Een volk dat voor tirannen zwicht
Zal meer dan lijf en goed verliezen
Dan dooft het licht
-H.M. van Randwijk
“A people that yields to tirants
Shall lose more than body and goods
The light is extinguished then”
It loses quite a lot in the translation, unfortunately. The poem is embedded in a WWII monument on the Weteringcircuit in Amsterdam, opposite the old Heineken brewery.
Not getting back at you, don’t worry. Just post what you WOULD like the title to be, and someone surely will change it. 
Yup, there is one.
It’s called the Volkstrauertag, i.e “National day of mourning”. I guess the name really tells what one needs to know about it - it’s a commemoration of the victims of war and state crime. Sombre, dignified and low-key.
S. Norman
A kind of hijack: I saw a programme on television about Iraq last week. A British documentary maker went to Iraq and interviewed some people. One of them was an Iraqi guy who lived in a home damaged by the war. He loved Frank Sinatra and Andy Williams. He had all their records until he was forced to sell them to get some money for food. That is indescribably pathetic.
And Spoofey Woofey: That’s really impressive, I’m sure. What I could never figure was why, when I was a kid in the sixties (only 20 years after the war) we were supposed to be laughing so hard at Hogan’s Heroes. What about that? In today’s terms that means a sitcom based on Serbian cruelty by 2010. Don’t let your children watch.
That’s illogical. I thought you could do big sums, Coldfire. I thought you could work things out with your brain for money. What are you actually saying here about Memorial Days? That they cause war? That they are devoid of purpose? That the Memorial Day business depends on war for income? That they ensure people’s acceptance of the inevitability of war? Why is war so inevitable in your opinion? It’s not in mine.
“Hogan’s Heroes” is a pretty creepy example, isn’t it? Especially since Werner Klemperer (Col. Klink) was forced to leave Germany because he was Jewish. And Robert Clary (LeBeaux) had been in Buchenwald! They used “POW camps were different”–run by the Luftwaffe, subject to international laws and inspections, and not death camps–as an explanation/justification. And it is important to be able to laugh at one’s oppressors. That’s why Liberals are funnier than Conservatives. 
Gee, G., I had pegged you at about twenty-five or thirty years younger than you are! You’re another old fart like me! No wonder we both see Memorial/ANZAC days differently than the younguns–we had to put up with our dad’s and their friends talking about the “good(?) old days.”
If you are of the opinion that it is possible to erase war and conflict from human nature, then I don’t think there is much doubt about who’s illogical here, G. Nome.
I’ll leave the subsequent doubts about my intellectual capacities untouched. I’m sure people can form an opinion of those by themselves, should they wish to.
What surprises me more, though, is that you seem to be very idealistic on the one hand (i.e.: war is something that can become obsolete in your view), and very opposed to memorial days on the other hand (whereas memorial days are exactly about that: making sure we don’t forget the attrocities of war, with the purpose of not starting yet another one).
Once again: colour me confused.
I am not opposed to Memorial Days at all. In fact it’s the fucking opposite. I am arguing for some sociobiological input into them (as ludicrous as that sounds) and a way for them to retain meaning after everyone with experience of the Holocaust and World Wars are dead. I listen to Anzac Day speeches. They are about the Somme, Gallipolli, Pearl Harbour. They are not about understanding why we hate. They’re not about political psychology in any way. There is a peace movement, I know. May be my problem is that it needs a higher profile.
This thread was about Pearl Harbour anyway. I heard some people talking about it briefly on TV last night. One guy asked: What about all the Japanese people who now live in the U.S.? What’s their opinion? Well, that was what motivated me to contribute to this thread in the first place. The realisation that some things are just out of place in the twenty-first century.
I think that is a fair point Nome. What do you mean by “sociobiological” though? Do you have any suggestions as to how memorial day might be improved.
