Discussion

Dulce et Decorum Est

2OEH8eoCRo0: Gallipoli is a good movie that touches on this complex subject.

swader999: I prefer the poem Warpigs by Black Sabbath.

kibibu: It's a great song, but as a piece of poetry it's not even in the same league imo.(This is my all time favourite poem though)

nemomarx: Why did the title of the poem get translated?

kibibu: The title of the poem is also only the first half of the statement. Somebody's doing some editorializing I guess

kibibu: There's additional context here that makes this poem more powerful in my opinion.It's a direct response to Jessie Pope, an English poet and propagandist who would write poems like "Who's for the Game?", implying that the great war was all a bit of fun and those who didn't want to go were cowards.Owen had actually been in the trenches, and tragically died only a few days before the armistice.

ggm: Owen died 7 days before the end of the war. A highly fictionalised but very evocative account of Owen, Sassoon, Hughes and the Craiglockhart medical facility that Owen stayed at (recuperating from PTSD) is in Pat Barker's 'Regeneration" Trilogy

jongjong: You've got to die of something; so you might as well die for something but your country isn't the best thing to die for.The problem with your country (at least the vast majority of countries) is that it doesn't care about you. It's just too big to care. It has almost nothing to do with you.I can't wrap my mind around the fact that people feel some affiliation with their country. For the vast majority of people, the relationship is akin to an abusive boyfriend/girlfriend who takes your money and ignores your existence.It only reciprocates for a tiny number of people at the very top; everyone else is delusional.Also, this dynamic is not fixable if the country is large; the slots at the top are EXTREMELY limited. The country should never be the focus; people should engage with local community instead. The country can only be appreciated in the context of a local community worth protecting.

seydor: I don't think modern soldiers feel like they own their country.

einpoklum: This reminds me of what could be considered a complementary poem/song, by John F. Kendrick:--Onward, Christian soldiers! Duty's way is plain:Slay your Christian neighbors, or by them be slain.Pulpiteers are spouting effervescent swill,God above is calling you to rob and rape and kill,All your acts are sanctified by the Lamb on high;If you love the Holy Ghost, go murder, pray and die.--Onward, Christian soldiers, rip and tear and smite!Let the gentle Jesus, bless your dynamite.Splinter skulls with shrapnel, fertilize the sod;Folks who do not speak your tongue, deserve the curse of God.Smash the doors of every home, pretty maidens seize;Use your might and sacred right to treat them as you please.--Onward, Christian soldiers! Eat and drink your fill;Rob with bloody fingers, Christ OK's the bill.Steal the farmer's savings, take their grain and meat;Even though the children starve, the Saviour's bums must eat.Burn the peasant's cottages, orphans leave bereft;In Jehovah's holy name, wreak ruin right and left.--and so on: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Songs_of_the_Workers_(9th_edi...

tanseydavid: Surprised that no one yet has mentioned the song of the same name, by The Damned, released in 1987. Very pleasing track to my ears.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4BxP5IEyzw

georgemcbay: For modern readers we might need an update to the old lie about how it is sweet and fitting to die for an entirely different country than your own. One you have probably never even visited.

thomassmith65: Pacifists from the Interwar period were a dime a dozen, and tended to be overly optimistic about human nature.The ideas that work (though we are abandoning them now) came in the aftermath of WWII.

rawgabbit: "Wo alle Straßen enden" is an German marching song. The video has WWI footage showing the reality of the trenches.https://youtu.be/A_45_19b9Hg?si=auCx4B6wFFGrJ3Hb

skmurphy: Henry Newbolt's Vitai Lampada https://net.lib.byu.edu/english/wwi/influences/vitai.html Captures a sense of duty against the realities of war.Randall Jarrell's "Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57860/the-death-of-th... Is a much grimmer perspective.Richard Grenier captured the truth for civil society: "As George Orwell pointed out, people sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." (h/t https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/07/rough-men/)All we have of freedom, all we use or know – This our fathers bought for us long and long ago. Ancient Right unnoticed as the breath we draw— Leave to live by no man's leave, underneath the Law. Rudyard Kipling, The Old Issue, 1899 https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/kipling/old_issue/

AuthAuth: Imagine your country is a nice place with nice values might be hard to imagine for Americans. You fight so that it remains that way for future generations. Countries can cease to exist.

jongjong: I get it but I don't buy this. You don't need to fight for this. You just need to live according to your values.My ancestors' country had nice values. Used to be under the control of France, then switched to British control, then back to French control. This happened without any war or fighting. Nothing changed for the people.Before they learned this, they had actually fought wars against the British, but for what? The British later ended up protecting them...If the people are strong-willed and have a strong sense of community and know what is actually important, the owner country doesn't really matter. People won't obey laws they don't agree with anyway. They'll just manipulate the local authorities to report whatever they want to higher ups. What is the parent country going to do if they don't get the results they want, kill everyone in the country?It's like having a donkey, you accept what it is and let it be.It's the reason why US failed to maintain control in Iraq and Afghanistan. They didn't need to fight to reclaim their country. What more proof do we need? Fighting exists just to sell weapons IMO.It's crazy to me that everyone assumes that you have to obey authority. People forget this only happens with consensus. You can just pretend to obey, do the bare minimum and let the authorities blame bureaucracy. Anyway these big nations have real major bureaucratic struggles internally anyway so they're used to it.

