MIL = Mother In Law BTW
When my grandfather (on one side) was 14 he ran away to sea, signed up for the Royal Navy, ended up at the Battle of Jutland, WWI, then when WWII broke out, having spent a lifetime at sea in the wavy navy, and being too old for the regulars, he and his sons all marched down to the recruiting office, on the day war broke out… in WWII he had three tankers torpedoed out from under him, Murmansk run, so even if the torps and fuel didn’t get ya, the arctic seas would, but he survived all three, and went on to die from bowel cancer, probably brought on by years of chewing tobacco, as you couldn’t smoke on a tanker.
One of those sons who signed up with him on day 1 ended up in Singapore at the fall of same, and instead of being evacuated or left to surrender, he was told to stay behind and report on the Japs movements, after being reported missing presumed killed in action, he turned up at Calcutta 11 months later, having made his own way there, in wartime, and when he got there he had to steal rations for three months, until they could confirm his identity, he was reported MIA/KIA see…
Now we can sit here and dismiss the obvious courage, bravery and remarkable resilience and tenacity of these people as fucking stupid, having one tanker torpedoed out from under you is bad enough, going back for two more helpings… being told to stay behind and report on the japs is bad enough, somehow managing to survive and make your way 2,000 miles through jungles and mangroves in enemy territory, only to be told you were dead and not entitled to any rations or new kit (clothes) to stick around so they can decide you are actually alive, to spend another three years in service for these same fucks….
Thing is, they weren’t actually dumber than you and I, and in many cases they weren’t actually less informed and worldly wise than you and I, they knew “our” leaders were as bad as “theirs”, they knew in all probability they were going to die, but they still went… and it wasn’t for the money or glory, there was none of either. Seriously, the monetary compensation, IF it was paid, would not have kept them in food.
They certainly were not mentally less intelligent than you and I, in many ways, in all these things, you could make a good argument that the opposite is true.
So… WHY????
Why was a little word called duty, and having spoken to these people first hand about this very subject, duty was never to king and country, or merrie olde england, or any of that shit.
Duty was to “a way of life“, they were fighting to preserve the way of life they had known, at the local, personal and family level, before hostilities started.
They were fighting to preserve the life they knew when they grew up.
In this, they, and all men everywhere who went to war, failed utterly.
It is this very disenchantment for example, that some of the GI’s returning to the good ole USA after WW2, felt so bitterly that they used their de-mob money to buy motorcycles, which meant ex WD Harleys and Indians, and thus was formed the Hells Angels.
The world my grandad returned to after WWI was very different from the world he left in 1915, and not merely because he left as a boy of 14 and returned as a man of 18/19, many of the things he fought for, out of duty, were gone by the time he got back.
The same thing happened to him again in WWII, and to his sons for the first time, the world they came back to in 1945 was a very different place from the one they left in 1939.
And no, it wasn’t changed because entire streets or local regiments had ceased to exist, it changed because of a mixture of demographic shift (all the men off to war) of technology emergence and “what most people on the home front did for work day to day” changed when the country gets on to a war footing, and all those things enable huge socio-political changes to be rammed through.
Tom goes off to endure 4 years of hardships to preserve the way things were back home, eg for his sweetheart Jane, meanwhile Jane has been trained and got a job as a welder, she is now earning, literally, more money than Tom, plus all that goes along with spending all day in a working environment and not a domestic one…. Tom comes back to find that;
- The old way of life is gone
- Tom own personal role / space / niche is gone
- nobody gives a fuck about HIS sacrifice, because THEY have been making bombers and suchlike all day, and getting well paid
- Jane as he knew her is gone
- New Tom doesn’t fit in either
“Duty” just died in Tom.
I am here to tell you, you are probably more likely, if you were able to magic up some brain scanning device that monitored me 24/7 even deep down to the animal subconscious levels, you are probably more likely to find thoughts of me wondering what it is like to suck cock, than you are to find thoughts of me thinking about DUTY.
This is, probably, the most important thing that our leaders have never read, I’m denied my opportunity to do my duty by my own son, my flesh and blood, so I take that sense of duty out back and BANG BANG, double tap to the head, done properly, side to side low down on the brain, then just because what the fuck, might as well, empty the rest of the clip into the body.
Duty is dead.
In fact, it is worse than that, IT IS AGAINST MY BEST INTERESTS for me to individually attempt to preserve the way of life I find myself in now.
This is the TRUE reason empires like Rome fell, forget all that jingoistic crap economists and historians and military jugheads tell ya, not saying all that shit doesn’t play a part, it does, but it is not decisive… it fell apart from the bottom because the guys at the bottom had no interest in maintaining the way of life they lived in.
Take a look at people like DMJ, a reasonably well educated white man, who has been through the best indoctrination money can buy (apart maybe from ten years in the slammer) the military…. a champion of the 2010’s decade of western life he is not.
I’m being totally fucking serious here, the guy SHOULD be at the apex of those fighting to preserve ever last little things about our current way of life… because if you can’t manipulate guys like him who have been through the carrot and stick indoctrination school to buy the kool aid and bathe in it, like brawndo, you are F U C K E D….
Historians generally, and military and political historians particularly, vastly under-estimate the significance of things like the Spanish Civil War…
Quite apart from the literally hundreds of thousands of serving regulars from various other countries who were sent to fight, the REALLY significant stuff is things like the English, who, despite it actually being made a SERIOUS fucking crime to go and fight, over 4,000 went and did just that, at their own expense.
And of course as the Spanish Civil War ended, WW2 started.
And today we underplay the significance of those who make their own way to Syria or Palestine or Afdiggastan to fight.
NONE of these people have a way of life at home they want to preserve as a priority.
Duty… it is gone, dead, do not underestimate the deep and lasting significance of that.
Which brings me to….
Mother in Law jokes.
You just don’t hear them any more, and in fact a well known but now dead comic told me many years ago that you did not hear them in the pre WW2 days either, it took that peculiar transition period in the decline of Family 1.0 / Marriage 1.0 / Community 1.0 where, as we all know, women end up looking and acting like their mother’s, which didn’t matter back in the day when a man was the head of his own household, but later, that changed and then…, the relationshit with the wimminz after the period when the man was head of his own household had to stay intact long enough for the man to grow tired of the mother in law, today marriages are too transient, if the marriage doesn’t last 20 years you can’t have a 20 year relationshit with the mother in law, and see the marriage lasting long enough to see your wife become her mother, and start telling mother in law jokes.
Mother in law jokes were the canary in the coal mine, were we smart enough to know it at the time, and again, the guys put up with it, that little word again, duty.
