What Veteran's Day means to me on the 100th anniversary of WWI.

[Doktor Howl]

100 years ago, we looked over at Europe descending into madness, and we thought to ourselves, "That looks like a GREAT idea".  So, within 2 years, we were filling up trenches in Europe with dead kids right alongside all the Europeans.  We generated Mud, which is a hostile deity of some sort, as anyone who's ever had to march in it knows, and we fed the REAL winners of the war (corpse-eating rats) with some high-quality cuts of gassed and exploded bodies.

We weren't the first idiots to do this.  You can go all the way back to the Hittites and see the exact same thing.

The Greeks, though, were the ones that did it with style.  They had HEROES, giants that we remember by name, long after we've forgotten who they fought and why.  Of course, being a "hero" involved some WEIRD SHIT, like fucking your own mother, putting out your own eyes, and dying miserably in exile.  So the Romans didn't go for that as much.  We remember their generals, to a degree, but only the ones that wrote books.

In more modern times, you had some "front cover heroes" like Sergeant York and Audie Murphy, but even thought they had balls like brass cantalopes, hardly anyone remembers what they DID, and to WHOM.  I guess they skipped the "fucking your own mom" part of the equation.

So what you have is masses of young men, nameless & faceless except to their families and their squads, helping build giant stacks of bones (their own and other people) which is somehow tied to "freedom", despite the fact that all but one of our wars as Americans (the War of 1812) was fought in other lands, and almost always in the interests of beating up brown people and taking their shit, as well as insuring that the rich get richer while the middle class gets poorer and the working class goes into outright destitution.

So, to recap:  Mud, corpse eating rats, stacks of bones, no heroes, and people all torqued up with war fever while the real principals lick their lips and chuckle.

And that's what Veteran's Day celebrates. 

You're welcome.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

That gave me a bit of a shiver

[LMNO]

Are you gonna post that to FB groups and ruin their day?

[Doktor Howl]

Are you gonna post that to FB groups and ruin their day?

Already on it.

[Doktor Howl]

I am so far:

A traitor
A hippie
A Godless liberal
A communist
A supporter of the Caliphate (wtf?)
A disgrace to my former uniform
And thrown out of the Hamilton branch of the family, as if THAT hasn't happened before.  Because Canadians hate un-American shit.

[Doktor Howl]

No comments on my page yet, though.

[LMNO]

Wow, that was fast.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

 

[Doktor Howl]

I am now also:

A bitter liberal
A libertarian ( )
Ungrateful
Unaware that soldiers are all that is keeping the hordes of MOOSLIMS from overrunning the country.
TOO YOUNG TO KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT.

[Cain]

Yup, we've had much the same thing over here, with much the same results.

It's amazing how so many people can watch politicians draping themselves in the corpses of dead and mutiliated soldiers to justify their current wars and shore up their flagging popularity and not spit blood.

I mean, did no-one actually pay attention to what the soldiers of WWI thought about the war?  Apparently not, going by our current track record.

[Doktor Howl]

Yup, we've had much the same thing over here, with much the same results.

It's amazing how so many people can watch politicians draping themselves in the corpses of dead and mutiliated soldiers to justify their current wars and shore up their flagging popularity and not spit blood.

I mean, did no-one actually pay attention to what the soldiers of WWI thought about the war?  Apparently not, going by our current track record.

Nope.  While they were still alive, the government would gag them with food at Armistice Day celebrations, then holler jingoism through the mic.

[Cain]

Rudyard Kipling put it quite eloquently (as one would expect):

I could not dig: I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?

[LMNO]

Rudyard Kipling put it quite eloquently (as one would expect):

I could not dig: I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?

Oh, that's good.

[Doktor Howl]

Rudyard Kipling put it quite eloquently (as one would expect):

I could not dig: I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?

Oh, that's good.

Almost all of his stuff was.  "Cleared" could have been written about the Bush administration.

[Doktor Howl]

UPDATE:

I have now been told by 38 people that either I never served, or that my service "doesn't count" because I am not to the right of Galtieri, do not belong to the Cult of the Dead Servicemember, and/or posted the above rant.

I know, IRL, some of the people who said this, and the funniest bit is they didn't do any time in the service.