Repent !

Following the example of their colleagues from officially recognized religious organizations - the leaders of religious sects around the world usually live by the motto `do as i say, don`t do as i do`. This is most often manifested in relation to material wealth, for which the sectarian doctrine preaches modesty and even complete rejection of the `diabolical` material world. What is true of `suffering` does not apply to the leaders, who, for their part, give themselves over to earthly pleasures to the fullest.

Last year, the world media reported on the sinking of the ferry `Sevol`, en route between the South Korean ports of Incheon and Jeju, in which 304 passengers and crew members drowned. The investigation into the causes of the tragedy quickly led to the parent company `Chong Hae Jin Marine`, which owned the ship, and behind that company, which sank into a maze of proxies and front companies in order to mask the real owners, was a sect, or rather an unusually talented character named Byung Un Yo, a priest of the Gu Won Pa sect (Salvation Sect), which was a faction of the Korean Evangelical Baptist Church, one of the various Protestant denominations that dominated among the numerous Christians in the south of the peninsula.

As the investigation and trial revealed - Mr. Yo and his sect in whose clutches the company was - worked to minimize the cost and maximize the profit, not exactly in accordance with biblical tradition but completely in accordance with the capitalist gospel. Cutting all possible expenses in terms of ship security and control, hiring dubious crews and officers from the very bottom of the maritime profession and regularly reloading ships with cargo - the tragedy simply had to happen one day. And it did on April 16, 2014. But it was only an ominous echo, a belated rumble of another tragedy, which was the little-known mass suicide of sectarians from the ``Salvation Sect`` in 1987.

Unlike the widely famous mass suicides of sectarians such as the incredible case in Jonestown in 1978 or that of ``Heaven's Gate`` in 1997 - the Korean sectarians inclined to leave this world would have remained on the margins of memory if the tragedy with the ``Sevol`` ship had not happened. And she reminded the superstitious of the event of August 29, 1987, when 32 members of the sect took their own lives with the help of an unidentified poison at the Odeyang factory in the suburbs of Seoul. Led by Sun Ja Park, a forty-eight-year-old high-ranking member of the sect and mother of three children (who would also poison themselves) - a group of sect members gathered in anticipation of the Day of Judgment. Classical Christian dogma speaks of a great taboo regarding suicide that leads directly to the cauldrons of hell. It also speaks of the value of repentance.

But the sect members somehow mixed these two concepts, as only fanatical sects can do - and concluded that repentance is impossible without suffering. And is there any greater suffering than suicide? The need for repentance was intensified by the increasingly frequent financial sins of Mrs. Park and her most loyal followers. Involved in a series of money laundering, misuse of investor funds, and similar scams, they were often the target of the authorities and, oh my, of enraged deceived individuals demanding their money back. Physical attacks were frequent, and the media also joined in the fray. Exposed to great pressure, the sect members projected their own fear onto the entire world, which is not an uncommon occurrence among brainwashed individuals.

There was only one way out. Repentance and redemption through death. Sun Ja Park gathered her most loyal followers, distributed poison to them, and watched them end up in convulsions and foaming at the mouth before doing the same herself. Later, rumors emerged that it was a murder, that uber-leader Byung Un Yo poisoned the sect members out of fear that they would "sing" to the authorities and that this would mean the end of their millions in income and thus the end of the sect itself. The official reports of the investigative branches concluded that it was still a case of suicide, although this did not mean that Yo was free from suspicion because in the following years he was a frequent target of investigation, and was even arrested in 1991, but this did not lead to long-term results and Yo was released after a short time...

The elusive Yoo re-entered the public spotlight in 2014, following the sinking of the Sewol. A warrant was issued for his arrest, and various buildings and offices linked to the many companies owned by the sect were searched. Yoo was never arrested for faking his alleged death. Namely, police found a body in an advanced stage of decomposition some 300 km south of Seoul in July 2014. Preliminary DNA tests yielded results that suggested that it was Yoo. The manner in which the maniac allegedly died has not been determined because the condition of the remains did not allow for this.