NoboruWataya: While we're sharing anti-war songs/poetry, I like And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda (originally written by Eric Bogle, but I personally like the Pogues' version): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKURhqmSLmM

wvbdmp: I prefer Child In Time by Deep Purple.

wk_end: Seems a bit like an historically blinkered statement. There's a long history of countries militarily supporting their allies; there's nothing "modern" about this.Most of the countries in WWI - which this poem is about - entered the war because of existing alliances, not because they were personally affected by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.While the US was indeed attacked by the Japanese in WWII, they could have focused entirely on the PTO and left their allies across the Atlantic to fend for themselves. Instead hundreds of thousands of Americans died liberating Europe.The Vietnam War was at root the US supporting an allied government in Saigon. Tens of thousands of Americans died for an entirely different country than their own, one they'd likely never been to. A tragedy, but a tragedy that's been in the history books for fifty years now.The Gulf War was 42 separate countries banding together to liberate Kuwait from an Iraqi invasion. How many of those soldiers had ever even thought about Kuwait before being deployed and potentially dying there?When the US was attacked by Osama Bin Laden, the US invaded Afghanistan in response. Whether or not that was a justifiable decision, at the time dozens of countries lent their support. Their soldiers died for the sake of the US, though in this case maybe some of them had at least visited it.This isn't an endorsement of dying for someone else's country (or even one's own); just an observation that it was normal even when this poem was written, hardly modern and no need for an "update" (perhaps just an expansion of the original). I also don't want this to come across as a defense of the US or Israeli action in Iran, which I assume is what you're referring to, so I'll be explicit about my position on this: the Iranian regime may be unquestionably awful, but not only is this attack illegal domestically (in the US) and internationally, I have extraordinarily little faith that either Netanyahu's Israel or Trump's US are going to handle this war or its aftermath well, and I'm terrified about the chaos that's likely to unfold over the coming months and years.But: this sort of thing is precisely why Israelis/Zionists/Jews often view criticisms of Israel as anti-semitic. Things that have long been considered totally normal - military alliances, in this instance - are suddenly treated as novel and uniquely awful when Israel is involved. So their question becomes, "what's unique about Israel that makes people treat us differently", and then they look at their status as the only ethnically Jewish state and the history of how the world has treated Jews and derive themselves an answer.

seydor: in those times everyone was conscripted , and people had a visceral feeling of fighting for their actual land and family out of necessity. Perhaps ukrainians have that feeling.US army is more like mercenaries on a misson. Besides, Us soldiers have not fought on US mainland for century

KnuthIsGod: "My friend, you would not tell with such high zestTo children ardent for some desperate glory,The old Lie: Dulce et decorum estPro patria mori"

KnuthIsGod: Powerful poem.I studied it in school as did my children at their school, decades later.They also studied the Caesar' savage Gallic Wars ( in English and in Latin ) and Thucydides History of the Peloponsesian War.Thucydides is essential reading these days.https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/opinion/america-china-tru...

nullorempty: There is a reason they put that into curriculum.

nullorempty: I much prefer "Imagine" by Beatles.Imagine they call a war but no one shows up.Young people are especially vulnerable to brainwashing. Do everything you can to explain to them that they will dying to protect the powerful elite.

scubbo: Can you elaborate on what you mean here?

shimman: Read "War is a Racket" by Smedley Butler for the first person account, "Gangsters of Capitalism" for the third person.

b65e8bee43c2ed0: every Western country, especially Britain, is now open for everyone. and while that is wonderful for keeping the rents high and the wages low, good fucking luck drumming up WWI/WWII kind of patriotism even the dwindling aboriginal population.

beloch: The ceremony, pomp and reverence we pay to soldiers and the fallen are all aimed at making sure the young remain willing to do an ugly job at affordable prices. For every poem like this there is a parade, monument, wreath-laying ceremony, or the modern equivalent of young girls handing white feathers to young boys.It seems ungrateful to view it this way. We owe a real debt to the soldiers who died for the world we live in. It seems like we should owe them respect. However, we need to recognize that this kind of respect, while indeed owed, is also sometimes abused by politicians to field armies at affordable prices in the service of their own greed and vanity.If, "War is the continuation of politics by other means", then we must demand better policy from our politicians than what we're seeing today.

trhway: >sometimes abused by politicians to field armies at affordable prices in the service of their own greed and vanity.After Khamenei death Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement that Russia is "against killing of the leaders of sovereign countries". Somehow they didn't mention nor regular citizens nor rank-and-file soldiers of sovereign countries.In the Spanish series "El Cid" there is a nice depiction of how a battle and the whole war immediately ends once the king of one side is killed in that battle. Everybody just went back to their regular business.A translation of saying in Russian, not sure whether it exists in English - "One's heroism is always a result of incompetency and idiotism of somebody else."

thomassmith65: If you're Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Jewish, Catholic, Northern, or just the wrong class, you should be happy there are new people in the Isles to blame things on.

ekianjo: there's more movie clips than actual WWI footage in there

jonstewart: About 150 Iranian sailors drowned this morning, far from home, not a clear and present danger to anyone, no war declared on them by Congress, nor sanctioned by the UN. We could have demanded a surrender but instead we blew them up.https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2026/mar/04/iran-war-...