A Maelstom of Surveillance

Our world of surveillance began a little over two centuries ago in the secret police that Joseph Fouché created for Napoleon. Secret police were not entirely new, but they only assumed something like their modern form in the years of Napoleon's empire. They were soon copied with varying degrees of success, frequently with dark comedy, by most of the rest of Europe. We could tell much of the history of the last two centuries as the growth of surveillance, the building of files and profiles of citizens by governments and later by businesses, and the attempts to classify and pigeonhole every person and their every action.

We are in a golden age of surveillance now. Himmler, Beria, and Hoover never had the ability to collect, record, profile, and classify that any police department and many businesses have today. It took multiple streams to bring us to this pass today. Only a few of them grew out of the activities of the police or weaved in and out of their realm. The growth and expansion of banking and credit required the creation of fixed, fiduciary identities so that persons could be pinned down and tracked for monetary purposes. The police could more easily deal with someone who's identity changed as revealed by aliases, but the flow of credit, the creation of wealth, the identification of property, could not tolerate aliases. Neither could conscript armies, which again required the correct registration and classification of citizens for military training and service, or skilled work in munitions factories, etc. Armies and banks could be comfortable only when a person's identity was as fixed as a bug pinned in a collection.

Of course the armies also wanted to know something about the health of the citizen, so that had to go in the record too, but the medical profession was also doing more recording and classifying, trying to understand health and disease. Public health was the great medical triumph of the 1800s and early 1900s, and it increasingly relied on record keeping, classifying people, and making observations about their environment. That also merged into the activities of the early social scientists, and of the reformers who set out to help and educate the poor.

There were other streams too, technical ones. The growth of the size of the United States and the desire for more information about the country quickly overburdened the decennial census. That led to the origins of modern information technology in the form of the punchcard, key punches, punchcard readers, and sorters, all of this decades before computers. Parallel to their growth was that of card indexes, often looking like nothing so much as the library card catalogs that many of remember from libraries. Cards with written information on possible subversives, enemy aliens, and their cronies, were maintained by all major governments until they were eventually automated with punchcard and then computers. Fear of Anarchists and Communists made them seem vital to many governments and security firms.

Banks, mortgage companies, and business of all kinds found it convenient to keep records on their customers and employees with the same technological innovations. The time clock was the most visible manifesto on of this to employees, though the card indices were used to track and control them too. Customers were increasingly tracked by department stores and catalog companies so they could be better targeted for advertising.

Computers began to add more and more power to these kinds of systems, but it would take the Internet to make possible the kind of data harvesting and exploitation we see now. Meanwhile cameras, CCTV, audio recording, the bugging of phones, but also just tracing what phone numbers were called and what credit transactions made, and later GPS began to allow governments and businesses build up more detailed profiles and gather ever more data.

Meanwhile the sciences were given us more and more to track and profile. Fingerprints were long the most full-proof means of identification, but blood type, hair, and other means were used as well, until DNA and biometrics began to dominate identification, fixing our identities ever more effectively. Psychology was also hard at work in these years, testing, diagnosing, classifying, and profiling. They were creating psychographic methods that could, when given enough data, describe and anticipate the behavior of individuals or groups.

All of these streams have begun to coalesce in the past two decades. The needs of government, business, finance, and medicine to identify and classify, to detect and predict; the technologies for collecting, sorting, and communicating; the psychological techniques for profiling and controlling have all come together into the nightmare world of modern surveillance. It took us two centuries to reach this point, two decades to Brian the disparate streams together into a mighty ocean, and about two years to begin to comprehend the consequences. Around the world the shape of the future is taking shape, whether in the Social Credit scheme being imposed on China, the commoditization, monetization, and weaponization of psychographic profiles in America, the attempts to put the brakes on in Europe, the targeted use of false information for internal control and external warfare by Russia, or scores of other experiments by government and business that are barely on our radar in every corner of the globe, sweeping us up in a  maelstrom from which their seems no escape and in which direction seems to become meaningless. The ideals of those who created our world of surveillance have created a world that even Orwell would scarcely recognize, in some cases it seems to give those in power more control, but the truth may be that it is spinning out of control at a rapid accelerating rate. When it spins off its axis no one can say where we will be left, or with what.