Immediately after the sinking, hundreds of sectarians protested in Seoul, while others declared publicly that Yoo would simply sink into the sect's web and that the authorities would never catch him. Although the authorities announced that helping Yo would mean many years in prison - this did not stop the sect members from announcing that they would help their leader escape and that they would never reveal his refuge. The arrest of several sect members on suspicion of helping Yo escape did not yield results...If we take into account that Yo and his sect had hundreds of millions of dollars, good connections in Korean society and a network of more than 100,000 sect members in several countries - fanatically ready to hide him from persecution, then it is not difficult to assume that the sect leader-swindler-money launderer managed to remain unpunished.

It would be great if such a religious psychopath with pronounced greedy tendencies really ended up as an unrecognizable corpse, killed by a real-life Dexter Morgan who decided to take revenge for the injustices. But reality is incompatible with television scenarios, and psychopaths are resilient, at least as resilient as a cockroach...

(Roger Mortis, 115)

Uniforms

Man as a social being is inclined to strive to be positively valued by his environment, closer or wider.

The problem arises when he uses force to achieve this. Is Usain Bolt respected among athletes? Yes, probably by many, if not all. Some envy him, some are jealous of him, some would even do him harm. But most would give anything to be in his place. But that respect is gained by deeds. Because he leaves his competitors behind him after 20 meters in a 200-meter race. What can you say?

Young guys dream of becoming like him, they train, they try, why not? He has not harmed anyone, he has not forced anyone to respect him. He is not an assistant professor of sprinting or a master of relay races. There is no decree. There are deeds.

But on the other hand, here is strength, it is easier that way. A cop who expects respect because of his uniform and fluorescent vest. Some character who is an advisor to the advisor to the assistant to the deputy of the mayor's coffee cook. Uniform. A Chinese suit and a bright green bow tie. In search of respect. No bullshit.

The doctor. The professor. The teacher. The priest. Everyone wants to gain validation through force. Okay, the priest maybe through a suspended sentence. And the title is just a glorified uniform.

Over time, people stop being Trajce, Stavre and even Blerim, they become moving uniforms. Because without a uniform they are one big nothing. Those who cannot command respect through some natural course of things, with their actions - rely on force, on the law, on the vertical, on coercion. From the teacher in some godforsaken hole to the SS man with a rifle pointed at some Yevgeny or Shlomo. Not because they have any qualities that would be worthy of respect, but because they have a mechanism for coercion, from an ordinary pen to a bullet.

Of course, not even remotely all uniformed people are empty shells. But exceptions are extremely rare and do not have a significant impact on the general picture. It cannot be denied that a uniform significantly facilitates life in every sense. Suddenly, a man in uniform feels accepted. Even loved by heaven. Although this ``love`` is woven into the uniform and not into the flesh-and-blood creature who wears it. He remains just as insignificant as before he put on the uniform. A fairly precise dissection of this phenomenon can be found in the wonderful Chekhov, two short stories, ``Death of a Clerk`` and ``The Fat and the Thin``. I recommend reading them, they are a few pages each anyway, so laziness should not be an obstacle.

Chekhov, unlike some of his contemporaries, was the essence of conciseness.

(Roger Mortis, 114)

Shit in Paris vs. Shit in Rwanda

The phenomenon of verbal or virtual expressions of empathy of certain population in connection with the somewhat recent `shit in France` is interesting.

There is nothing wrong with empathy, on the contrary - but it is always reserved for groups that people consider close or at least have a serious delusion that they are close to them. And there is nothing wrong with that in itself, but it should be avoided if possible. The local masses of people can identify with a random population that died at a concert in Paris, because they sometimes go to concerts themselves, or with those who died in a cafe because they often go to cafes, or with those killed in front of a stadium because it is assumed that they go to matches of the local football team.

