Europe and Russia Flirt with Nuclear War

There is no shame in armistice when the alternative is Armageddon.

J.B. Shurk | October 10, 2026

War is ugly and awful.  People who experience it generally detest it.  In movies, soaring soundtracks make falling buildings and gunfights seem exciting.  In real life, people feel excruciating physical and emotional pains that never really fade.  It’s Hell on Earth.

After WWI, nations around the world celebrated Armistice Day on November 11, which later became known as Remembrance Day in many countries.  Remembering the dead was only half of the holiday’s purpose; it was equally important for the survivors of the Great War to remember the costs of total war, so that mankind would never unleash such cataclysm again.

We did not sufficiently remember the costs of global war, and twenty years later, humanity endured a Second World War far more deadly than the First.  After WWII, there was a movement in the United States to honor all veterans — both living and dead — on Armistice Day.  President Eisenhower signed into law a bill renaming Armistice Day as Veterans Day, and we Americans have observed the holiday ever since.  

We should honor our military veterans every day.  By forgetting about Armistice Day, though, we stopped remembering the horrors of war.  November 11 was once a day for survivors to say, “Never again.”  It transformed into a holiday that celebrates heroes and sacrifice, while often burying the most important warning from past generations to the present: Do not repeat our folly.

War is tragedy, not entertainment.  Although I wish that we humans had longer memories when it comes to the psychological toll of mass killing, we barely know peace for half-a-generation before descending into Hell once again.  

Wars between belligerents who see no alternative to either victory or death are cruel, bloody affairs.  

Despite historical revisionism that often casts the use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as indefensible, the enormous loss of American marines, sailors, and soldiers on scattered Pacific islands proved that the Japanese would continue fighting to the last man before entertaining any notion of surrender.  Both........

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