The End of Gutenberg

The quincentenary of Gutenberg's earliest publications, those of which we are certain, occurred in the midst of the television revolution of the 1950s and was accompanied by the commercialization of computing technology. We know from the studies of Walter Ong, and others, that literacy had already begun to change in the preceding decades, under the influence of radio and talking pictures. The printing press itself had done much to change the nature of literacy in its early centuries. It facilitated, though did not cause, the spread of silent reading, of standardized spelling and punctuation, mass literacy, and greatly expanded the descriptive power of illustrations, maps, and diagrams. In the early years of electronic media, the changes perhaps had less effect on reading habits, but provided both alternatives and competitors, and possibly changing some aspects of the way our brains dealt with written and visual information. 

Still, the world we knew in the last century had plenty of space for books as we had known them for hundreds of years. If, by the 1960s, we were beginning to conceptualize tablet-like devices for reading and writing, we still tended to think of them as pretty well rooted in the world of print. What we actually got was something a lot more complex. Think about Star Trek for a moment. They had computers, or specifically they had huge computers that were coterminous with starships and building complexes, they had some sort of tablets (PADDs) which just seem to be digital clipboards in the original series, but seem more adaptable in TNG, they had Tricorders, which seem to have had a lot of memory (based on what Spock was able to recover from his in City on the Edge of Forever), and they had Communicators. 

What they did not have was a single, unified device. Roddenberry and company simply could not conceptualize a device with more computing power than any machine that existed in the 1960s, that could fit in the palm of the hand, display any type of media, have built-in sensors and cameras, could be connected and communicate basically anywhere, and be cheap enough for almost anyone to afford. They continued to fail in this regard in the 1980s, but then so did the more advanced cyberpunk writers. William Gibson is humbled by the fact that he failed to anticipate wireless and cellular. He assumes students who study his early writings today will think that the need to be plugged in was a deliberate plot device. 

When we reach the next centenary of Gutenberg's invention, which is still a few decades away, we cannot anticipate what books will be. We truly do not know whether paper books will survive, recent trends indicate they might be alive and well for decades to come, or what kinds of other devices we might have. Will we sit and read with our glasses or contact lenses (in an odd visual parallel to people walking down the street with nearly invisible earbuds talking and gesticulating to thin air), or perhaps we will have implants that allow us to bypass the eyes all together. 

I really have no clue, but we can be sure that the changing technologies of reading will lead to more changes, more evolution of our minds, how we balance visual, auditory, and linguistic realms of knowing (not forgetting the tactile, and perhaps even involving taste, smell, and even proprioception) to allow us to experience the world differently. How we consume media, and the kinds of media we consume, has a lot to do with how we perceive the world, and what kinds of constraints are placed on our cognitive abilities. 

We have co-evolved with the written word for about 5000 years. Successive kinds of writing and media have colonized our brains and our minds. Just as language shaped us over millions of years, writing has shaped us for  fifty centuries. It became more than the exteriorization of memory that Plato had Socrates fear. It became the exteriorization of imagination, of logic, and of emotion. It is arguable that peoples using alphabets, abugidas, abjads, syllabaries, and logographic systems all produce different mental worlds, and represent a great deal of the differences we see in the world between major blocks of culture. We are only just beginning to understand how writing and reading have affected us as a species. Now we are having to learn to comprehend a world where writing and all other forms of communication are running together. We do not know what it will do to us. We do not have any idea where it will lead, but then who could have predicted where moveable type, or phonographs, paintings, photographs, maps, prints, movies, or any of the other communication technologies would change us. What is certain is that we are encountering the very end of Gutenberg's epoch. 

I will hazard a few predictions. Neuroscientists will see changes in the organization of the synapses and distribution of white and gray matter in the brain as our means of reading and consuming media change. Religious interpretations will change a great deal as holy books move beyond being stand-alone texts and are perceived in different relations to one another and through more and more media. That could lead to a backlash and a greater fundamentalism, to greater religious understanding, new religious movements, or, more likely, all three. Politics, policy, and law will be unable to keep up. Our current ideas of intellectual property and privacy will be radically changed, as the political and legal world struggles to cope. This will create dynamic tensions that may server to both stifle and encourage creativity. And just as the modern state was transformed as more and more men and women learned to read and write, and then had access to cheap media, so will the shape of the post-modern state be molded and carved into new forms.

