Recently I wrote a post on Facebook
asking the question “Got War?” with the following text.
...“When one man dies, it’s a tragedy. When thousands die, it’s statistics.” - Joseph Stalin
Image from The Nuremberg Pharma Tribunal where the Nazis manufactured the Zyklon B gas used to commit genocide against millions of European Jews in the Holocaust....
Facebook blocked the image and told
Facebookers they could choose to look at the image but it was
graphic. Which it most certainly was/is. In a sense this illustrates
my intent perfectly. (See attached image.)
Most American have no idea what war
means. Veterans and certain refugees do. The images are burned into
the PTSD soaked minds along with the sounds of guns, planes,
exploding bombs and screams of terror.
I wish for people to think about and
consider what war means. Who suffers in these wars? Ask someone from
Iraq, Syria or Yemen.
No one remains who remembers WW1 or
WW2. We can get a sense of it in War Poetry from Homer's Iliad
to victims and soldiers of the day. Seems so crass to use the beauty
of the language of poetry to describe the pain and gore of war.
Cathartic for the composers and instructive for the rest of us.
At this moment John “Bom'em”
Bolton, Mike Pompeo and President Trump are rattling swords (or
penises??) at Tehran. (Bolton and Dick Cheney are fighting their
erections). Analysts tell us that if you thought the war in Iraq
was/is horrific, a war with Iran will knock your socks off. Will
Israel strike Iran with its (undeclared) nuclear weapons?
How many U.S. Allies will join the
fight and how many of Iran's will? How many of you “love
the smell of napalm in the morning”?
From
the Smithsonian:
The
Horrors Of War -Gettysburg
Confederate
soldier killed by a shell at the battle of Gettysburg, July 3, 1863.
Caroline
Hancock was 23 when she served as a nurse after the Battle of
Gettysburg, in 1863. She found the smell of the decaying bodies so
strong that “she viewed it as an oppressive, malignant force,
capable of killing the wounded men who were forced to lie amid the
corpses until the medical corps could reach them.” A sickening,
overpowering, awful stench announced the presence of the unburied
dead upon which the July sun was mercilessly shining and at every
step the air grew heavier and fouler until it seemed to possess a
palpable horrible density that could be seen and felt and cut with a
knife …
“The
soldier above all others prays for peace, for it is the soldier who
must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.” -
Douglas MacArthur
Work for Peace – End Wars
