All's Fair In Love & War...The Realities - Belgium 1914

"It is true, as Sartre once wrote, referring to French army atrocities in Algeria, that the real tragedy in our time is that any of us can be, interchangeably, victim or torturer." ~ Gore Vidal

How true those words, considering the French (and many others) had suffered terribly themselves at the hand of the enemy less than 20 years prior during WWII, and not 50 years after WWI opened the world to the extreme brutality of modern warfare.

Yet how can one be swayed to commit such terrible, inhumane acts, sometimes easily too?

It is the subject of this week's article over on The Flat Land That Is Mine: From False Accusations During WWI to Real Atrocities.

War

War, a massacre of people who do not know each other, for the profit of those who do know each other but do not massacre one another.

Paul Valéry

French author, philosopher, and poet.

Left:

"The German Tango" by Louis Raemaekers.

Raemaekers (1869-1956) was a Dutch painter and cartoonist who was fiercely opposed to Germany. His cartoons (such as the one seen here) led him to be tried for endangering Holland's neutrality. And though he was acquitted, he nevertheless had to flee to Britain when the Germans placed a 12,000 guilder bounty on his head.