The end of Gutenberg is not then the end of the world, nor of a given culture, but it is a major part of the path of our evolution. 

First Amendment Conflicts

Earlier today I attended a panel discussion at the Unbound Book Festival( http://www.unboundbookfestival.com/panels) on: "Is the First Amendment in Crisis." It was a good discussion and covered a number of topics, but in 2018, a title like that covers a lot of ground, more than the panel could touch on in the time allotted. Not surprisingly it focused on free speech, with some reference to freedom of assembly and protest, but nothing on the other, and increasingly contested part of the Amendment, freedom of religion, which is actually the first part of it:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

There was an interesting bit where Lee Wilkins (MU School of Journalism) began talking about how social media is inherently divisive. This was echoed by David von Drehle (Washington Post). Drehle did make note that this was not a new phenomenon, talking some about the political fragmentation of Victorian newspapers. Had the session lasted longer, perhaps there would have been more on this. What struck me, though, was that there was no discussion of how freedom of religion, and freedom of speech and the press, have helped create the underlying fragmentation and tension that have facilitated the rise of division. I had not considered this before, at least not in this way, and I want to explore it for a moment.

For much of the past half-millennium, religion has been the most divisive force in Europe and America. We were taught at mid-century to think of it as a unifying force, but that is largely illusory, an assumption made possible by the corporate and government-sponsored civic religion of the 1950s and early 1960s. The divide between Black and White Protestantism was always largely ignored. That, in itself, would have given the lie to the portrait of unity. The mid-century revival did manage to paper over some of the differences of Catholicism and Protestantism, and it at least made anti-Semitism unfashionable and publicly unacceptable. What it did not do was to erase the divide that had appeared between liberal and conservative Protestantism decades earlier, a divide that had largely been invisible with the withdrawal of fundamentalists and other conservative Protestants from the public arena after the Scopes Trial.  

I am not an historian of American religion, so what follows may be a bit sketchy and off in some details, though I believe the main outline is correct. Before, during, and after the Civil War, there had been a thriving religious press of newspapers and magazines in this country. These continued to thrive up through at least the First World War. Freedom of press and religion had interacted in these. In their pages, and also in religious conventions and conferences held regularly, as well as in books and seminaries, what amounted to new doctrines were introduced and worked out. New religious movements were emerging. One of these gave rise both to conservative Evangelicalism and to Fundamentalism, while another gave rise to Pentecostalism. Fundamentalism itself was largely the result of Bible conferences and the press, culminating in the publication of an important series of pamphlets (gathered up in book form) during the first part of the World War, called The Fundamentals. These gave their name to the movement. These writings and conferences also began a trend that later grew more important, certain words and phrases began to take on specialized meanings within the group. 

The First World War was a religiously shattering experience for much of the world including the United States. Millennial expectations came into play, as did prophecy, and a real sense that Christianity was under attack in the West from Social Darwinism (with which the Germans were held to be especially enamored) and Bolshevism, and, in the East, by the Ottoman onslaught as the Armenian Genocide and the destruction of many of the oldest Christian communities in the world was revealed. The groups on the Protestant right moved further in that direction, splitting ever more decisively with the liberal Protestants in the mainstream churches. 

The Scopes Trial subjected these groups to public ridicule on a national stage, particularly from the barbed pen of H.L. Mencken. (The Mencken character in Inherit the Wind was played by Gene Kelly in the film version; suffice it to say that it is the least sympathetic role he ever played, and certainly the most cynical.) The ridicule stung, I suspect it still stings today. It also showed how far from the religion and beliefs of the urban elites they had come. These groups moved ever more to the right and largely kept their own counsel. Their thoughts, beliefs, and means of expressing themselves became more insular and difficult for liberal Christians and others to comprehend. It would be decades before they would emerge into the political arena in a meaningful way. 

What I want to point out is that all of this occurred through the interplay of freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press. It is possible it could not have played out in any country outside the British Common Law and constitutional tradition. In the 1600s, such conflict had torn England apart and led to what used to be called the English Civil Wars and are now more commonly referred to as the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, the bloodiest and most tumultuous period in modern British history. The slow emergence of these key freedoms was an evolutionary result of those wars, and their aftermath a generation later, the Glorious Revolution. 

