I didn’t have a chance to acknowledge Memorial Day – or, as my Heathen Rebel Colonist friends call it, Veterans’ Day – because I was busy with “team-building” activities while separated from my laptop for three days. That’s just the way it is, sometimes. But I was reminded of the sacrifices made by those who died, so that the rest of us did not have to, this morning in church. (Yes, I do actually attend from time to time – I’m a very poor example of a Christian, but even I feel the call to communion.)

Over Here, today is (or was, depending on your point of view) the last day of Memorial Weekend, the final day to acknowledge the fearsome price paid by those whose bones litter the slaughter-pens and killing fields of continental Europe, and elsewhere. I won’t write too much more on the subject, simply because I wrote a LONG post about that back in 2018, on the 100th anniversary of the end of the War to End All Wars:

And then there was silence

I focused, in particular, upon the manner in which the Great War shattered the greatest civilisation that the world had ever seen up until that point. The era of barbarism and slaughter that we endured as a result of this breaking, formed our modren world.

We have made immeasurable human progress in the 103 years since the end of WWI. In my view, however, we have not recovered the standards of decency and civility that existed before that war. That is long gone, and it will take a terrible, harrowing time before we recover anything like it.

Of course, one can argue – and I do – that it was precisely the peace and prosperity of that era which led to idealism, foolishness, and complacency, to the misguided belief in entangling alliances and imperial ambitions. And that, ultimately, is what plunged the world into not one, not two, but THREE world wars – each a continuation of the last.

WWI was a product of imperial folly and globalist stupidity that led directly to the abominations of Communism and Fascism. WWII was the culmination of WWI, and resolved, once and for all, the question of whether Fascism was a viable political philosophy (it wasn’t). The Cold War was an epic, multi-generational long war that resolved, finally, whether Communism was a viable political and economic system (it isn’t).

But we still haven’t resolved whether Cultural Marxism – a direct offshoot of Communism and the two miserable Hell-spawned bastards who created it, Marx and Engels – can be excised from the body politic without killing the host.

We are about to find out.

I believe that we are now at “the deep breath before the plunge” of a fourth such war – a Fourth Turning, if you will – in which the great task set before our great-grandfathers comes home to rest upon our shoulders.

We are not ready for it. We cannot tolerate this burden. And we feel, rightly, as though the horrors that lie ahead are too much to bear.

So too thought our forebears, whose bones and broken dreams litter the landscapes of Europe. They died in their millions to buy their countries and civilisations a little bit more time.

Perhaps, if we are very, very fortunate, we will be able to accomplish what they could not – the preservation and even restoration of our culture and civilisational heritage. But if we do not, at least we can be satisfied with the knowledge that they did not die in vain – and that at least some of their descendants learned the harsh lessons that they died to teach.

For now, though… we simply remember them, and what they did.