At 11:00 on 11/11 remember that WWIII is no more needed than the first two.

by David Swanson, Let’s Try Democracy

At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis it was generally permissible in the United States to say you supported negotiations for peace and disarmament — I mean without declaring your hatred for China or liberals or black people. Had it not been so, we might not be here to talk about it.

But it was not so at the time of World War I. At that time, you could get locked in prison for peace talk. Had there been nuclear weapons at the time, we might not be here to talk about it.

People celebrate armistice day in a contemporaneous photo

It’s useful, after over a century of continuing to use war as the preferred means of ending war, to remember momentarily what The Great War was — that it was a whole new level of imbecilic horror, that it was a huge leap forward in the ability to kill, employed not only against — among others — “white” people, but also employed mostly from the ground — not yet from such a distance that those doing it could avoid seeing it.

Among the lovely biproducts of WWI (a deadly flu pandemic, the reborn KKK, prohibition, the European carving up of the Middle East for future wars, Nazism, the latest monstrous monument in 2022 in Washington DC) was the Armenian genocide, so labeled later because at the time of WWI a large portion of those killed in wars were still soldiers, whereas from WWII forward, with the majority of deaths usually being civilians, it was discovered that bad or genocidal killing could not be done from the air.

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