But to return to my main theme, the interplay of these three freedoms both helped created a serious, long hidden or dormant divide in America, but when that divide did become visible, slowly in the 1960s and 1970s, and then became a major preoccupation in the 1980s and after, it was driven by these three freedoms interacting, so that the difference became magnified and solidified. We lived in a world where liberal and conservative Protestants no longer easily understood one another, where liberals could become incensed over Biblical literalism, while conservatives (and even not so conservatives) fumed over John Lennon's lyrics. Television and the other media found them to be good press, and sometimes good comedy (I especially recall a couple of episodes of WKRP built on the differences), but almost always the emphasis was on difference and rarely on reconciliation or understanding. As with most things, pundits found it easy to get good ratings by exaggerating differences and manipulating the biases of audiences. 

If we now find ourselves divided into camps on social media, I would like to suggest that this has a long history, a history rooted in religion as much as politics, of the need for newspapers and television for profits and ratings, and in the difficulty of basic communication that arose from the history of different religious movements, on both left and right, that developed their own meanings for words and phrases, so that free speech itself came to divide instead of uniting us. Social media may be dividing us more, but it magnifies existing fissures; it did not create them. 

Eulogy for Jane Wilson

This is the eulogy I gave at my mother's funeral. The reference in the text to Vi, is to Viola Rhoads, her long-time friend, who conducted the service. A photograph of the painting mentioned is at the end. All quotes may be found on Brainy Quotes (https://www.brainyquote.com/) with the exception of the Ira Gershwin line from the song of the same name. 

Outwardly, my mother led an average life. She married, taught school, raised a child, attended church for decades, painted, drew and read. That was one side of my mother, but not what I saw day in and day out. I have been looking through quotes from some of her favorite author that highlight other sides of her personality and beliefs. I found a few that capture aspects.

Teilhard de Chardin wrote: "He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed." As Vi will tell you, mom would not let her mind or soul be limited by anyone or any book, not even the Bible. She could live "in the question," as some philosophers put it. That is to say, she could live with the questions that mattered most to her open, always subject to inquiry, with no fixed solution. There was, in the end, very little that was conventional in her belief or world view. Or, as she herself sometimes said, when confronted with the need of someone to decide exactly what God was or meant, "you can’t put God in a box."

Thomas Merton wrote: "Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time." Even when she was not painting or drawing, which she ceased to be able to do after her stroke fourteen years ago, she was always immersed in an artist’s way of seeing the world. It is a very different way than a businessman, a scholar, a lawyer, or doctor has. It informed everything she did and thought. The artist's way of seeing is, I think, closer to that of the mystic. It is about more than looking at things; it is, at its best, looking through them, into their nature, and at that to which they point.

May Sarton wrote: "We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be." Mom was unafraid to be herself, to understand who she was and might become, and to tell others when they were wrong. It wasn’t always comfortable and sometimes maddened people. She wanted to be true to herself, her beliefs, and to her intellect, seeing no inherent conflict between the things of the mind and the things of the soul.

All of those capture aspects of her, but I finally realized the other morning that my favorite Miles Davis quote was the most appropriate. I don’t claim she liked all of his music or or the way he lived his life, but she did love his Sketches of Spain. Miles famously said: "Don't play what's there, play what's not there." The silences and potentials in a piece of music, in a book, or in a life, not the things that are obvious on the surface or the things that are easy, those are what are most important.

Those of you who know her paintings, know the one that has alway hung in the living room above the divan. She renamed it at least once, but it is about a person trying to break free of a box; about those who also know they are in boxes and are waiting to see what happens; about those who think themselves superior, but who are unaware that they too are boxed in; and about how we can never break out of all the boxes, only breakthrough into larger and less confining ones. This is one of the keys to understanding who she was and what she taught me.

Another key is the way she constantly watched and tried to understand the needs and the things that drove others. This was a life-long habit, a product of her childhood, and always being aware of the spoken and unspoken currents in the relationships she saw around her. She refused to stop at what she saw on the surface. She rarely took any statement at face value. It maddened people, but she was always trying to dig deeper and  connect what had just been said or done with what she knew of that person’s past. She missed very little, and she forgot very little, and her memory stretched back to her second year and the day she moved to Sedalia. Those memories and, I think, her curiosity about others persisted to her last days.

