Reading to remember the sacrifices that some U.S. military personnel made during World War II: 81 Days Below Zero: The Incredible Survival Story of a World War II Pilot in Alaska’s Frozen Wilderness. When Seward bought the territory in 1867, nobody could have imagined that the interior would end up being useful for the yet-to-be-invented heavier-than-air military airplane, including the B-24 that Leon Crane was co-piloting in the crash that led to his fellow airmens’ deaths and his own remarkable survival.
Of course, most of the military deaths in Alaska occurred in the Aleutian Islands battles (see Justifying our total war against Japan for some Fairbanks museum exhibits on this subjectd). It’s tough from today’s perspective to see the military value of these fights, but we can still reflect on the memory of those who were willing to sacrifice their lives in the cold for the perceived value at the time.
I was in Juneau yesterday. Seward doesn’t look too happy about the future state that he purchased:
The best way to honor fallen veterans is to accept into our hearts the intention of eliminating the concept of war altogether.
Right – and the best way to eliminate the concept of war altogether is to master Esperanto because no two countries that adopted Esperanto as the official language ever went to war with each other.
@jdc Did you know the word “trofidema” isn’t in the Esperanto lexicon?
Alas, Cain meet Abel — would that we could escape our inner Neanderthal-slaying nature. 🙂
Spouting crazy ideas like “thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” still gets you crucified.
Speaking of language, the Tower of Babel is very relevant. Note that we don’t share a common language and culture due to the folly of man, not from God being randomly mean. Mankind’s collective acts should glorify God and benefit men, not rival God and destroy other men. To wit, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.”
Metaphorically, if Rhea Silvia, the she-wolf mother of Romulus and Remus, had even instilled the idea of Christian love into the *hearts* of the pups, there is some chance their offspring would have not considered an empire, but a well-defended city-state. The world might be a different place, not a dystopia built on Babylon and the Roman Empire.
OAG, respectfully, you are very mistaken in your presumption that “The best way to honor fallen veterans is to accept into our hearts the intention of eliminating the concept of war altogether.” This would in fact dishonor our fallen veterans and almost certainly leave us to be eventually wiped out and killed by humanity’s many evil-doers (think Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Khomeini and on and on). The great Western thinkers have written extensively on this very subject and overwhelmingly conclude: “War is hell, but sometimes the lesser evil or necessary duty.”
> respectfully
That’s something else our world sorely needs to get back to. Thank you! Memorial Day is quite somber and meaningful to me, due to my own personal involvement with veterans. We may disagree, but at least we are reflecting together on what we each believe on this shared holiday.
@OAG
Make pot brownies, not war, amiright?
Actually, the Hitler phenomenon was created in the power vacuum and economic woes after WWI, war begetting war. And “patriotism” was the crux of his platform, IIRC. God being on your side is victor-dependant, like history.
“Only the dead have seen the end of war,” as George Santayana pointed out. (He was smart enough to quit his job at Harvard long before Claudine Gay took over.)
> “Only the dead have seen the end of war,” as George Santayana pointed out.
So Sr. Santayana was a bit of a “glass half-empty” thinker, huh? (It looks like this quote is sometimes incorrectly attributed to Plato.) Human civilization has suckled from the military-industrial complex so long, it does seem like they don’t know anything else. This discussion reminded me of 2001: A Space Odyssey when the protohumans invented violence (gorillas reached a steady state of being mostly peaceful and vegetarian, despite disinformation to the contrary). Santayana might be on the right track on a scientific level, regarding violence and human nature:
> A consequence of the second law of thermodynamics is that certain processes are irreversible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy
Violence and entropy seem closely related, in case you need the dots connected. Whereas, life itself is about a temporary deferral of thermodynamics. Humans never seem to do anything rational.
> This would in fact dishonor our fallen veterans and almost certainly leave us to be eventually wiped out
Note that I don’t consider lion on gnu predation “violence”. Human-on-human predation would fit that definition. Preserving the species is the evolutionary mandate, wiping out Neanderthals (despite the ability to mate interspecies) made more sense than does wiping each other out.
> 5. Aggression
> Dawkins discusses John Maynard Smith’s evolutionarily stable strategy, “a strategy which, if most members of a population adopt it, cannot be bettered by an alternative strategy … once an ESS is achieved it will stay: selection will penalize any deviation from it.”[10]: 90 A 50:50 ratio of ‘hawks’ (aggressors) and ‘doves’ (nonaggressors) is evolutionarily stable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene
All good and science-y. Back to religion, once we are outside the Garden of Eden we have to decide between good and evil. Au revoir.
“The art of war is of vital importance to the State. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War
When you are a Chinese military general, everything looks like a war. What about “The Art of Civil Defense”?
Looks like Mr. Seward ingested a bit of seal blubber, quite unpalatable and unhealthy for ones of European ancestry below a certain lattitude. He should have taken the hint and recommended the entire state be a native preserve.
@Patriot: “wiped out and killed by humanity’s many evil-doers (think Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Khomeini and on and on)”
…and LBJ, Robert McNamara, and GWB