remindmeofthe | (no subject)

So the great irony of today is that with classes having, of course, been cancelled in honor of Veterans' Day, guess which one of my classes is cancelled?

My World War One class, of course.

I've spent the semester reading literature about the Great War - autobiographical accounts, fictional accounts, poems . . . a lot of writing by a lot of veterans, some of whom went on to be fiercely pacifistic, and some of whom I'm not sure I can call veterans because they didn't make it to November 11, 1918. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Did you know that the armistice was signed sooner than that, but the fighting kept right on going and people kept right on dying because those in charge wanted Poetic Symbolism (and something that would be easy for schoolchildren to remember)?

Because of all that reading, I'm not feeling as solemnly sentimental as I'm supposed to feel. Mostly, I'm feeling angry. So I'd like to join in the posting of poems in remembrance, but the one I've chosen is a little different. It was written by Siegfried Sassoon, a British officer who fought memorably in the war even after his published declaration of his belief that it had turned into a war being waged for the wrong reasons. Sassoon lived through the war and went on to become an angry veteran and pacifist, and spent his life writing about it.

"At the Cenotaph"
Siegfried Sassoon

I saw the Prince of Darkness, with his Staff,
Standing bare-headed by the Cenotaph:
Unostentatious and respectful, there
He stood, and offered up the following prayer.
"Make them forget, O Lord, what this Memorial
Means; their discredited ideas revive;
Breed new belief that War is purgatorial
Proof of the pride and power of being alive;
Men's biologic urge to readjust
The Map of Europe, Lord of Hosts, increase;
Lift up their hearts in large destructive lust;
And crown their heads with blind vindictive Peace."
The Prince of Darkness to the Cenotaph
Bowed. As he walked away I heard him laugh.

Sassoon was right. Today is the anniversary of the end of the war to end wars, but now we use it to honor countless men and women from the many wars that happened anyway. For myself, I will honor them by being angry that they had to fight at all.

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We are very good at ignoring large chunks of our own history (particularly the embarrassing parts; no mention of Cromwell's abuse of the Irish, nothing about us having to go fetch kings from the Dutch because ours had got too crazy and indolent, nothing about the Glorious Revolution, nothing about shitting all over India) and hitting key points for study over and over - I think we "did" Rome/Greece, Tudors/Stuarts, Victorians, and WW1/2 about five times and left almost everything else. We'd not have covered the fucking Civil War had it not been for my school being nearby one of the last Cavalier strongholds.

GOD YES. I have quoted the shit out of the second two in various places; I feel I should warn you that they are literally amazing and that The Ghost Road will probably make you weep like your tear ducts are broken.

From what I recall of the American history classes I took, we spent about a thousand years on the Revolutionary War (focused on ourselves, of course, without much talk of the outside help we got - Eddie Izzard wasn't actually joking when he tweaked the American audience in Dress to Kill for not knowing who General Lafayette was), some moderate time on our Civil War, stuff about the industrial revolution, and then we ran out of time at around the turn of the century. I had to get to college to take a class that covered any of our history after like 1910.

I did take a high school class that spent like a month on the Holocaust. (I was sixteen. We watched Night and Fog. I am still scarred.) It was my English class, not history class, bizarrely enough. So that was like, the only exception to the general "nothing from the twentieth century" rule that seemed to govern all history-related teachings.

The Blitz, Dunkirk and the Holocaust are - or were - covered in primary school here. Not in detail, necessarily, because I don't think we needed to be that freaked out, but the whole spiel about concentration camps and That Bloody Poem were firmly embedded in our heads by the time we were 12. Having said that I knew literally nothing about US history until I met Americans. ;)

We are very good at ignoring large chunks of our own history

We had history textbooks which ~~suggested~~ ~~heavily implied~~ practically spelt out in glowing neon letters that the Gunpowder Plot was Almost Certainly A Total Frame-Up.

Ah, Catholic schooling...

Eh, I thought there was a certain amount of truth in that? At least that poor Guido was definitely the fall guy.

Oh, absolutely agreed that James and the authorities knew damn well what was brewing and (at the very least) had a hand in perpetuating it before orchestrating the big reveal. The book in question, though, all but said that Catesby & co. were innocently walking along in the park with nothing more on their minds than tickling furry kittens, before some complete stranger foisted several barrels of gunpowder on them, then ran away.

I appreciate that opinions differ as to the precise extent of the conspirators' involvement. I personally feel that the intent, planning, and a considerable portion of the execution was theirs.

(I'm a practising Catholic myself, so I'm not coming at this from a knee-jerk reaction of "bloody Papists". ;) )