This was also the source of her empathy. It was deeply rooted in her desire to listen and understand, but also in her memory and ability to identify what was happening to others through her own store of experiences. It was also all tied up with her artist’s eye, the ability to observe, to analyze, and to see the whole picture without missing the small details that made someone or something unique.

I never doubted her love for me, nor the love of my parents for one another. I tried to ensure that she never need doubt mine. I grew up very loved, very wanted by both my father and mother. She always encouraged me to follow my dreams, follow my reading, and my thought wherever it took me. Those are gifts I would wish for every child.

Mom loved no one's music like George Gershwin's, whose death she mourned for eighty years, so let me end with the line that Ira Gershwin wrote on his brother’s death, "Our love is here to stay."

Remember the Day The World Ended?

Do you recall July 1, 1997, the day the world ended, or should I say the day a world ended? Neither do I, no clue at all what I did that day. It was an important day, at least symbolically, and for China, Britain, and Hong Kong, of vital importance. July 1 was the day Britain returned Hong Kong to China. Metaphorically, it was also the end of the Age of Vasco da Gama, whose voyage to open up the sea route to Asia had begun on July 8, 1497. Carlo Cipolla used the term to refer to the age of European world dominance, which really began with the voyages of Columbus to the west and da Gama to the east. They were made possible in part by recent advances in technology - better ships, better guns, better navigation aids, better information technology - and by evolving world views in Europe. 

European dominance did not come all at once, nor did it end all at once; it grew, it flourished, and it decayed. You could argue that the mortal blows were struck by the Japanese between December 1941 and the end of February 1942, beginning with the attack on Pearl Harbor and the assault on the Gin Drinkers Line (outer defenses of Hong Kong on December 7/8), The Destruction of Force Z (HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Renown) two days later, and the fall of Singapore towards the end of February. Still, the terminal decline was protracted. Decades passed as the colonial powers withdrew from Asia and Africa, while fighting rearguard actions with their American hegemons. Even the Soviets tried their hand at empire in Afghanistan, having disregarded hard-won British lessons about that country, just as three successive American presidents have done.

We are still behaving as if we are living in that world, but we are not; we are transitioning to a new world system, and it is not just a matter of international politics and trade. What we are seeing, I believe, is the breakdown or rapid evolution of a number of systems that we identify with modernity and Western Civilization. These include:

• Gutenberg's information revolution, 
• the nation state, 
• business and banking, 
• the military revolution, and 
• post-Reformation Christianity. 

All of these have their roots in events that occurred between about 1450 and 1550, have long dominated aspects of the world to the point where no alternative to them long seems possible, have been going through a prolonged period of difficulty or decay, and which appear to either be on the brink or replacement or of evolving into something else. We are undergoing an epochal change - literally, a change of epochs, and have no reason to expect that the transitions will be any easier, any more peaceful, any less disturbing from those that came a half-millennium ago.

A Vital Dichotomy

This year has been about much more than just some political realignments and chaos. It is the year a fundamental change in the inner workings of society became visible.

Back during the election, I argued, with anyone who would listen, that we need to get away from left-right dichotomies in thinking about politics. The thing that happened is that the Trump campaign had figured this out, and went much further, while the reporters and pundits either didn't get it or could not use it in the context of their papers, magazines, or shows. Of course I'm talking about the way Trump's campaign and affiliated groups broke the electorate up into tightly focused groups and targeted them. They were not looking at a simple left-right continuum but something more like a cloud with a several score dimensions. Put another way, while everyone else was looking at a grainy, monochrome display they had a 4K screen displaying millions of colors.

So here we are a year into this mess of an administration, and the media and pundits, and a lot of the politicians, are still talking, writing, and behaving as if they can still deal with a continuum, possibly a forked continuum with a progressive and a socialist branch breaking away from a neoliberal branch on the left and libertarian and alt-right branches on the other end, but really nothing much more complex than they have been for a couple of hundred years. Whether you want to view this as intentional concealment, institutionalized blindness, or something else, it is making it very difficult for anyone to follow what is really happening.

