It’s very funny – but only for a moment and only if we forget a few things: the 16 million dead and 20 million wounded ( to which we can add a significant percentage of the 50 to 100 million deaths from ‘Spanish Flu’ which raged across a devastated Europe with millions hungry and destitute). Then we mustn’t forget the crucial role Germany’s defeat (seen by many Germans as a betrayal) and the crippling and humiliating Versailles conditions played in creating the conditions for WWII. I guess we could add the part played by WWI in the Great Depression (I’m… Read more »
THE EDITOR REPLIES: We completely agree with our colleague Paul Carline. His points are entirely correct. Humanity has a perverse ability to put great horrors in a memory fog that facilitates new horrors—always aided by political corruption and propaganda. That said, theres such a thing as “gallows humor” and this could be—stretching it a bit—classified as an example of that. Even survivors of death camps relate how many actually found it possible to tell jokes amongst themselves, something which to us sounds hardly conceivable. But then again we could never conceive that a people so atrociously victimized as the Jews… Read more »
It’s very funny – but only for a moment and only if we forget a few things: the 16 million dead and 20 million wounded ( to which we can add a significant percentage of the 50 to 100 million deaths from ‘Spanish Flu’ which raged across a devastated Europe with millions hungry and destitute). Then we mustn’t forget the crucial role Germany’s defeat (seen by many Germans as a betrayal) and the crippling and humiliating Versailles conditions played in creating the conditions for WWII. I guess we could add the part played by WWI in the Great Depression (I’m… Read more »
THE EDITOR REPLIES: We completely agree with our colleague Paul Carline. His points are entirely correct. Humanity has a perverse ability to put great horrors in a memory fog that facilitates new horrors—always aided by political corruption and propaganda. That said, theres such a thing as “gallows humor” and this could be—stretching it a bit—classified as an example of that. Even survivors of death camps relate how many actually found it possible to tell jokes amongst themselves, something which to us sounds hardly conceivable. But then again we could never conceive that a people so atrociously victimized as the Jews… Read more »