Remember the Fallen

and not just our own

President Trump, Vice President Vance, and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth were at Arlington National Cemetery today honoring the Fallen. As they should.

Politics is a dirty business, and all too often it sacrifices young men by the thousands in its wars. For nothing.

Was it worth it: the Civil War, World War I & II, the Cold War? As Zhou Enlai said about the French Revolution: “it is too soon to tell.” All we know is that young men gave their lives in the very peak of youth. It is chilling to think that the greatest thing a young man can do is sacrifice his life for his tribe, while the greatest thing a young woman can do is bring forth the miracle of new life.

And let us not forget that Memorial Day started out as Decoration Day, when the women of the South, defeated in the Civil War, determined in 1865 to decorate the graves of their sons that died in the war. Blacks organized to honor union troops that died in a Confederate prison camp, and a day of remembrance was officially established in 1868.

For me therefore, the center of Memorial Day is mothers mourning the sons that could never return home to father a new generation of beautiful bouncing babies.

For me, personally, I never cease to be grateful for the extraordinary good fortune experienced by my family in the 20th Century of Abattoirs. My father escaped as a teenager from Bolshevik Russia in 1918; my mother moved from Japan to India in 1940 where she met and married my father. My uncles both served in World War II but survived to father my cousins. In India during Independence, the Hindus and Muslims killed each other rather than the oppressor Brits, I have been spared military service. But I have four grandsons of military age.

Secretary Hegseth just announced that the armed forces had achieved their recruitment goals with four months to go. Truth is that young men volunteer to fight for their country: it’s in the jeans. It is our job to make sure that, whatever sacrifice is asked of them, they fight and/or die for a good reason.

Very often there is no good reason. Politicians like to fight wars: it’s in the jeans. And that goes for the leaders of sub-national guerrilla armies, much beloved of our lefty activist friends.

Activists like to fight too: it’s in the jeans. They too send out their warriors to die for the cause: think Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

I confess that I also remember the fallen of the enemy. If you look at Wikipedia’s World War II Casualties page you see that the Soviet Union lost about 20 million, military and civilian; Germany lost 7 million; Japan at least 2.5 million. The US lost 0.4 million; the Brits lost almost 0.5 million.

Then there is Poland: 6 million deaths.

Let us all hope and pray that we humans learned a lesson in the Century of World War, even as we honor the fallen that gave their lives that we should live.