Because Jeanne and Michel who died at a concert are somehow similar, almost ours, with a slight shift in the parameters they could also have been Stanko and Biljana in Prilep. All of this seems recognizable, alien but ours, a common (or at least aspired to) social dynamic that is disrupted by bearded maniacs who come from hell. Some people may even perceive the situation as a personal insult, an attack on `their` values.

But the reality is bleak and harsh, the local crowd goes to concerts and matches less than the French crowd, purely for the sake of living standard, sit on bare cement in a half-destroyed stand or goes to the cinema with torn seats and a projector manufactured during Tito's time. Similar to a fan of a club from...Lebanon. And all of this is fine, the standard of living should not be a measure when expressing empathy.

The problem is that people want to perceive themselves as part of Western civilization. And the poor people do not realize that they are not. The West does not consider you as an integral part of itself and will never consider you. Ever since the Krajina War, you will always be the Border between the `bright` West and the `dark` East. The Western paradise does not consider the southeastern paradise `its`. Until yesterday, there was a visa ghetto for you. And today there is Schengen. It exists because of you. And they will not empathize with you under similar conditions. Just as they did not empathize much during Vukovar, Ovčara, Knin, Sarajevo or 2001. You will never find yourself on their front pages, no matter how many people die. Or possibly if so many victims die that it would be inconvenient for them not to put you on the front page. Like Srebrenica, let's say.

The terms Ausländer, Jugo, Eastman, Vogue, Balkan - are an integral part of everyday Western vocabulary. A little more than Sand-Niger but much less than Belgian. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't express sympathy for a tragedy in the West, on the contrary, we should. However, I will mention again, we shouldn't shy away...Empathy should be distributed to all innocent victims on the planet. Since if there is a gradation of the significance of the victims - then it is not empathy but only an expression of the stated desire to belong somewhere, to experience oneself as part of something, in this case Western culture. Or civilization, if that word is more dear to you.

With a child from Congo who dies at the age of 14, blacking out in a mine, no one intends to identify, empathize or even understand him because that child is foreign, unrecognizable, there are no patterns in the brain that would lead to empathy. Here, at the age of 14, a child goes to the eighth grade, likes a girl, plays games, throws a basketball, sleeps in a children's room a.k.a. all those things that a child from Congo doesn't have. Here, no one goes to a mine on 14 so there is nothing to empathize with.

Just like the myth about the Indians who supposedly could not see the Spanish ships when they approached some Mesoamerican coast, not because of myopia but because they did not have a pattern in their minds that such a thing as a ship could exist. Or death from a thermobaric bomb. Or from a grenade. In Syria. Everyday life. But the thermobaric bomb and its effect on people is an abstract, alien, unknowable thing - hence one cannot suffer from virtual/verbal empathy or concern about `some`...Sand-niggers there.

The fact that, in terms of civilization, the citizens of the Republic of Hunzistan are much closer to the Middle East than to the West is an unpleasant fact that needs to be covered up with some new mythology, with Nietzsche Macedon or Kirche Lazaroff.

Because you are sincerely looking forward to a bowl of fried food like you eat in Beirut, not a baguette. Because you are corrupt to the core and have semi-functional societies like theirs. Because your cities resemble landfills like theirs. Because your traffic culture is far more similar to that of Istanbul than to that of The Hague. Because...beer before cooperation. Because four recycling bins are as foreign and incomprehensible to you as a random character from Aleppo.

And because you are in the only European region that can generate war on the old continent. Naturally, you are not totally the same as the people from the Middle East, primarily because they have the destructive role of radical Islam, which is a conveyor belt for the production of idiots, a medieval atavism gone astray in our time. The Balkans are special, always on the border between East and West, not completely belonging to either of those two worlds. Although, if we are honest, much more similar to the Levant.

(Roger Mortis, 113)

Dinner of Two Halves

Imagine a nice dinner, where a wedding is announced, the hosts are all happy and cheerful - they take out thirty-year-old wine from the family stash, to celebrate as is proper, the fiancé and fiancée hold hands, relatives and friends congratulate them. And the fiancé...the guy is a mass murderer, those present know that and have no problem with that fact, including the fact that the daughter has already been impregnated by a murderer.

