Blood is spilt, once again.

It is human nature to want to commemorate the lives those now deceased. If we live long enough we will come to see people we care about pass away. As one of my family member’s said recently, “These days I go to more funerals than weddings”.

Siegfried Sassoon was offended by the instillation of the Menin Gate. Given there is an inscription by Rudyard Kipling on the memorial that includes the Jesuit motto: “IN MAJOREM DEI GLORIAM”, one is able to read into some of the hubris that touched Sassoon’s nerves.

Sassoon himself had been at the WWI battlefront, fighting for England. The most striking development in warfare at the time was a whole swathe of adaptions and new technologies for destruction, that typified this period in the modern world. Many of these deadly weapons had not been seen before, such as poison gas and tanks.

Sassoon saw the carnage of the war and wanted it to stop. The Dadaists in continental Europe saw the major institutions of church, commerce and state all implicated in vigorously pursuing the war. Sassoon’s final line of On Passing The New Menin Gate: “Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime”, appears to have been fulfilled with the anarchic visual and performing arts of the Dadaists. No authority was to be trusted by those in Dada if those authorities would lead people to their doom.

Alas, although the political leaders talk about learning from the past, it is political leaders who make the decisions to go to war. How are we to learn not to go to war, when if we scratch the surface of global society a little deeper than the twentieth century, we find war to be a semi-regular existential presence in the history of humanity?

One does hope that “the glory of God” may be found in more peaceful pursuits.

“Never Again” by John J Heartfield, Dadaist.

Works Cited

Chilvers, Ian, and John Glaves-Smith. “Dada.” A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art (2015): A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art. Web.

eCurtain Media. “Never Again! (Niemals Weider). One of the Most Famous Antiwar Images.” John Heartfield Exhibition, 30 Oct. 2019, http://www.johnheartfield.com/John-Heartfield-Exhibition/john-heartfield-art/political-posters-sale/never-again-dove-bayonet.

“The Menin Gate Memorial: The Australian War Memorial.” Home, http://www.awm.gov.au/articles/blog/the-menin-gate-memorial.