#MajorsCorner #RemembranceDay2014 #CivilianDeaths

This is the most awful day of the calendar year for most of us at the club: Remembrance Day. It was on this day that peace was declared at 11 a.m. on the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918. It was the end of the war that was supposed to end all wars. So many of our members were casualties.

Many denizens of this city will gather at the cenotaph near the harbour and other spots in greater Victoria to remember the soldiers who died for Canada. !
There is a special sadness this year, for it appears that war continues to worsen in the Middle East and Canadians are involved!

Also as I write this the country mourns the loss of two soldiers, killed on our home soil, sadly documented in the news these past few weeks. The once distant madness has now been visited on Canada.
A large amount of money has been donated for the families of the fallen, and not just from our own citizens. Substantial sums were sent from wildly disparate sources such as Rosie O’Donnell and Prince Charles. Thank you !
However this year I am also thinking of all the civilians who since time immemor- ial have died fleeing from war or been caught up in its grip. Where are the cenotaphs and hymns for them?
How many are there? Many millions I am afraid. There is no marker for the slaughter that took place outside the walls of Urgench when Genghis Khan slaughtered some 800,000 men, women and children. Nor on the plains outside

Baghdad where 1.2 million were murdered at the hands of the grandson of Genghis.
Wherever Alexander the Great did battle, the earth ran red with the blood of innocents. Certainly Richard the First was no slouch, nor were his contemporaries during the Crusades. The Turks butchered what some historians claim was nearly a million Armenians during the Great War in the last century. More recently, one can only imagine what that gruesome trio of Hitler, Stalin and Mao are re- sponsible for in carnage. The deaths of slaves does not even bear thinking of down through history.

It goes on today, in this now “civilized world.” One has only to look at the refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey to see the human misery resulting from the slaughter in the internecine war in Syria and Iraq.
It is not just wars directly that bring terror to the front doors of the populace, but sometimes returning soldiers. Plagues in the 14th century killed an estimated 40 per cent of Europe, with some parts of Spain reaching 80 per cent. It was thought to have spread from battles in the Crimea, when infected bodies were catapulted over the walls of the besieged city of Caffa, by the Mongol army already suffering from the disease. The merchants escaped to Sicily, taking the Black Plague with them.

The Spanish flu of 1918 to 1920 easily killed more people than the Great War itself, possibly as many as 75 million, or 4 per cent of the world’s population. It infected 500 million in all corners of the world, even the Arctic. All because so many men gathered to do battle in trenches. For what?

Someone said once, “It is easy to start a war, and so difficult to stop.” Old men waving their fists at each other in anger, followed by young men sent to tear each other apart.!
We are faced now, not by old men drawing lines in the sand but by deranged Islamist terrorists driven by a death cult, with promises of a land of milk and honey accompanied by 72 virgins in paradise, all in the name of Mohammed. It would be laughable if it were not happening. Then again, who would have believed that cultured Germany would have fallen in love with a vegetarian, oddly mousta- chioed, underdeveloped Austrian corporal called Hitler? But they did, and they and the world paid a terrible price.

It once appeared that we homo sapiens would never learn. But there are too many of us now. With the lack of space, water, driven by hunger and dreadful sanitary requirements, we must stop our aggression toward others. Think of it this way. We cannot afford it, as no one will leave this room (Earth) alive. We are in- terconnected as never before.

A country can no longer declare war on another. We must find other ways to end disputes and pay attention to the collective good of our very tired planet. Wipe out the death cults by all means, or any other world threat, but find the similarities, not the differences we all have, as we must work together.

Give up the paranoid gun culture and accompanying conspiracy theories. There are no “Black Helicopters” coming to destroy us, just ourselves. Don’t be angry over the little things. Stop the killing, please !
Naïve, I suppose, but I don’t know what else to say.

Copyright Major’s Corner 2014

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