On Monday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” Klavan talks about the history of Veterans Day and plays a recording of the minute the gunfire stopped at the end of World War I. Video and partial transcript below:
Let’s talk about Veterans Day, which used to be Armistice Day until the 50s and is still in Britain, where I lived in Britain for many years. And in Britain, they wear those little poppies, which is part of a poem that was written about the poppy fields that the poppies that grew up fertilized by the bodies of the dead….
I believe that’s how it became a symbol of World War I. It was originally to mark November 11, the eleventh day of the eleventh month at 11:00 am, when the guns stopped firing and the truce came on. In Britain and in Europe, we don’t really realize what that war was. It was kind of like our civil war, there was not a town in Europe that wasn’t affected by it, an entire generation of men was wiped out. I contend that it was the beginning of a long world war that included World War II, that ended Europe, that ended the great civilization of Europe.
Europe has essentially been an American client-state ever since then, and no longer produces the kind of art, science, and thought that it did when it was the leader of the world that was one of the greatest — I think it was probably the greatest culture that ever existed on Earth, and World War I brought that to an end. So here in the 50s, we changed it to Veterans Day to celebrate all veterans, which is a wonderful thing.
I was looking it up, and I found this incredible tape, which is the tape of the sound on the front, on the American front in World War I, as the guns stopped at 11:11 on 11/11. You have to imagine that these guys have been out there for years. They’ve been stuck in these trenches; they’re covered in rats; they’re covered in sores; their feet are always wet; they’re always in danger of their head being blown off. If they pop their head over the side and every now and again they’re sent into these useless, useless charges, and these guns have been going forever and ever and ever.
This is where the idea of shell-shock came from, people coming back from this horror of these horrible conditions, basically broken and insane. One of the things they frequently talked about was the relentless shelling — shelling, year after year, day after day, minute after minute, year after year. Never stopped, these dangerous shells, and sometimes those shells would hit and kill the guy next to you if it didn’t eradicate you.
Here’s the moment. The actual moment on 11/11, one hundred years ago, exactly a hundred years ago when the firing stopped.
[Recording Plays]…
TRUMP: In 1919, the people of this city filled block after block to welcome home General Pershing and his 25,000 American soldiers after victory in World War I. Just a few years before many of those soldiers had boarded ships not far from here at Hoboken Port, more than four million Americans fought in the Great War and more than one hundred sixteen thousand made the ultimate sacrifice. At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, the armistice was declared: The war had come to an end, and the allies achieved a great, great victory. Every year since, on November 11, we have shared our nation’s deepest praise and gratitude to every citizen who has worn the uniform of the American Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and Marines.
That, of course, is your president making his Veterans Day speech and remembering that 100 years ago. You know, I sometimes think that this holiday should be renamed to something like Thanksgiving, unless somebody else is using that, because it really is a moment of remembering that everything we do is is dependent upon the people who keep us safe. The military certainly in the world, the police at home, ICE agents who do defend us at the border, the border guards who defend us at the border, all these things that we do are dependent upon the peace that they keep.
So when you sing your child a lullaby, when you go to the opera, when you read a book, when you you’re making love to your or your spouse, when you’re doing all the things going to work, those things happen because these guys are in a way behind the scenes where you don’t see them and you don’t have to experience them.
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