PGHIMC - Pittsburgh Independent Media Center

World War I Atrocities Echoed In Afghanistan
by S Shriver Thursday, Feb. 09, 2012 at 5:58 AM

ANNE PERRY'S WORLD WAR I

King and Kaiser were cousins...
George V and Kaiser Wilhelm II

World War I, a war between
the Kaiser's desire
to expand his empire
and British plutocrats' desire
to hold on to their own.

There were 37 million casualties of which
6.5 million were killed, 21 million wounded, some
horribly, and 7.7 million were missing or POW's.

Millions were slaughtered
by chlorine gas,
by suffocation in trench tunnel caveins,
by dying slowly for hours shot and nailed
on barbed wires,
by slow freezing,
by gnawing hunger,
by each side's hunters.

Tens of thousands of sailors died
of suffocation by drowning or
of fiery torpedo explosions.

No chaplain spoke of Jesus
as universal pacifist
but of the honor
and loyalty of slaughter through
bullets bayonets or fists.

British 'upper' classes could
purchase officer status,
were often incompetent,
and in many cases conducted no
military training.

Pacifists and reporters
who tried to inform the public
of the carnage of the war...
could be arrested for treason
under the Defense of the Realm Act.
Their crime: harming morale.

Conscientious objectors were
given white feathers on the street,
projected cowardice. In prison
they were beaten.

Those who were convicted of self inflicted injuries
in order to leave the insane slaughter
were shot, whether they had injured themselves
or were innocents sacrificed. On the king's side 306 soldiers were
murdered by execution, 25 from Canada, 20 from Ireland, 5 from New Zealand.
Shellshock was never a mitigating circumstance.

Survivor soldiers' world was a treeless gray mud
of bonenumbing cold.

The constant stream of legs or hands shot off,
bellies blown open, blindings,
bombcaused castrations exhausted the surgeons.

Smells of offal
were longlasting and awful.

Horse legs, decapitated horse heads could frequently be seen floating bloated downstream. Burying the kidnapped mammals was not a priority.

**

The Treaty of Versailles was so draconian in its steep reparations and punishing provisions that it planted the seeds of Hitller's hope for revenge.

World War I atrocities still echo today. Soldiers on both sides freeze on Afghan mountainpeaks, are blown apart by drones or daisy cutter bombs.
Survivors, because of faster more advanced techniques, are of higher percentages, but their injuries worse. Today too men and noncombatant women, elders, children,animals, birds, frogs, butterflies, trees die in fights for oil, for control of poppy fields, for mineral mining, for
interfaith hatreds fanned by war profiteers. Bears are bomb-sealed forever
by caveins in their hibernation caverns. A quarter million fleeing Iraqis were
carpetbombed and bulldozed into graves, some buried alive, in what has been
called The Highway Of Death.

Today, some returning soldiiers will bring back STD's or face a homefront of
some mate infidelity. On one military base, 4 men have killed their wives,
driven mad by an alleged antimalaria drug.
Other soldiers have died forced to take lethal 'vaccines'.

Who is a greater familybuster than military and media
with propaganda's luster?

Cui bono? 'To whose benefit' was the black op of Sept 11, 2001. The answer could be seen in the haste with which the US regime went into Afghanistan 6 weeks later.

-S Shriver-

http://stampingwithsandi.com/in-flanders-fields-the-poppies-blow/ Flanders Field, Belgium
Anne Perry's book Shoulder The Sky and others of her books have been
graphic about this war, yet she has done no preaching or opining. She has described nearly all the WW1 events in this poem. Apologies for any unintentional inaccuriacies. The paragraph about purchase of officer status is not Anne Perry's, nor does she make any criticism of chaplains for supporting the war effort.

Anne Perry character paraphrased: You want to crucify half the youth of Europe over a strip of land?

Part of a poem by A E Housman

http://www.fullbooks.com/Last-Poems.html




The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers
Stream from the hawthorn on the wind away,
The doors clap to, the pane is blind with showers.
Pass me the can, lad; there's an end of May.

There's one spoilt spring to scant our mortal lot,
One season ruined of our little store.
May will be fine next year as like as not:
Oh ay, but then we shall be twenty-four.

We for a certainty are not the first
Have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled
Their hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed
Whatever brute and blackguard made the world.

It is in truth iniquity on high
To cheat our sentenced souls of aught they crave,
And mar the merriment as you and I
Fare on our long fool's-errand to the grave.

Iniquity it is; but pass the can.
My lad, no pair of kings our mothers bore;
Our only portion is the estate of man:
We want the moon, but we shall get no more.

If here to-day the cloud of thunder lours
To-morrow it will hie on far behests;
The flesh will grieve on other bones than ours
Soon, and the soul will mourn in other breasts.

The troubles of our proud and angry dust
Are from eternity, and shall not fail.
Bear them we can, and if we can we must.
Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.