugs, self loathing, death cults, ritualized mutilation or gibs, they all have needs that they want someone else to fulfill. The only thing they share in common are the strings the puppet masters twitch them around on.
They have no shared past, and no future.
I’d like 1 Patriot, just 1, to watch this Project Veritas video (just published today) and please tell me the sacrifice of our fathers, grandfathers and Great grandfathers was worth the cost.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvLVJaKN28k
And once again, is there anyone (not you rAT and Peevee; we know) out there willing to sacrifice their lives to protect it today?