Arnon Grunberg

Risk

Great-uncle

Lorna Finlayson on forgetting:

"There is no sense in which my great-uncle, who died at the Somme along with hundreds of thousands of others, gave his life for my freedom. He was cannon fodder in a needless imperial war which created fertile conditions for the rise of totalitarian regimes that killed millions, and which millions more would lay down their lives to defeat.
The centenary of the end of the First World War comes at a time of resurgent nationalism, rising hate crime and normalised racism. Those who wore a white poppy – a way to honour the dead while registering a protest against the glorification of war – noticed the increase in hostility and aggression with which the gesture was met this year. Many people without white faces did not want to take the risk. For all the talk of ‘lest we forget’ and ‘never again’, this Remembrance Day was an exercise in forgetting."

Read the article in LRB here.

I'm not sure if war is glorified, even Trump is not (yet) glorifying it. What's glorified is nationalism, xenophobia, und unabated self-love. And the belief that everybody is entitled to victimhood, this entitlement then functions as the excuse for aggression.

War itself is just the side-effect of too much boredom and a slightly perverse longing for meaning.

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