LET’S JUST FORGET.

Way back in 1918, as the Great War was drawing to a close, US Senator, Hiram Warren Johnson, said “Truth is the first casualty of war.”, or something very like that. It was wartime, so of course we don’t actually know what he said, or if he said anything at all. But it’s a pithy statement, concise, poetic, everything a quote should be.

Johnson served in the US Senate for thirty years and died of natural causes on August 6, 1945, the day his countrymen dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. At least that’s what we’re told, and there’s no obvious reason to doubt it. But, then again, we were coming to the end of yet another war. The one after the Great War that was supposed to end all war. That’s war.

JUST ANOTHER CASUALTY OF WAR

I used to wear a poppy

on Remembrance Day;

actually the first eleven days of November.

It started in my childhood,

And lasted more than fifty years.

They said, “We must remember those who died.

To bring peace they died.

To bring peace we must remember.”

But, their dying didn’t bring peace,

any more than wearing poppies

brought remembrance.

They went to war because we said

“You can kill and not be killed,

maim and not be maimed.

And, if through some miscalculation,

or unforeseeable complication,

you should be killed or maimed,

you will,

forever,

be

remembered.”

Did we know that we were lying?”

Killing brings more killing,

war more war,

poppies only poppies,

remembrance more remembrance,

memorials more memorials,

more and more and more.

Some, of course, will say,

"Those who cannot remember the past

are condemned to repeat it."

I know the quote; George Santayana.

He also said, "Only the dead have seen the end of war."

I used to wear a poppy

on Remembrance Day.