Armistice Day

Just a few links for Armistice Day, or Veterans’ Day if you prefer:

• Every year, Teresa Nielsen Hayden writes an Armistice Day post. Don’t miss it.
• The New York Times ran an op-ed about Frank Buckles, the last living US veteran of World War I. Henry Allingham is the oldest World War I survivor in the UK. The last Anzac died in 2002. World War I in the News keeps track of the surviving World War I veterans.
• If you want to read one book about World War I, I’d suggest starting with Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August.

World War I seems like it’s part of the distant past, but it’s worth studying it is the classic example of events taking on a life of their own. That should serve as a warning to us today. As threats are made, plans are laid, and pieces are put into place in our ongoing spat with Iran, war becomes more likely. Eventually, if we’re not careful, that war will begin because one side or the other goes one step too far, and events dictate a response that ends in hundreds of thousands or even millions of deaths. It hardly matters whether most people on both sides don’t even want a war. We’ve seen it happen before, and it can easily happen again.