It varies depending on which country you’re in (e.g. August 1 in Germany, August 3 in France, August 4 in the UK), but 100 years ago today, World War I began in earnest. The following four years saw a deadly conflict that crossed the globe and took the lives of 16 million people and injured 20 million more, and led directly to the greater conflagration of WWII.
The conflicts of the past sixty years or so, as damaging as they were and taking their own toll of human suffering, have been mild blips by comparison to the wholesale slaughter that took place on the Western and Eastern fronts.
By sheer coincidence, I’ve been listening to a rendition of Barbara Tuchman’s “The Guns of August”, a superbly written and sobering historical account of the build up to the war and its pivotal first month. May we never see anything like this ever again.
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"May we never see anything like this ever again"-I am afraid you sound a tad too optimistic there.
ReplyDeleteMuch of what is taking place in the geo-political sphere nowadays are just reruns of ast experiences prior to the two World Wars.
At some point they will reach "critical mass" and culmiat i another conflagaration. Just affirms what philosopher/historian George Santayana once astutely observed. And the more one looks at events, the more one acknowledges how true that observation was plus how incapable man is in learning from history.
Anyway, a belated Eid al-Fitr to you and the family and good tidings always, insyaallah.
Warrior 231
err.....'culminate in...........
ReplyDeleteSalam raya Warrior, maaf zahir dan batin, to you and yours.
DeleteThat wasn't optimism, that was a prayer.