Although the guy is a special kind of mass murderer, a pilot of, say, an F-16. That miracle carries up to 6 tons of bombs and rockets and has a built-in six-barreled rotating cannon with hundreds of 20mm rounds. And so the guy, on orders, with the stamp of legality - took off and unloaded the cargo on a paradise, somewhere...anywhere. 96 dead, 133 wounded, destroyed houses, children's bodies scattered around, street dogs feasting on the intestines of some little girl. Some of the bombs did not explode upon impact (especially those in cluster containers have a habit of doing so) and remain to maim and kill people for months and years after the pilot's flight.

The guy volunteered for pilot school, volunteered for the military aviation, and voluntarily signed an agreement to follow orders. The dinner goes well, everyone is proud and satisfied, there is drinking and eating, and gifts are planned for the wedding. The wedding of the mass murderer.

Now imagine a nice dinner, at which a wedding is announced, the hosts are all happy and cheerful - they take out thirty-year-old wine from the family stash, to celebrate as is proper, the fiancé and fiancée hold hands, relatives and friends congratulate them. The fiancé...the guy is a serial killer, he raped and murdered three girls and threw their butchered bodies into a river. Those present know this and have no problem with that fact, and with the fact that the daughter has already been impregnated by a murderer. Needless to say, the second scenario is impossible because if they knew he was a serial killer they would immediately report him and he would be imprisoned, but despite that, they would still be left with a wound in their souls for the rest of their lives, hysteria and depression, a stain on the family's honor due to the fact that their daughter almost married a serial killer...

`You know Jessica Babe...I think you made a great choice, the guy is a pilot, a man of his word, now it's okay - sometimes he'll be away from home for a long time when he goes on a mission, it is as it is, you'll adapt somehow`. `Don't cry daughter, no one knew that your fiancé slaughtered a girl, we'll get through this somehow, oh my, what a shame. Oh woe is me!

Two completely realistic scenarios and two completely different approaches to murderers. How is that possible? That is the power of ink and paper, that is the distortion of perception produced by the simple stamping of a state seal that serves to infuse justification and even morality into one dying woman as opposed to another. This death is not death.

License to kill & maim little girls.

If tomorrow a law were to be passed that would legalize killing purely for fun, no one would cry. And the second scenario would become quite acceptable in heaven...

(Roger Mortis, 112)

Hello Mr.Winston

Somebody, somewhere, once...became acquainted with dystopia as a phenomenon through books and films. Terms like ``Big Brother`` or ``Orwellian`` have become part of the everyday vocabulary of the population. But despite the countless books, films, documentaries, TV series and comics that are available today and that deal with dystopian themes - something strange happened.

Unfortunately, we have that ``honor``, a historical moment, to be in a real time dystopia.

Like the frog from the boiling water experiment, when it escapes from the pot if it is immediately placed in boiling water and remains to be boiled if the temperature of the water is slowly increased - so too we, reading and watching dystopian themes on the screen, have failed to recognize the symptoms in time. And now we are boiling in the dystopian stew.

Because today...we are already living the dystopia. Adults are self-censoring. So that no one hears anything. So that no one somewhere tips off. And the little humanity that thrives in their brains is killed. After the royal rent is gone. The dividend of fear. The two hundred euros. Such people feed that dystopia. In its stomach our past, present and future end, the destinies of unborn children end. But that is not the worst. The worst comes for the next generations who will be promoted from wage slaves to chattel slaves. When for a written opinion on a virtual medium one will go to prison, will be beaten and will be left on the street. When the price of bare physical survival will increase significantly, as it already is. Which means for some 10 to 15 years from now.

The last bastion of independent thought, besides the inside of the skull (which citizen Winston Smith discussed at length) is the virtual world.

