Amazing to know that the First World War will have been 100 years ago next summer, next August. Strangely there has hardly been any mention in the press. I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
America is the nation with no memory.
We tend to live in the now the present. We have no notion of history, and rarely think of the future. How a nation like this came to be the last Super Power is a mystery.
Yet everybody still wants to come here.
Anyway the war that set a whole century on fire is about to have it's centenary. 1OO years,...amazing I must say again. I remember as a boy seeing veterans of that war marching in Memorial Parades.
They were given a place of honor at the front. Followed by ww2 vets, and the still young Korean vets. Vietnam was still in our future in the mid-1950's. We were still a sentimental old fashioned patriotic country then.
This before the 1960's blew everything to hell.
Mind you much 'needed' to be blown to Hell, but I miss the old America in some ways.
Stay tuned.
"Очень Плохой Перевод"
Удивление, чтобы знать, которым Первая Мировая война будет 100 лет назад. Странный там едва любое упоминание в прессе. Я предполагаю, что я не должен быть удивлен. Америка - нация без памяти. Мы имеем тенденцию жить в теперь настоящем. Мы не имеем никакого понятия истории, и редко мы думаем о будущем. Как нация и без того прибыла, чтобы быть последним супергосударством. Однако каждый все еще желает приблизиться. Во всяком случае военный то, которые поджигали о целое столетие, собирается иметь, это - столетие. 1OO годы... Я помню, как мальчик, видящий ветеранов той войны, продолжающейся Мемориальные Парады. Вьетнам был все еще в наше будущее. Мы были все еще сентиментальной патриотической страной тогда.
Vor 100 Jahren
Eine sehr schlechte Übersetzung
Im Erstaunen-Stellen, um zu wissen, dass der Erste Weltkrieg 100 Jahre haben wird. Seltsam hat es Erwähnung in der Presse kaum gegeben. Amerika ist die Nation ohne Gedächtnis. Wir neigen, in der Gegenwart jetzt zu leben. Wir haben keine Vorstellung der Geschichte, und denken selten an die Zukunft. Wie eine Nation wie das kam, um die letzte Supermacht zu sein, ist ein Mysterium. Und, dennoch, will jeder noch hier kommen. der Krieg, die ein ganzes Jahrhundert in Brand stecken, um ein Jahrhundert zu haben. Ich muss 100 Jahre ... im Erstaunen wieder sagen. Ich erinnere mich als ein Junge, die Veteran dieses Krieges in Gedächtnisparaden marschierten.
You forget that Amerika didn't get involved until it was almost over, a cynical move to allow you to sweep in and collect up lots of pieces of the old European empires.
ReplyDeleteYou're not really a superpower, when you murder innocent civilians by remote control, just a tawdry bully slipping back into irrelevance as the Chinese over take you.
As for everyone wanting to go to, that's no longer true either, and as the Hollywood myths fade will become even less so.
Sorry Uncle but this is how the civilised world sees you, the slide into ignominy started with the morally bankrupt Billybob, accelerated under the totally incompetent Dubya and hasn't had the slightest reversal under Brown Jebus.
Actually the slide into ignominy started with Reagan and his love interest the Iron Lady. Obama's just putting some of the finishing touches on what the Gipper started. As the industrial economies slide ever faster into the pit we've dug for for ourselves, I expect some quite nasty totalitarian tendencies to manifest themselves on both sides of the pond.
ReplyDeleteYou'll hear no defense of empire from me, nor of the uses to which it puts its war machine. Empires aren't nice - they're an extractive enterprise, inherently violent, involving as they do the despoliation of peripheral subject peoples and their resources by those at the imperial core. But they all fall in the end, even those on which the sun reputedly never sets. When they do, the results are liable to be painful for people in the imperial nation, and its core allies.
I hope everyone enjoys doing business with their new imperial overlords in Beijing. Don't expect too many price breaks on their shoddy goods - and be sure to check them for lead content; better keep a Geiger counter handy too.
Zaek
Fair point Zaek but Ronnie and the blessed Margeret did defeat the evil empire so he deserves some brownie points for that.
ReplyDeleteHe did start the move towards the "religious right" though, so a good kicking for that one.