I’d like to echo Manda JO’s point above - to me memorial days have always had a touch of the gung-ho get-yourself-killed-for-a-questionable-reason about them. At the same time I too think that it is important to remember what war does to us. G.Nome, if you do have any good ideas then please don’t be shy to spill them.
pan
I think we not only have a generational difference here, but also a national one. The Netherlands was occupied early in WWII, and has since been part of a Europe that has been becoming unified again, except through PEACEFUL means this time. Germany is a neighbor and an ally. The German people are neighbors and friends. And, perhaps more importantly, the horrors of war were an experience that both nations shared, as complete nations and not just through the eyes of a fraction of the young men. The Dutch and the Germans have been able to talk and and see how their experiences were more similar than different.
This is simply not true in either the USA or NZ. Thanks to geography we haven’t had to suffer invasion or mass death and destruction. Unless a person was actually in combat, and that limits it to men of a certain age, these have to be experienced intellectually, second-hand, by not only present generations but also by the people whose sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers were doing the actual fighting. War was sanitized for the home front, and even the loss of a loved one was at a distance. And because the threat posed by the Axis was also distant and intellectual, recruitment was only possible by appealling to the intellect and the heart. Therefore, in the USA and, I assume, NZ, war is STILL seen as a more glorious thing than in places where it has been actually experienced as the grim, if sometimes necessary, thing it is.
That is being changed by television news. We are able now to more nearly experience the reality of war. It was often said that what REALLY turned the American people against the war in Vietnam was seeing dead Americans on TV during dinner. Seeing starvation caused by the civil war in Somalia got us involved there, and seeing more dead Americans got us out. We are in a period of transition and it will be interesting to see how it all works out.
Errr, wow. Fantastic post, dropzone. And a very good description of the differences between mainland Europe and the rest of the world in this regard. Bravo.
Kabbes: I am aware that my attitude can be so easily parodied in a Dharma and Greg sort of way. I’ve always been puzzled, to be honest, by the extent to which sixties ideology is lampooned in America. Hippy characters in television and film are invariably seen as jokes even within serious drama. But, anyway, books like The Lucifer Principle by Howard Bloom, The Hare and the Tortoise, by David Barash, The Moral Animal by Robert Wright provide a lot of insight these days into the human condition. About hate they’ll say we direct it at outsiders to avoid damage within our own groups. About war they’ll refer to the Seville Statement which says that violence is a learned form of social behaviour. Personally, the way I have been shocked into a kind of pseudo-pacifism is by recognising that all people of all races seem to have an almost depressing sameness beneath their cultural veneers. If Rememberance Days speeches addressed all that a little more I would be up at the crack of dawn as well.
this year two days before memorial day observed i heard an account that i posted in a thread titled “book signing.” when i heard the story of the meeting between the officer of the ind. and the sub captain that sank her i thought this is what memorial day is all about. it is remembering individuals who died in war, no matter what side they were on. the sub captain was fighting for his country and his way of life. the officer on the ind. was fighting for his country and his way of life. they both saw and did things in that fight that no doubt turned their stomachs. they were able to go beyond that and see that there are losses for both of them and to get to an understanding that neither thought they ever could.
this is why memorial day is a national holiday not ve or vj day.
The old lie in the Owen’s poem is:
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori
It is sweet and honorable to die for one’s country.
Cantigny
Um… Just how are you contradicting my post? I said nothing about multiple countries being involved in a U.S. Memorial Day event. What I actually addressed was G.Nome’s insistence that Memorial Day was a glorification of war and victories. Right smack at the end of your post is a line about honoring the American dead. Well, you may honor only your fellow Americans, but I can gaurantee that there many people whose honor isn’t so limited. What of all the people who have immigrated to this country? They left familyand friends behind in their homelands, and those relatives prolly fought the WW’s, Korea, and other wars that the US was not involved in. How much you wanna bet that they honor those relatives and friends on Memorial Day? How much you wanna bet that there are vetrans out there who went to war, whichever one you like, becuase they felt it was their duty, but did not like killing people one bit. Sure, they can justify their actions by saying they being “patriotic Americans, protecting the country.” How many do you think still regret killing people who were also being “patriotic [insert plural nationality here]”?
Back to the OP, here’s one marketing campaign poster for selling the film to the Japanese audience:
http://modernhumorist.com/mh/0105/pearl/
…well, sort of. :rolleyes: