Why report? Just decide

By Christmas 1915, the Brits’ cheerful August 1914 slogan, “Get ‘em home by Christmas” had dissolved in mud. More than 2.5 million soldiers had died in the trenches, on both sides of the line.

Short of warm bodies, England instituted mass conscription in 1916. Fussell calls this “an event which could be said to mark the beginning of the modern world.” And our never-ending wars.

Fussell’s thesis is that The Great War changed modern memory. How it expunged many “high-minded” words: and good riddance.

In a single, devastating page, Fussell shows that breast-beating words were just dishonest vulgarity.

After The Great War, never again could we accept attack  as assail, to be brave  as gallant,  to accept the dead on the battlefield  as the fallen,  to accept the front  as the field,  to accept warfare  as strife , to accept to die  as to perish,  to not complain  as to be manly.  And so on.

Still today, as our domestic warlords foist upon us words that no longer have meaning, we assume that they still mean something. We might as well be in Russia and China, where they accept bullshit by compulsion. We do it for our convenience.

Our domestic warlords have obliterated centuries of philosophy with a snap of their slimy arthritic hidden fingers. They have changed Hegel’s thesis – antithesis – synthesis , into thesis – antithesis – obliteration .

The Beasts of the Right claim the right to reduce any story, any word, into two opposing sides, and only two, and to pound their breasts on Fox News about right and wrong — always right and wrong — though they never really define anything: by *diktat * they expunge ambiguity and cause meaning to disappear.

Our modern domestic military volunteers reduce everything, every word — health statistics, science, even the weather — to adversary positions.

With ambiguity, science and uncertainty banished, hysteria reigns, because there is nothing real behind their fatuous words. Feelings and blind certitude take precedence over thought, so thought becomes unnecessary.

This strutting in imaginary, borrowed feathers was summed up by Ernest Hemingway in his World War I novel “A Farewell to Arms*”* : “Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.”

Back to the Great War: Short of warm bodies, England instituted mass conscription in 1916, which Fussell calls “an event which could be said to mark the beginning of the modern world.” And our continuous wars.

This led to the enduring hatred of line troops for the general staff, and even for civilians back home, who had no idea what war was like, and who presumably accepted the bland, official lies which were the only things they were allowed to hear.

This great social divide remains, between our ruling billionaires and their contempt for the tens of thousands of workers whose lives they are ruining, epitomized by Elon Musk’s ginning up hatred against a blind man who worked for the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan group that since 1981 has focused on what Musk claims to be doing: reducing government waste.

Musk did this because the blind man dared to raise questions about Musk’s bogus “department” of “government efficiency.” (And since we’ve had people doing this for nearly half a century, without government money, aren’t Musk’s massive invasions of privacy a prime example of government waste?)

Musk calls to mind the rich and powerful fantasist Lord Northcliffe, owner during World War I of the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror and publisher of the Times, and who became England’s director of propaganda in February 1918. (As the Great War began, Northcliffe controlled 40% of England’s morning newspaper circulation and 45% of the evening circulation.)

In a 1917 Times essay for Americans, headlined, “What to Send Your Soldier,” Northcliffe suggested that Americans send their Doughboys plenty of “peppermint bulls’ eyes.”

Peppermint mints: Your boys’ best defense against artillery.

When the Lord’s article appeared, more than half a million British soldiers had died in the trenches, in wretched conditions, and far more had been wounded, by bullets, grenades, artillery shells, poison gas, and drowning in mud. Here is what Lord Northcliffe advised the parents of soldiers:

“The bulls’ eyes ought to have plenty of peppermint in them, for it is the peppermint which keeps those who suck them warm on a cold night. It also has a digestive effect, though that is of small account at the front, where health is so good and indigestion hardly ever heard of. The open-air life, the regular and plenteous feeding, the exercise and the freedom from care and responsibility, keep the soldiers extraordinarily fit and contented.”

Northcliffe was the grandparent of Fox News and its illegitimate siblings: He decided without bothering to report.