Remembrance

[sabotabby]

 Today is a great day to remember that 20 million people died in WWI from 1914-1918, and 50 million people died in the 1918-19 influenza pandemic. We have ritualized pomp and ceremony and monuments to honour one group of victims, and the other tragedy is a barely-remembered historical footnote. This says everything you need to know about why Western so-called civilization is a death cult.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

Well and truly said.

[sabotabby]

Thanks.

Then they flew military planes over my school today, because traumatizing kids is fun.

[rdi]

Blinded by the beauty of our weapons.

[ironed_orchid]

I don't think I've seen the numbers compared like that before.

[sabotabby]

They seldom are, and that's by design.

Awhile ago I saw someone mention that when 3000 Americans died, there were memorials and tributes and stories about them and with 100,000 (the number at the time), there was silence of the sort that permeated the AIDS epidemic.

[ltmurnau]

I can understand Western European countries not remembering it separately because they had enough chaos going on well into the 1920s. But I've often wondered whether the American non-remembrance of their 675,000 dead in the flu epidemic, far in excess of their actual war dead, isn't just everyone agreeing not to remember it as too traumatic a separate event and running it into general postwar trauma and isolationism.

[sabotabby]

In a weird way it gives me hope because at this point, I can't imagine not being scarred for life about all this, and the fact that we just basically forgot about the influenza epidemic suggests the possibility of moving on.

This is probably the wrong attitude to have.

[ltmurnau]

You did note there were 50 million dead in the flu epidemic. Most of them were Chinese or Indian, so that sheer number would not have registered much with white countries then. However, this flu did not pick off the old and already ill as it usually does, and it could kill people in as little as two days, so that made it worth remembering.
I think part of this is that there were different attitudes about public health back then. There were no antibiotics, dirt and epidemics were part of life, and hospitals were places you went to but often did not leave. Nowadays the world is much cleaner, standards are higher and you and I have grown up in a world largely free of polio, smallpox, tuberculosis etc.
But I note there were anti-mask movements in the US even back then, so it's not just that people forget, it's also that some of them can never be taught in the first place.