We must NEVER FORGET!

Nicely summed in that blog post, LC.

I've lived throughout a war that was fought on this very soil. I was young back then, but let me tell you...those soldiers that really fought that war, want to forget about it.
IMHO capitalizing and emphasizing "never forget" like this can only raise agression and hate, regardless of what it's about. Besides, who's going to forget that? Acts like that can't be forgotten regardless of the "reminders".
 
My thought is that everyone who saw that day can never forget. I am sure there are things you saw that you can never forget. The same as my dad.

The problem is people trying too hard to remember bad things and not trying to bring about good things. All the remembrance in the world doesn't put a fucking building up. Do you know what raised California, West Virginia, Nevada from the bottom of Pearl Harbor and put them back into action? Good ol' fashioned American hard work. 20,000 man hours each.

What was the plan? Put the fuckin' things back together. If we had started on Jan 1st, 2002 to rebuild the towers the same as they were, they'd be up for 4 years now, assuming the same build schedule. If the US moved heaven and earth, they probably could have been put up in 2 - a monument to the strength of the United States. You hurt us? We'll come back. Strong and fast and put the fear of almighty God into you.
 
Those things i want to forget aren't brutalities of war. I was lucky to live in a city that wasn't heavily affected. There were some minor clashes and a dozen of shells fired from a retreating naval force. I saw air raid sirens as an opportunity to get out of school and chance to hang with rest of the kids in a big nuclear shelter below the building  :)

But i'd gladly forget the economical and social situation that was caused by that damned war. You see, my late grandfather was a Yugoslav army general of Montenegro origin. Already years in retirement when the war happened, but the nationalistic hatred was off the scale. My late grandmother was also a former army officer. Both of them were in Tito's partisan movement of WW2, which was part of allied force. Croatian '90s nationalism celebrated Ustashe regime, and i'm sure you know what kind of monsters those were.

Hordes of hooligans backed by new regime were harassing people of Serbian or Montenegrin origin. They pulled out grandpa of one of my friends in the middle of the night, took him to nearby park-forest and beat the hell out of him, left him there. He barely survived. He was just an ordinary man. So we thought anything could happen. Luckily, nothing like that happened, 'cause my grandpa had balls to take everything that he took as memorabilia from his army days to local police station. A hunting shotgun, a precision rifle, binoculars...he just opened the door and said, hello, this is a donation for new army. Let's just say that he had to walk about a mile to there. If anyone intercepted him...

However, they wiped both my grandpa and grandma from citizen lists. They didn't exist. They had no money from pension fund any more. The flat where we live was given to him by Yugoslav army in late '70s. Yugoslavia had private ownership, something which other communist countries lacked. For instance, my other grandpa/grandma (of mother) bought themselves a flat in the same period. It was theirs, on that name. The other type of housing was "passed". Meaning : Yugoslav government builds a building. They sell apartments. Some of them are bought by individuals as private property, some of them are bought by enterprises or any other institution. The latter are passed on to employees as seen fit. But there is one catch - you're not the owner, but you own the "housing right" on that particular real estate. It's exactly the same, but you can't sell it.

I'm telling this because new Croatian government just erased that "housing right" model from the book, and rendered all those estates a state property. Then they would sell them, but they weren't obliged by new laws to sell them to "previous inhabitants". So they really came with a nice mechanism of ejecting anyone on the street, by choice.

We had a really tough time to clear that issue out. Pulled a lot of strings, a lot. In the end, a final goal was to get the right to buy a damn place. Imagine that, you're struggling to buy something that already belongs to you.

All the existence questions, two elderly people rendered into second grade citizens, father that was working in a computer enterprise which normally fell to pieces with the new system, mother that worked in the bank, remained there, but had a paycheck cut 10 times as it was right before the war. The household income equaling 100 Deutschmark per month, year before that it was several thousand. A brother that's just been born. A family in Sarajevo where the shit was just about to happen, so we needed to house my two older cousins, too. And then, my father gets drafted.

Excuse me, but i want to forget...
 
That is the same time my dad went to war the first time - NATO forces in Former Yugoslavia, which...well, he is not talking about. And it is amazing the shit that it caused for you. I mean...I'm glad you weren't near some of the horror stories, but it sounds like there was more than enough to go around.
 
I never said I want to forget. I said that I couldn't forget, and that I worry that we concentrate too much on remembering and not enough on moving on. Moving on is important.

I guess I can sum it up by saying that I think the US has lived in fear since 9/11/01, and they've acted like it, and continue to act like it.
 
LooseCannon said:
I guess I can sum it up by saying that I think the US has lived in fear since 9/11/01, and they've acted like it, and continue to act like it.
Click to expand...

We've moved on.  Exhibit A:  Snooki and the Situation.

In all seriousness, the date September 11 will always trigger a somber memory for as long as I still have my mental faculties, as well it should.  Still dreading the day I'll have to explain its significance to my kids.  Hopefully not this year yet.  Talk about innocence lost...  And, in some ways, it is reason to give thanks that I have never had to endure a war on my nation's soil, like Zare.
 
My favourite politician (not!) Wilders will be one of the "headliners", making a speech at the anti-Muslim cultural center demonstration in NY today.
 
This always kinda falls onto how I feel about Nazis. If we fear, or resent, or constantly mourn, we're just giving power to an event that happened years ago. I'm not going to let mass-murder dictate my life.
 
Travis_AKA_fonzbear2000 said:
"Never forget" is just a general 9/11 expression which is the reason for my thread title.
Click to expand...
I'll never forget what happened - it will be absolutely impossible to do so. But LC is so right that people should move on and that is neither forgetting or wanting to forget.
 
LooseCannon said:
I never said I want to forget. I said that I couldn't forget, and that I worry that we concentrate too much on remembering and not enough on moving on. Moving on is important.

