15 Replies to “August 4th, 1914”

  1. The western nations have not yet recovered from that war and the peace that followed. It has turned our world upside down.

  3. What a total disgrace that war was! And these very same sort of pigs are attempting to do it again with their war mongering and propaganda directed towards Russia.

  6. Seeing through the full spectrum propaganda theater being directed towards Russia does not make one a supporter of Russia, the Soviet Union, Putin or anything else but the truth. Just for the record, I despise and detest all governments, especially totalitarian ones like the Soviet Union and the current American government.

  7. It looks like a photo of the Tower of London? perhaps photo-shopped to bleed poppies.

  12. I love the post modern narrative of WW1 – where people mindlessly, apparently against their will, marched off to war for “king and country.”
    You know, we’re so much better that that now. Not bloody likely. About all we’ve managed in the last 100 years is not quite destroy ourselves. People merrily go about their days letting letting their fingers walk through life for them, oblivious to the dangerous Islamist threat (now moving back to Afghanistan in a big way along with the conquest of ISIS), Putin and his oligarchs goosestepping across the old Soviet Union, along with the prospect of a nuclear armed Iran, to name but a few threats to peace out there.
    Like now, times were good prior to WW1 – war has a way of creeping up on you – it’s no signal for peace, quite the opposite in fact. As long as we, I mean Canada and the rest of the Americas, are involved in the petrol gambits in the ME, Europe and Asia, we are vulnerable to be drawn into conflict, regardless of our government stripe.
    It’s zero surprise Hamas, her leadership ensconced in luxurious exile in Qatar, is now escalating military action against Israel. There’s no mystery as to why pro-Russian Ukrainian traitors (or their Russian techs) shot down a civilian aircraft. It’s no surprise why Islamists plan ever larger attacks against the West so we can “feel their pain.”
    It’s part of disparate strategies to draw powers like the US and other democracies into ever larger conflicts, to justify invasion or to achieve various aims of power and wealth.
    Is that a whole lot different from the imperialism that drew European powers into war one hundred short years ago?
    But climate change is the existential threat of our generation. Ignorance abounds and stands for wisdom, or some new way of thinking, or other equivalentism balderdash.
    Presentism is the opposite of history because it applies today’s standards to yesterday, thus negating actual experiences and attitudes of the past, making a thoughtful, accurate and useful study of the human condition throughout time impossible.

  13. The moat will have the exact number of porcelain poppies as men and women killed from the Commonwealth and the U.K. when it is finished.
    One of those poppies represents my uncle who died 2 months short of his 16th birthday in September 1916. He enlisted as a bugler and volunteered for the front as his mother was making progress in having him returned from England. In a letter written as he was packed and ready to ship out, he told her she wouldn’t be able to get him back now as he had volunteered for the front as there were only two buglers left and they were needed for gas attacks. He was shot by a sniper while on a night detail working on trenches in front of his unit. In 2005, I visited his grave and saw what my grandmother chose to have engraved on it: Mother’s Darling.
    To see all those cemeteries dotted through Flanders is staggering. All those men who didn’t return unwillingly contributed to what we have become.
    Jesus Wept.

  14. Speaking of revisionist history and post-modern narratives, nobody – not one person – from the Commonwealth fought and died in the “Great War”.
    It was still the British Empire.
    The ceramic poppies are impressive though and it will apparently be November before they’re all installed.
    Sobering.

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