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Lest we Forget

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the first world war. 09/11/2014 is remembrance day when the entire nation takes time to remember the fake of all conflicts across the world past and present, and i think that Owen Griffiths put it most poigniantly in his poem, Lest We Forget.

 

What do we forget when we remember

What are the stories left untold

What do we think each November

As we march down that glory road

As we march down that gory road

 

One hundred million

Don’t come home from war

Another eight hundred million

Who lived to bear its scar

Who lived to bear its scar

 

Lest we forget

What they were dying for

Lest we forget

What they were killing for

Lest we forget

What the hell it was for

 

What do we forget when we remember…

 

Owen Griffiths

 

Owen Griffiths is an Associate Professor of History at a university in Canada. His area of study is especially modern East Asia (Japan and China mainly).

He writes: " I have never been to war but both grandfathers (both British) fought in WWI and my father fought with the RAF in Europe and Asia in WWII. My mother worked in a mortar shell factory and a pig farm in England during WWII. My parents immigrated to Canada after the war in 1949, among the many who passed through Pier 21 in Halifax (Canada's Ellis Island). My father was a navigator on the Argus for the RCAF so I lived on air bases in Canada until I was 10. Professionally, I currently have two main research fields: One, examines how Japanese society from the 1890s to the 1930s became increasingly militarized by analyzing the stories written for children in mainstream print media. The other argues for a reorientation of our systems and tropes of remembrance to include killing and dying on all sides in the hopes of constructing more honest and accurate representations of war as universal tragedy and as a common ground of human inhumanity."

 

 

 

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Uploaded on November 8, 2014
Taken on November 7, 2012