I guess I can sum it up by saying that I think the US has lived in fear since 9/11/01, and they've acted like it, and continue to act like it.
Click to expand...
Yes, that is very true.
 
WtcLIGHT.jpg
 
Travis_AKA_fonzbear2000 said:
I understand that some of you want to forget. "Never forget" is just a general 9/11 expression which is the reason for my thread title.
Click to expand...

I hate coming in late for good topics...

Never forget is the blanket statement used by the U.S whenever tragedy befalls it. Who remembers the USS Maine? Plenty of people remember the Alamo... for all the wrong reasons... I'm sure there was a "remember the Arizona" or Pearl Harbor for WWII... now it's 9/11... I wonder for how long and how accurately. It is still fresh in all our minds, but will our kids get the straight facts in school? I wonder.
 
Great bunch of links.

Which brings me to this. Every year since, there are broadcasts all over the world regarding WTC on that particular day.
We all know how much Jews teach and propagate about Holocaust. It's a rudimentary element of junior school textbooks in every sane country.

3000 people died @ WTC that day. 9000 people died in Srebrenica by assassination in one day. Yet you don't hear much about Srebrenica
20 million Russians died in WW2. Way higher number than victims of Holocaust.

So it comes to every nation shouting about their tragedies. The stronger the voice, more people outside that country will hear. Voice equals level of influence.
Therefore, small states like Rwanda and Bosnia will never get the attention, because they lack influence on other states. I'm not trying to belittle WTC, but frankly it's nothing compared to what happened in those two countries, on regular daily basis, each day of the war.

I thought that mass crime against civilians on American soil will make a typical six-pack Joe realize what atrocities have been happening in Earth throughout his life-time only.
But no, they remained inside their little box in their narrow mind-set thinking only about their problems.

This is not related to U.S. only, a lot of countries have same problem. But they're the ones having the greatest international influence. So i write this rant towards them.
 
I hope this doesn't come out and offend anyone, but I sometimes think that the US is like a teenager, who got punched in the mouth for the first time, standing in a room of old boxers.  We can't believe "that happened to us!"  So, we go around showing our wound to everyone to get a reaction. 

The other thing is, there is a large amount of the population that just has no knowledge of what the rest of the world is going through.  Seriously, we have book burners on the news, while mass graves are being filled.  Yes, the information is out there, but it isn't always readily and easily accessible.  You don't hear it on the radio driving to work, it doesn't pop up in the front page of Yahoo, so it must not be happening.  No, that isn't an excuse, and it is sad.  But, that doesn't change reality here, either. 

I remember having a discussion here once before, about the Russian lives lost in WWII, and, honestly, I had no idea of the death toll until I took a 100 level World History class --during my senior year of college, when I was 33!  I had taken other history classes in college and high school, but hadn't ever gotten the concept of what Russia had to go through, and how pivotal they were in the end of the war. 

However, one thing that has come of this, for us here, is the fact that people have a strong belief in the military again.  Unlike the Vietnam war, where military personnel were scorned, people are now feeling pride in what our men and women are trying to do (whether the politicians are doing the right thing or not).
 
When it comes to WW2, the simple fact is that the war against Germany was won by the Soviet Union; the other countries helped to hasten Hitler's end through Lend-Lease and the Normandy invasion, but without our help the Soviets still would have won the war. But at what cost, oh!

The Holocaust was terrible, and the reason it holds such an important place in Western psyche is severalfold; the creation of Israel is one of those reasons. It was also the first atrocity of its sort and scale to be documented by video, which gives it a certain shock factor. The industrialization of the Holocaust was another.

We have also neglected to mention the estimated 20-30 million Chinese who died during World War II…oh, the list could go on and on.
 
Yes, the information is out there, but it isn't always readily and easily accessible.
Click to expand...

Main issue with Internet - it has a ton of diverse information, objective, subjective, truth, lies, and in between.
If you want to find out something, you need to check various sources on the Internet. You need to have a basic knowledge of how stuff works to do that. And then, you need to pass it to your in-brain sanity filter.
So it really comes down to your mindset.

Example that i frequently see; i'm a somewhat of a Soviet/Russian aviation fanatic. On that kind of forums, you can see fanboys writing about, let's say range of a missile, that's way, way higher than in real life.
So we point them off from wikipedia and biased Russian sites to some good books. And we quote those books. And their mind just won't accept the fact.

What's even worse, to discuss those kind of things, you need to have insight in missile kinematics. If you check data tables for any air-to-air missile on official brochures, the maximum range number is measured in a scenario where the platform (plane that carries the missile) is going straight in line at Mach 0.8, shooting towards non-maneuvering target that's few thousand meters below in altitude, and going straight head-to-head with missile.

Of course, in real life, when the target is running away, and maneuvering, missile's maximum range can fall down to 15% of it's "declared maximum". And still miss.
When you couple false sites with lack of personal know-how on the subject, you come to this : a guy talking about Russian planes shooting down others from 300 km range. It's a bad ass missile, but in real scenario, that kind of range would be down to 70-100 km at most. A drastic difference.

@LC, let's not forget that USA attacked Japan. Because of that, Soviet Union and Japan demilitarized their border. Japanese incoming soldiers haven't made much difference against USA because the war was mostly naval-based. However, Soviet Union ones did, hundreds of thousands of well-trained fresh soldiers entering the war against Nazis @ European Eastern Front was...almost decisive.

IMHO, USA invaded Normandy and opened Western Front to stop Soviet juggernaut rolling into Europe. And yes, Soviets won the war themselves. But it wouldn't be possible without USA aid.
So i say that USA played a large factor in WW2, but the highly-praised Normandy wasn't a part of it. Lend-lease and offloading Japanese threat was.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top