Thank you, Mitchell Yockelson, for your Mother's Day love letter from "Black Jack Pershing" and his World War I American soldiers. Not much dearer in this world than children letting their mothers know that "the war's going fine!" - wherever they are, whatever war they are battling. Mothers love to hear from their children by real mail, not social media which is the bane of our American lives now.
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The author talks of "Western Front to fight in a distant war over tangled loyalties and imperial aspirations." causing this war a hundred years ago. He also talks of wrecked villages and fields with shell holes everywhere. Well we now have a president who loves to talk about loyalties and his imperial aspirations expect this time there will be no France left.
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When the conflict ended, more than 50,000 American mothers had lost sons on the battlefields; 63,000 Americans perished from noncombat-related causes.
Every American life is precious, no doubt. People who live elsewhere, not surprisingly, believe strongly that their lives are precious too. This weekend, with encouragement from Trump's Washington, Israel is boldly bombing and obliterating 'targets' of opportunity in the Gaza Strip thereby maiming and killing who knows how many little boys and little girls. Happy Mother's Day, America.
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Maybe there is a lesson here for mother’s as well this mother’s day as women increasingly have a greater say in the affairs of men: teach your children not to go to war.
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What if there were a war and nobody came
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As usual the other sides of the story is left out...the civilians killed as well as the sons of other mothers, sons who were conscripted for the war as the US kids were...Warfare and battles should never be rites of passage for any one ....
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"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori."
No - it isn't.
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At least that war came to an end (along with the 19th-century cultural and political structure). How about our current unnecessary wars of choice all over the place?
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A hundred years on, as I see my son off to our nation's seventeen-year war: it is as it always was.
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As we consider the casualties of WW1, we must not forget that just at its end the movements of people and poor sanitation of much of that movement helped spread an influenza that killed between 3 and 5% of the entire world population.
In the US alone, between 500,000 and 675,000 died from that, which is ten times the combat casualties of the war.
This is especially timely to consider today because a modern war could do the same, and worse, with radiation poisoning spreading over the world. We've suffered so horribly before in our recent past that we tend to forget as a protective response.
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Correction: 10 times the combat fatalities of the war. There were far more casualties that were non-fatal.
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Yes, my comment was inspired by a part lower down in this story that says, "50,000 American mothers had lost sons on the battlefields; 63,000 Americans perished from noncombat-related causes."
Thus the Great Influenza of 1918 killed about five times as many Americans as all causes in WW1, and killed them faster too.
Oddly for a flu, it tended to kill young and healthy adults. Their stronger immune systems reacted more strongly, with fatal results. It was the immune response that made that flu so deadly. So it was killing the same sorts of young healthy adults who died in wars, but of course women too.
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Thank you for that informative slice of history - it was profoundly moving in a subtle, understated manner.
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