After Yesterday Let Us Unite For Peace

I am in full agreement with MUNGUIN'S NEW REPUBLIC

Who wrote Yesterday,

"I’ll have no truck with the ceremonies in London where royals and political leaders gathered to pay their respects to people who died in a war that ended at 11 am 100 years ago today (and in the many conflicts since).
Not because I think we should forget war, and most assuredly not such a stupid pointless war as the one from 1914-18 that killed so many millions of people and wrecked the lives of countless more, because we should never forget this kind of monumental folly.
No, rather we should remember and learn from them.
But I want nothing to do with this tra la la, because that is what it will be. There’s no learning to be done. Just the Brits showing off their ceremonial prowess."

Indeed as we face a new threat from a growing far right throughout western democracies it may be that we put less emphasis on the First World War and on the Second.

After all it was exactly a hundred years since the 1918 Armistice and there are now no longer any living survivors of that conflict.

The New York Times in a sombre editorial reminds us that..

The anniversary comes amid a feeling of gloom and insecurity as the old demons of chauvinism and ethnic division are again spreading across the Continent. And as memory turns into history, one question looms large: Can we learn from history without having lived it ourselves?

In the aftermath of their cataclysmic wars, Europeans banded together in shared determination to subdue the forces of nationalism and ethnic hatred with a vision of a European Union. It is no coincidence that the bloc placed part of its institutional headquarters in Alsace’s capital, Strasbourg.
But today, its younger generations have no memory of industrialized slaughter. Instead, their consciousness has been shaped by a decade-long financial crisis, an influx of migrants from Africa and the Middle East, and a sense that the promise of a united Europe is not delivering. To some it feels that Europe’s bloody last century might as well be the Stone Age.

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, whose decision to welcome more than a million migrants to Germany in 2015 first became a symbol of a liberal European order, then a rallying cry for a resurgent far-right, said the jury is still out on whether Europe will heed the lessons of its past.

We now live in a time in which the eyewitnesses of this terrible period of German history are dying,” she said of World War II. “In this phase, it will be decided whether we have really learned from history.”

Indeed, the last World War I veteran died in 2012. And the number of those who experienced World War II and the Holocaust is rapidly shrinking, too.
Politicians are apt to use history selectively when it suits them. But the history in this case is ominous.

Now as then, Europe’s political center is weak and the fringes are radicalizing. Nationalism, laced with ethnic hatred, has been gaining momentum. Populists sit in several European governments.
In Italy, a founding member of the European Union, Matteo Salvini, the nationalist deputy prime minister, has turned away migrant boats and called for the expulsion of Roma. Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary speaks of a “Muslim takeover” and unapologetically flaunts his version of “illiberal democracy.”
“In 1990, Europe was our future,” he said earlier this year. “Now, we are Europe’s future.”
The political discourse is deteriorating in familiar ways, too. In Germany, the far right has become the main voice of opposition in Parliament, mocking the mainstream media as “Lügenpresse,” or lying press — a term that was first used by the Nazis in the 1920s before their ascent to power.

Prehaps the most poignant piece of the NYT's editorial was a quote by  

Traute Lafrenz, the last surviving member of the White Rose, an anti-Hitler student resistance group in the 1940s, said she got goose bumps seeing images of Hitler salutes at far-right riots in the eastern German city of Chemnitz recently.

“Maybe it’s no coincidence,” Ms. Lafrenz, now 99, told Der Spiegel. “We are dying out and at the same time everything is coming back again.”

The NYT continues 

 After World War II, the European Union sought to prevent anything like it from happening again by gradually creating a common market, a common currency, a passport-free travel zone and by pooling sovereignty in a number of areas.

But on Sunday, standing next to Ms. Merkel and her host, the fiercely pro-European French president, Emmanuel Macron, will be a number of nationalist leaders who would like nothing more than to pull the European Union apart — among them President Trump, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.
Historians guard against drawing direct parallels between the fragile aftermath of World War I and the present, pointing to a number of notable differences.
Before World War I, a Europe of empires had just become a Europe of nation states; there was no tried and tested tradition of liberal democracy. Economic hardship was on another level altogether; children were dying of malnutrition in Berlin.
Above all, there is not now the kind of militaristic culture that was utterly mainstream in Europe at the time. France and Germany, archenemies for centuries, are closely allied.

“What is being eroded today, is being eroded from a much higher level than anything we had ever achieved in Europe in the past,” said Timothy Garton Ash, professor of European history at the University of Oxford.

The only thing missing from the editorial was more in depth criticism of the American President and Brexit that has seen a growing xenophobia in the UK , and the fact that the "Nationalism, laced with ethnic hatred" is now prominent  within the governing party of the USA and is growing within that of the UK.

Both countries do not need  to see the growth of a Far-Right party when such ideas are clearly latent in those who hold the strings or power.

Why do the right need Ukip when there are Breit supporters in Westminster who can hardly wait to enact a Far Right Agenda.

Whilst in the largest Western Democracy there is a President,  who  describes himself as a Nationalist and whose policies match that of the Far-right which concerns the New York Times.

From now on lets  remember on November 11 that we vowed that both World Wars should never happen again and unite for peace.