 This is Sandy Baird on Armistice Day 2022 in honor of the World War I on Armistice Day of the Eleventh Hour and the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month of 1918. At the Eleventh Hour on the Eleventh Day in the Eleventh Month of 1918, the guns of World War I were silent. In that armistice were the trench warfare of the Western Front, the horrifying loss of lives on both the Western and the Eastern Fronts of Europe and the rest of the world. The furious battles over inches of territory like the Somme, Verdun, Passchendaele, and worse, the predestined slaughters like the Australians by the Turks at Gallipoli. The head was the uncertain world of the twentieth century, with unease deepening as the Bolsheviks swept Russia in the ten days which shook the world and brought to power a communist country. In Germany, resentment simmered as the Versailles Peace Treaty unconditionally blamed that crushed nation for the disaster of the First World War. That worldwide conflagration was finally over and the people of our world stunned by the vastness of that conflict and numbed by grief tried to pretend that this would never happen again, that this was the war to end all wars and that the world had been made finally safe for democracy. To the cheers of the victors and the doubts of the realistic, Johnny came marching home. Now, more than a hundred years later, as we survey the twentieth and now the beginnings of the twenty-first centuries, we with empathy with those who served ask, was it worth it? The world after the armistice quickly saw that nothing had changed. Germany forced to admit total guilt for the war in the peace treaty and forced to unconditionally surrender nursed a grudge which soon evolved into the Nazi movement and the Nazi party which vowed to take back German pride, empire, and they promised revenge for the stab in the back that the Germans had suffered not only from the Allies, the British and the French and the Americans, but also from who they labeled as internal enemies, the Jewish people of Europe. The old imperial powers now swollen with the addition of the German colonies and with the colonies of the defeated Ottoman Empire in the oil-rich and strategic Middle East still lusted after the resources of the globe and none of the superpowers now, including the United States, gave up for one moment the desire to exploit the resources of the globe. The borders of the Middle East and the land of the Arabs were redrawn without the consent of the Arabs, with the victors awarded the spoils of that real estate transfer. In the Sykes-Picot agreement, Syria was mandated to the French, the British received Palestine and spheres of influence in Iran and Iraq and Jordan. Without the Arab consent in Palestine, the British in the Balfour agreement gave consent to a homeland for the Jewish people in largely Arab Palestine, ensuring that the world of the future would be plagued with the continuing wars in the Middle East. Behind the Russian border, this new Soviet Union withdrew from the Middle East in defeat on the Eastern Front and they built a communist country. Just to preserve that revolution against the anti-communist powers, the USSR announced itself as a competitor to the West, to the chagrin, especially to the rising power of the United States, stirring the seeds of a new Cold War and even perhaps a hot war. And the United States emerged as the newest, strongest superpower in the world, emerging from World War I, one of the only countries that had not been devastated by that conflict. Without questioning the notions that had caused World War I, that nations built on capitalism, nationalism, racism and arms race, entangling alliances, militarism and a greedy economy always caused trouble. The old order repeated itself and made the continued and increased horrors of World War II and beyond to the Cold War in Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Central America, Latin America, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Syria, the Middle East, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Russia, China and now Ukraine. On this 11th day of the 11th month, we remember the armistice of World War I that commemorated the 11th hour when the poison gas, the cannons and the guns stopped. Now named Veterans Day, we owe to our youth the admission that the wars of the 20th century and now of the 21st, born in the competition between nations for profit and power, nursed on ideas of nationalism and racism have been of no benefit. While our brave young men were fighting the noble cause, while they paid the ultimate price of their youth and bodily integrity and lives, the world captured by ruling elites of powerful nations is not better off for their sacrifices and is still locked in violent combat for the control and exploitation of each other and of nature. To those brave men who believed and went to Flanders, to Leningrad, to Guam, to Korea, to Saigon, to Somalia and Iraq and now in Ukraine, our hearts are with you, the forgotten heroes of forgotten wars. To those young men and women who will be called once again, may reason and conscience be with you and with the rest of us. Make sure that your young lives are not wasted in the struggle for the empire of elites. And if sacrifice must be made, let it be for the battle to truly end all wars, the one to rid the world of dominating systems and economies and rulers who live and profit as young people and nature die. This is Sandy Baird and this is Commentary.