This is not just a political problem. We are living in a world where, thanks to surveillance capitalism, the surveillance state, and the heretofore freewheeling nature of the net, we still think and act on binaries (male/female, heterosexual/homosexual, rich/poor, black/white, Christian/non-Christian, etc., etc.) that were a product of an earlier period of sociological and economic thinking. We continue to frame ourselves and our world in old categories, but our society increasingly has no use for them, except as ways to manipulate us. We all drag huge clouds of data and metadata with us wherever we go. Increasingly, we are those clouds, or rather, we are what analytics programs and AI's can pull from those clouds and find useful. So while we still see ourselves in one way, we are seen in a completely different way by business, pollsters, and government. But just to make things worse, the biases and prejudices that go with the old binaries are getting folded into the analytical software.  

For at least the past couple of centuries, we have been educated and indoctrinated to think in binaries. We are not well equipped to think and function in a society that is no longer structured around them, and our society is increasingly moving away from them. This makes for a dangerous transition in which those who can think on cloud terms can more easily manipulate those who cannot. To heighten the danger, we have no way of knowing if the few have a good way of understanding the implications of their actions (events would seem to indicate otherwise) or can really retain sufficient control of their AI's. What happens when the algorithms and AI's are complex to a point where they become incomprehensible and make decisions no one can understand (we may already be there or be close to being there)?

Something new is taking form. It is not the anticipated Singularity, nor the much longer prophesied Millennium. It is something other, other than those events and other than what we have previously experienced. We have to understand it. We have to learn to live with it and within it. 

On Armistice/Veterans/Remembrance Day

Today is one of our three great patriotic holidays in the US, and an important one throughout the English-speaking countries. Here it was originally Armistice Day, not Veterans Day, but elsewhere it is Remembrance Day. It seems like a straightforward enough holiday, a day to remember those who sacrificed and served their countries in war, particularly the First World War, but like so much else that is patriotic, there are layers to it, and forgetting those layers, particularly in the present environment, where we are being told it is wrong to criticize generals, ignoring those layers seems as wrong as it would be if we suddenly decided to demonize all veterans, 

To begin with there is the choice of the day. For 98 years now, there have been commemorations of the Armistice. We think of it as the end of World War One, but of course it simply marked the cessation of fighting on the Western Front. The Ottoman Empire, the Habsburg Empire, and the Soviets were all already out of the War, while fighting continued for a few more days in Africa. What it did not do was end the War. That ended in June, and it was far from a formality. The Allied blockade continued unmodified until mid-January, was certainly still causing starvation in March, and was not fully lifted until the Treaty of Versailles in June of 1919. The numbers are unclear, but more than 100,000 Germans starved to death (probably several times that number) and many more were weakened during the worst pandemic of the century. Even after all that, the civil wars, Allied interventions, and smaller international wars in Eastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean continued for a few more years. 

To forget all of that on Armistice/Veterans/Remembrance Day is something that should not be done. To do so is to engage in a kind of moral sleight of hand with the past.

But that brings us to the other issue we need to consider. While we can all wish our veterans the best and thank them for their service and sacrifice, we cannot let the military (or its associated industrial complex) off the hook. In fact, I would suggest that to let the military  have this as a day of reverence without questioning is a disservice to our fallen, our veterans, and to the very ideals of Anglo-American democracy. It is one thing to look to the individual deeds and privations of veterans and admire them; it is quite different to argue that the wars and actions of the military and the corporations that support it are equally deserving. It is to accept that there have never been atrocities committed by our troops (which also raises the very difficult question of how we should treat those who perpetrated or knew of them but remained silent - a question that troubles me given my grandfather's service in the Philippine Insurrection where many atrocities were committed by US forces), that all of our wars have been just, that the decisions made by our commanders have been good, or that companies have never betrayed the trust of the men and women they equipped with shoddy goods or weapons (shoddy in fact is the name of a material from the US Civil War that some contractors used in supplying uniforms - it was notorious for falling apart in the rain). We cannot and should not let the military off the hook, not even for a single day.

What civilians owe to today's veterans is not a polite "thank you for your service," but constant vigilance to ensure that their needs are met during and after their service, that their equipment is reliable and appropriate, and that the wars and campaigns in which they fight are both necessary and just (or at least legal). What we all owe those who are no longer with us is to understand what they went through in context and to see that their sacrifices are not betrayed today.

So thank you, I hope we will always remember, never forget, and not fail to get watch your back.