izmeina: Strange Spiral Clock (Spiral)
2018-11-11 11:11 am
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Grave Days

When you live in a graveyard, you cannot weep for everyone.

This week has seen the anniversary of so much misery. Friday 9th was the 80th anniversary of Reichskristalnacht and today of course is the 100th anniversary of the 1918 Armistice

I remember years ago as a flobberworm going on a school tour to Paris and Amsterdam and we went by coach from one place to the other passing the all those fields of northern France and Belgium. there were poppies everywhere and it was just so creepy to think just what and who was fertilizing all those flowers in the fields

It is something best not imagined lest the vastness and futility of it all drives one to madness. and that is all without having any relatives murdered in the madness. Even H P Lovecraft could not have conjured such crazy insanity even in his wildest dreams.

For this reason I generally avoid stuff to do with that war. But that was until I heard a program on Radio National about the battle of Passchendaele. It was truly shocking.
So the whole thing was not just a giant morass of incompetence and chaos but for some men it was a cold blooded pissing contest.
Scary that some men consider that the protection of their precious and very fragile egos is worth the death of hundreds of thousands of others who literally were considered to be nothing more than cannon fodder. Even scarier that some 100 years later the lesson still has not be learned and there is one such creature in the White House who would happily sacrifice the whole world to save his ego.

Then there was a ghastly documentary on the radio this morning about slavery and people tracking in the fishing industry.
Hunting the Ghost Fleet
I had heard years ago about the Indonesian fishermen living in cages lured to jobs by promises of big wages and then cheated and exploited
This story was about Vietnamese sailors on dodgy shark ships who had to pay such enormous fines for breaking their contracts that they were as good as slaves in bondage

While here in the West there is much talk of the glass ceiling and how it limits women's career prospects, there is much less talk of the iron basement where nearly all the most dangerous jobs are and they are mainly done by poor or uneducated men and boys. Most of these jobs are in mining, construction, fishing or abattoirs and of course the most dangerous and expendable career of all - that of the soldier.

The horrors of the iron basement are particularly visible in war where men would be shamed or conscripted into signing up if they did not do so of their own free will.

Most of human history seems to be about the rich and powerful (usually but not necessarily white or male) using their position to shamelessly take advantage of those at the bottom of the pecking order

I do not even need to look as far as current events or world history when there is just such a creature lurking in my immediate family unleashing his toxic narcissistic nastiness on all who cross his path.

Nothing seems to have changed and nothing has been learned in the last 100 years.