But the virtual is only a reflection of reality. The number and activity of membership in a virtual platform/community that would be a deliberate or accidental gathering of characters with alternative views on reality - does not always reflect the eventual possibility of generating a factor that could influence public opinion.

That is the problem with virtual communities. The penetration of activity from pages with binary code into reality seems to be somewhat unlikely. If they are not an extension of some real life activism, then the reach of such communities remains limited within the framework of virtuality.

(Roger Mortis, 111)

Kingdom of Heaven

It is no secret that the boundary between religion and sect or a cult is sometimes difficult to discern and that time is often the deciding factor in the appropriate categorization of the terms. Christianity was once a tiny sect in ancient Judea, and after a millennium and a bit of a downfall, it became the religion with the largest clientele on the market with imaginary friends. One such cult, founded by three friends in China in 1843, soon exploded (both figuratively and literally) on the scene, turning southern China into ruins as a result of the last dramatic attempt to Christianize the most populous country in the world.

What is particularly spectacular about the sect simply called ``God-loving Society'' and the uprisings that grew into a civil war is the number of victims. There is no precise consensus on this figure, but the literature contains estimates that go as high as 30 million dead, which means that the fourteen-year conflict known as the ``Taiping Rebellion`` was the deadliest in human history to date, surpassed only by World War II to this day. And of course, it remains completely unknown to the general public, at least those inclined to history, the most significant historical event about which no one has ever heard anything. The monotony among the Confucian-minded population was broken by a certain Hong Siu Chuan, a member of the Hakka minority who tried to enter the state administration dominated by Manchu Chinese who were not particularly inclined to share the state's bread outside their ``tribe``. Entry into that world of bureaucrats was conditioned by a series of tests in which candidates had to demonstrate their knowledge. Hong tried four times - and failed four times. Whether it was because of unfulfilled dreams or because of the inflaming madness - Hong began to receive `visions`, he found Jesus and began to think about how to mirror the heavenly order on earth. Several Western Protestant missionaries were more than willing to provide him with appropriate literature, which Hong studied in detail. But Mr. Siu Chuan went a step further - he declared himself the long-lost, immortal brother of Jesus who had finally revealed his hibernated identity!

Naturally, the role of such an entity is mixed - heavenly-earthly, so Hong proclaimed himself the `Heavenly King` and began to work on his theology and ideology. And it was extreme, of course, a mix of proto-communist egalitarianism, gender equality, strict Protestant puritanism, apocalyptic millenarianism, complete demonization of Confucianism and consequently - a fight against the wretched barbaric Qing dynasty that had sat on the Chinese throne for several centuries and which Hong claimed was the result of the mating of some demons...After quite unexpectedly attracting twenty thousand followers throughout South China, Hong proclaimed the coming of the Heavenly Kingdom of Peace. The sectarians were clear that the Heavenly Kingdom would soon face Armageddon, the final battle between good and evil. And for that purpose they began to seriously arm themselves and form a well-trained paramilitary force, at least as good as the Green Imperial Army of the Qing dynasty. But with the difference that the state soldiers suffered from a serious lack of fanaticism which was also exported to the ranks of the Heavenly Army.

It is striking that in just a few years until the fateful 1850, the sect recruited tens of thousands of members, but it should be known that that period was not exactly the brightest in the millennium of Chinese history, the Qing dynasty was in a decadent phase whose terminal period was already underway and which would reach its apotheosis in 1911, the heavy defeat in the Opium Wars against Britain, the escalation of the old traditions of drug addiction throughout the empire, the financial crisis, epidemics, floods and famine in many regions - together with the several active uprisings at that moment created something like a perfect storm where only the Hong cultists were missing for the situation to get out of control. And it got out of control in December 1850, when the cultists went on the offensive. On January 1, 1851, the beginning of the end of Evil and the triumph of Good was proclaimed when imperial troops attempted to root out the sectarians by attacking their stronghold in the city of Jintian. The heavy defeat of the empire in a clash with an ordinary sect was a sign of the mobilization of countless members, disappointed with the existing system. The next few months and several clashes with the state authorities, in which the "Celestials" won in all clashes - played a decisive role in stabilizing the sect. In the next few years, it is believed that the fighting forces of the Heavenly Kingdom of Peace numbered over a million lost souls.

