NOVEMBER 11, 2022 – If we look back on this day 104 years ago—originally Armistice Day; “Veterans Day” after June 1, 1954—the great rising and falling powers of Europe, drained of blood and purpose, called a halt to the mutual mayhem and destruction that had decimated an entire generation. Along the way, Russia was turned upside down, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire was turned inside out. The old Europe lay in shambles, fertile ground for the rise of demagogues and fascism.
When I was a fifth-grader, the end of WW I was chronologically no more distant than my college graduation is from the present. Grandpa Nilsson had been in that war, and in 1964 he was still very much alive. “Armistice Day” (as it was still called in our family) was an historical junction to which I felt a personal connection.
His experiences as an American Doughboy in what at the time was called, “The Great War,” left deep impressions and certainly turned him sour on the whole idea of war. He lived until halfway through my sophomore year of college, and though from an early age I was interested in history, I never thought to ask Grandpa what he thought about the naive moniker assigned to his war: “The war to end all wars.”
He’d lived through WW II, of course, and the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur War, and nearly to the end of the Cold War with its threat of global thermonuclear annihilation. So much for . . . “The war to end all wars” . . . and so much for Francis Fukuyama’s revival of the phrase, “the end of history,” when he reflected on the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. By 1973, Grandpa had every reason to be a down-and-out pessimist about human prospects, but he didn’t live his life that way and he never engaged in doomsday talk.
Others today might understandably wrap “Veterans Day” in nationalism or national symbolism or simply in honor and remembrance of courage and sacrifice, but this year, as I recall Grandpa’s service, I see it differently from how I’ve viewed it in the past.
Beyond the honor, courage, and sacrifice, there’s a lesson to be learned from Grandpa—from his example, not his non-existent responses to the questions I didn’t ask. If we think our country and the world are “going to hell in a hand-basket,” hang on: we’ve been to the precipice before, and though well over 100 million perished in the wars of the 20th century, with many more people injured, diseased or displaced, civilization survived and in many regards, thrived. If history didn’t “end” as Pollyannaish Fukuyama proclaimed 33 years ago, I don’t believe it’s unduly sanguine to think we can avoid omnicide over the next 33 years—or 330 or 3,300, given our resilience and ingenuity, leveraged by AI, and dare I say . . . by the better angels of our nature.
If Grandpa was caught up in one of civilization’s homicidal low points, I knew the better angels of his nature. Once freed from his military conscription and participation in The Great War for Civilization [sic – according to his medal of participation], he helped make this world a better place. Like Grandpa and the billions like him, we can’t let the better angels of our nature be overwhelmed by our worst misanthropic tendencies.
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© 2022 by Eric Nilsson
