Armistice Day

Tell the innocent visitor from another world that two people were killed at Sarajevo, and that the best that Europe could do about it was to kill eleven million more.
--A.A. Milne

One hundred one years ago tomorrow -- on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month -- the first World War came to an end.  The armistice had been agreed to six hours earlier, but by its terms, the killing continued until 11 a.m., Paris time.

Maybe there was a logistical necessity for the delay, but the idea of senior statesmen prolonging the fighting until an esthetically pleasing hour -- if that's what indeed happened -- seems a proper symbol for everything that caused and prolonged the war.

As we all know, now, World War I ended a particular form of European civilization, brought about a new barbarism, and paved the way to World War II twenty years later.  It was caused by a then-fashionable nationalism, where nations as entities were viewed as more important than the human beings who lived in those nations.  As Eric Maria Remarque wrote in his novel, All Quiet on the Western Front:

Tjaden reappears. He is still quite excited and again joins the conversation, wondering just how a war gets started.

"Mostly by one country badly offending another," answers Albert with a slight air of superiority.

Then Tjaden pretends to be obtuse. "A country? I don't follow. A mountain in Germany cannot offend a mountain in France. Or a river, or a wood, or a field of wheat." 

... "Then I haven't any business here at all ... I don't feel myself offended."

It all sounds so obvious.  And seemed so even when Remarque published his novel in 1929. And so after World War II, we vowed never to allow nationalism to overcome common sense, to allow national leaders to treat their nations as individuals who could be insulted, whose pride needed defending.  We helped set up NATO to unify by alliance the military forces of Europe, together with Canada and the USA.  And we encouraged the integration of Europe in the European Community.

Now we have a leader who, apparently, hates alliances, except insofar as an alliance is a facade behind which one nation (ours) can control the actions of others.  A man with no personal friends, only sycophants who come and go according to his whim, he finds friendships and alliances among nations incomprehensible.  He appears determined to return the world to 1914, with the United States perhaps standing in for the then dominant British Empire. 

Such a return to 1914 would be to court disaster.  But it won't happen.  The world, especially Europe, is a different place today, and globalization is too far advanced to be reversed by any one nation's president.  

And that president may have only one more year to work his "magic." 

And so, as we remember the end of World War I, let's renew the vows our fathers made in the past:  "Never again."