Six on WW I 100 years ago: haunted by our failure to grapple with the dark side of World War I; 1914: Into the Fire; Armistice Day remembered 100 years after peace was declared; Death of an Airman; nationalism as a ‘betrayal of patriotism’ in rebuke to Trump at WWI remembrance; 90-year-old guard opens the doors of Allied Cemetery
"In any case, American soldiers killed in war are always a matter of statistics. Individual human beings are missing in the
numbers. It is left to the poets and novelists to take us by the shoulders and shake us and ask us to look and listen. In World
War I, 10 million men died on the battlefield, but we needed John Dos Passos to confront us with what that meant: In his novel
1919, he writes of the death of John Doe:
“In the tarpaper morgue at Châlons-sur-Marne in
the reek of chloride of lime and the dead, they
picked out the pine box that held all that was left
of him.”
A few pages later, Dos Passos describes him:
“The blood ran into the ground, the brains
oozed out of the cracked skull and were licked up
by the trenchrats, the belly swelled and raised a
generation of bluebottle flies, and the incorruptible
skeleton, and the scraps of dried viscera and
skin bundled in khaki.” - Howard Zinn, "What War Looks Like" pdf attached
We’re still haunted by our failure to grapple with the dark side of World War I
"WWI fundamentally changed the United States. It expanded the size and power of the U.S. state, and honed its Anglo-centric nationalism. During the war, Wilson's administration had instituted price controls, established a government apparatus to finance the war, set up a bureaucracy to produce government propaganda and built the controls for centralized government surveillance and oversight. Wartime calls for loyalty underscored the goals of an expanding nationalist state, backed up by the repressive Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 criminalizing dissent.
Thousands were jailed and hundreds were deported. In a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, U.S. Department of Justice agents jailed prominent socialist Eugene Debs for speaking out against the draft. As one Oregon district judge so aptly put it, “All the government asked was that those who did not [support the war] keep quiet.”
| | Resistance, Dissent, and Punishment in WWI Oregon on JSTORIn his essay, Michael Helquist discusses the Espionage and Sedition acts enacted by Congress during World War On... |
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This war effort mandated a national identity that inspired some to turn a wary eye on “foreigners” and other malcontents in their midst. Private hyperpatriotic organizations rose at local and state levels; nationalist vigilante groups targeted German and Italian Americans, and other minority groups that could be branded as “radicals” or “disloyal.” Self-proclaimed followers of “Americanism” (also known as “100 percent Americanism” or “pure Americanism”) demanded that “hyphenated Americans” prove they were “Americans and nothing else.” They railed against the spectre of war refugees, strident antiwar activism and intellectual elites who fostered new ideas about cultural pluralism and the benefits of being an “immigrant nation."
| | World War I: Immigrants Make a Difference on the Front Lines and at Home...Post about immigrants' support of U.S. efforts in World War I. |
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|  | Perspective | We’re still haunted by our failure to grapple with the dar...Changes wrought by the war still shape America today |
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1914: Into the Fire
"Excerpted from Béla Zombory-Moldován’s recently discovered memoir of World War I, The Burning of the World, which will be published for the first time, in a translation by Peter Zombory-Moldován, by NYRB Classics in August.
Béla Zombory-Moldován (1885–1967) was born in Munkács (now Mukachevo), in what was then the Kingdom of Hungary, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, he established himself as a painter, illustrator, and graphic artist. Wounded in action in 1914 as a junior officer on the eastern front, he served the rest of the First World War in non-combatant duties. He was a successful painter, especially of portraits, during the interwar years, and was the principal of the Budapest School of Applied Arts from 1935 until his dismissal by the Communist regime in 1946. Out of official favor and artistic fashion in the postwar years, he devoted himself to the quiet landscapes in oils and watercolor that are his finest work. The writing of his recently discovered memoirs probably also dates from those years of seclusion."
| | 1914: Into the FireBéla Zombory-Moldován The barrage rolls forward. Ten minutes. Then they start again from the rear. The continuous deafening explosions... |
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World War I: Armistice Day remembered 100 years after peace was declared - The Washington Post
90-year-old guard opens the doors of Allied Cemetery on Armistice Day
| | 90-year-old guard opens the doors of Allied Cemetery on Armistice Day - ...90-year-old Djordge Mihailovic could not be absent from the ceremony marking 100 years from the end |
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Macron denounces nationalism as a ‘betrayal of patriotism’ in rebuke to Trump at WWI remembrance - The Washington Post
| Plot 6, Row C, Grave 15 | | | | | | Malcolm Gaskill | | | | | | Van Dyke Fernald liked flying – ‘skylarking’, as he called it, was ‘glorious’, the ‘star stunt’ of the war. There were breathtaking views of the Alps and of the Adriatic and Dalmatian coastlines; the gloom he’d felt on the Western Front seemed magically to lift. A pilot from his squadron described Venice ‘glittering like a pink opal in the warm early sunlight’. A classical education led these young men to frame their experiences metaphysically; leaving the earth felt like separating body and soul. ‘We moved like spirits in an airy loom,’ Cecil Lewis recalled. | | | | | | Read more
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