Armistice Day
“Dulce Et Decorum Est,” a poem by Wilfred Owen
“Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” is Latin for “Sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country (fatherland).”
Today is Armistice Day, the original name for the day the guns fell silent. This is a poem by Wilfred Owen, veteran of the Great War, the “war to end all wars,” both what it was called before we had a second.
It was the first industrial war, mass–produced mass murder, in which for the first time civilian casualties exceeded those of combatants.
Today’s wars are on trend, ignoring all of the international law that was put in place since then, and the United Nations, whose charter was to end the scourge of war for succeeding generations.
The new world order of Putin, Xi, and Trump is an old one, a nineteenth century one of great powers, brokering control amongst themselves. These arrangements were the ground of the Great War. Only now, we are digital. A silicon panopticon makes total our control, collapsing distance and making the people transparent, the rulers’ machinations more opaque. All this as the world burns from the carbon we began dumping in the atmosphere since the nineteenth century.
Have we not learned?
