The Anxious Dead
War Erasure
Welcome to War Erasures, where I take a Banksy-like spray can to war propaganda poems. My spray can is once again pointed at John McCrae.
O we still make war
till we fall,
in the quiet dawn.
This is the same John McRae of In Flanders Fields fame, which I previously erased.
And this is the second poem about keeping the faith for those that died. As we are witnessing now in Operation Epic Fury:
It is easy to start war, but hard to end one.
As I’ve discussed before, wars are the ultimate sunk cost fallacy. Once people are killed in war, now the fighting must continue to keep the faith for the dead, which produces more dead. The military will only stop a war on one condition: last man standing.
This was the insight of the Benedict Cumberbatch scene in 1917: (spoilers)
This is why, in theory, the decision to go to war was entrusted to the United States congress. The failure of American government to maintain this principle is now felt by the world. And to be clear, this is isn’t a recent failure. The last congressional declaration of war was WWII. Every president, from Truman to Trump, has either continued or initiated armed conflict.
There is a famous quote by the military strategist Carl von Clausewitz, published in 1832, that goes something like: war is the continuation of politics by other means.
I believe a better version is this: war is the failure of politics.
The United States choose to initiate war with Iran on February 28th, 2026. The day before, the Strait of Hormuz was fully open and something like 20% of global oil and other commodities move through there. Now, we will onward till we win or fall to re-open it.
Meanwhile, Germany now requires military-aged-men to request a permit for extended stays abroad. That is one way to make a country care about the military. I wonder from which direction they imagine the attack.
I was recently in Slovakia, a country that claims to have the most amount of castles per capita. I visited Trenčín, which was voted the European Capital of Culture for 2026. The defining feature of this town is its castle.
It sits above the Vah river and the town on an impressive cliff.
In a few hundred years, I wonder what will the be the castles of our era. Perhaps it will be the hundreds of U.S. military bases around the world from which tourists will take pictures in the future — and yes, they will even do so on 35mm film.
O we still make war
till we fall,
in the quiet dawn.
"the ultimate sunk cost fallacy"
Indeed.
The world is going insane and it wants to drag us down with it.