 This is Sandy Baird, and this is commentary. At the 11th hour on the 11th day in the 11th month of 1918, the guns of World War I were silent. Behind that armistice were the trench warfare on the western front, the horrifying loss of lives on both the western and the eastern fronts of Europe, as well as all over Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. The furious battles over inches of territory, like in the Somme, or Vendun, or Passchendaele, and worse, the predestined slaughters, like of the Australians by the Turks in Gallipoli. Ahead was the uncertain world of the 20th century, with that unease deepening, as the Bolsheviks swept Russia in the ten days which shook the world and brought to power a communist nation. In Germany, resentment simmered as the Versailles Peace Treaty unconditionally blamed that crust nation for the disaster of the First World War. The worldwide conflagration was finally over, and the people of the world stunned by the vastness of the conflict and numbed by grief, tried to pretend that this would never happen again, that this was truly 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. And now, more than a hundred years later, as we survey the 20th and the beginnings of the 21st centuries, we with empathy with those who went ask, was it worth it? The world after the armistice quickly saw that nothing had really changed. Germany was forced to admit total guilt for the war in the peace treaty and was forced to unconditionally surrender. Germany therefore nursed a grudge which soon evolved into the Nazi movement and the Nazi party, which vowed to take back German pride and empire and promised revenge for the stab in the back that the Germans had suffered from the Allies, the British, the French, and the Americans, and from the Jews within Germany who the powers quickly labeled the internal enemy of the German people and made almost inevitable the Holocaust of World War II. The old imperial empires now swollen with the addition of the German colonies and with the colonies of the defeated Ottoman Empire in the oil and strategic region of the Middle East, still lusted after the resources of the globe and none of the superpowers, now including the United States, gave up for a moment the desire to carve up the world as so much real estate. The borders of the Middle East, the land of the Arabs, were redrawn without the consent of the Arabs with the victors awarded the spoils of that real estate transfer. By the Sykes-Picot agreement, Syria was mandated to the French, the British received Palestine and spheres of influence in Jordan and throughout the Middle East. Without the consent of the Arab population in Palestine, the British in the Balfour agreement gave consent to the homeland for the Jewish people in the largely Arab Palestine, ensuring that the world of the future would be forever plagued with the continuing wars in the Middle East. Behind the Russian borders, the new Soviet Union, which had withdrawn from the war by a defeat on their eastern front in 1917, built a new communist nation, anxious to preserve its revolution against the capitalist powers of the West. The USSR announced itself as a competitor to the West, to the Shagrin especially of the United States, stirring the seeds of a cold war and perhaps even a hot war. And the United States emerged as the new strongest of the superpowers and planned to supersede the old imperialists as the new kid on the block and the world's mightiest bully. Without questioning the notions that had caused World War I, the nations built on nationalism, racism and an arms race, entangling alliances, militarism and a greedy economy that they always caused trouble. The old order repeated itself and made certain the increased horrors of World War II and beyond to Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Central America, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Syria, the Middle East, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, and now once again the war, the drums of war, beat against China. 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 rather than Armistice 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 power and profit, nursed on ideas of nationalism and racism, have been of no real benefit. While our brave young men and now women, while they pay the ultimate price of their youth, their bodily integrity and their lives, the world captured by the ruling elites of powerful nations is not better off for their sacrifices and is yet locked in violent combat for the control of each other and for nature. To those brave men who believed and went to Flanders, to Leningrad, to Guam, to Korea, to Saigon, to Somalia and Iraq, 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. 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 rulers which live and profit as young people and nature die. This is Sandy Baird and this is commentary on this Armistice Day of November 11, 2021.