Nov 11th 1918. The End of the Ist Great Imperialist War

Dulce et Decorum Est

Wilfred Owen, 1893 - 1918

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, 

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, 

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs 

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; 

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots 

Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind. 

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling, 

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; 

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime... 

Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.  

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

 He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. 

  

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
Tomorrow, November 11th will be the hundredth anniversary of the end of the first World War, or what I always knew as a young man as the Great War. My father spent the entire length of the Second World war in Japanese hands, first in Hong Kong, then working on the docks in Tokyo, I believe for Mitsubishi. He may have been lucky in this regard as had he been in the jungles of Burma or Thailand he may have not survived at all. 

I always remember when him and is old army buddies would drink together at events in Mill Hill or a local pub. My uncle George also had half his foot blown off by a land mine in Italy and often he was there. They were in the Middlesex Regiment. The Middlesex Regiment's nickname was the Die Hards as in a famous battle, the Battle of Albuhera, their commander's words to them were "Die Hard my men Die Hard" and  The term had earlier origins.

There was one of them who was a veteran from the Great War, I forget his name now. He had a wooden leg losing the other in battle and he held his liquor so well the others claimed to the young me that his leg was hollow and the beer went there. When they'd had a few there would be a little bit of friendly competition with the Great War veteran using that term "up to my neck in mud and bullets" as the first war was fought to a great degree in trenches with a no-man's land separating the combatants. There were many attempts at fraternization and a decent film about this is Joyeux Noel 

The 1914-18 war, 1917-18 in the US, cost some 18 million lives. I was to understand later in life it was an imperialist war, a war between the capitalist powers for domination of world markets and natural resources. It was the end of the domination of British colonialism on the world stage and the second imperialist war sealed that fate as the US took the baton although British colonialism's decline began much earlier. Two world wars sealed its fate. All empires end. After the Armistice, US and other western powers sent troops in to Russia to crush the world's first workers' state.

There were many poems written about the first Imperialist war, but the one above is one of the most famous and powerful. Soldiers wrote their experiences down and many of these have been found.    This is a beautiful poem by Wilfred Owen who died in that war. The term Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori, that Owen refers to as a lie, translates to: "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country" It is indeed a lie. Workers die for "their" ruling classes, the heads of competing nation states, battles we have no real material interests in. Workers have no country in that sense. The working class governs no nation state in the world today and only did for a brief period after taking power in Russia in 1917 until the rise of Stalinism. Workers do not declare wars, capitalists do, or did. Now they don't even bother to do that.

We should keep this in mind: workers as cannon fodder are also trained to kill. They are taught that the enemy is less than human or less human than them. Racism, religious hatred, these are some of the methods used to turn workers in one country against workers in another. We just saw this fearmongering on a major scale with Trump and the economic refugees from Central America. When we think of the marine who killed 12 people in the bar and the black marines who also shot a number of cops some years ago and other vets that have returned and killed their families and themselves, they are then demonized, criminals, mentally ill, they are supposed to kill the people they are told to. They must never make decisions for themselves. To kill for most human beings is a traumatic sickening thing but we are supposed to ignore what the state has done to them and accept that their behavior is just a mental health issue not connected to military training or the product of combat.

The Great War was supposed to be the "war to end all wars". But capitalism is a system of war, it is never ending war. No matter what its adherents say, they are driven to war by the laws of this system  and they will be driven to the next one. The US has been at war with other nations and peoples its entire history starting with Native Americans. It is only the unity of the working class internationally that can build an everlasting peace. With the existence of nuclear weapons, time is not on our side.