In March 1853, the rebels captured the regional center of Nanjing, which they declared their capital. After taking over several other major urban centers, next on Hong's wish list was Beijing, the seat of the Chinese throne. But it seems that the sectarians overestimated their strength and failed in the siege of Beijing. It was then that divisions and factions within the sect itself began for the first time. A turbulent period followed of new conquests, defections from one side to the other and vice versa, flirting with Western missionaries in order to gain international recognition of the new kingdom by its Russian ``brothers'' in the Western world, and the eradication of Confucianism from the occupied territories. Looking into the abyss of their own power, during this time the Qing dynasty and the imperial army decided on a transformation. Foreign advisors and mercenaries were hired, vast quantities of Western infantry weapons and artillery were purchased, and intensive diplomatic activity was carried out to secure Western support. The Western colonial powers, at least officially - decided to support the regime in order to keep China as a whole. No one was willing to cooperate with an extremely fanatical Russian sect headed by a madman. A madman with episodes of genius - but a madman nonetheless.

And then there were the 'gifts' for foreign ambassadors and military attaches, and the Opium trade that brought in huge sums of money for the British. And all vices, including drug addiction, were banned in the new Celestial Kingdom. Fearing a serious decline in their profits, British companies and the government decided to help the Qing dynasty, together with the new republican empire known as the United States and the long-standing French presence in Indochina. After the spectacular victory of the sects at the Battle of Jiangnan in 1860, when the imperial army undertook the largest offensive against the Celestial Kingdom to that time, it seemed that the fate of China was decided in favor of the sect. But what was not so obvious, the great ``intra-sectarian'' divisions, epidemics and the melting of the funds needed to wage war - influenced the sects to throw everything at the card of conquering Shanghai, the main commercial center of China. By conquering Shanghai - the Western powers would be faced with a fait accompli and the empire would lose its main port and source of income.

The attack on Shanghai in August 1860 was the beginning of the end of the sect. Once again, the rebels proved powerless to break a huge fortified city with a siege. The Chinese army, together with foreign mercenaries led by the American Frederick Ward (who would not live to see the end of the war) and the legendary British adventurer General Charles Gordon (known as Gordon of Khartoum, the city where he would later end up with his head impaled on a Mahdi spear) - managed to repel the invaders.

After this turn of events, the initiative gradually shifted to the government forces and over time - after numerous battles and operations - the sect was trapped in its capital, Nanjing and its surroundings. A siege began in June 1864, during which the sect leader Hong died - probably by taking his own life, tormented by severe pain as a result of poisoning with spoiled food. Exhausted and running out of ammunition - thousands of sectarians fought fanatically to the death, to the last bullet and to the last blow with a saber. Few surrendered and the battles for every street and every house can be considered the forerunners of modern battles, Liege, Sevastopol, Berlin or Grozny where well-barricaded defenders fought to the death with the aggressors in a new type of conflict, completely urban and completely total. The government paid for the defeat of the sect with at least 120,000 victims in the last battle alone, and how many suffered on the side of the rebels - is unknown. If we take into account the reprisals that followed, the figure could rise to half a million dead, wounded and missing, which means that the siege of Nanjing was the most difficult battle in the history of mankind up to that time.

A few days after the death of the leader, Nanjing also fell and that was the end of the Heavenly Kingdom of Peace. The imperial authorities, worried about a possible new gathering of sectarians - decided to cremate Hong Siu Chuan and put the ashes in a cannonball and shoot Hong's remains in an unknown direction. I do not believe that there has ever been a more original funeral ceremony, which nevertheless fulfilled its preventive task in a world dominated by superstition, religious madness, Opium and Cholera. Although the Kingdom of Heaven itself collapsed, the surviving hundreds of thousands of sectarians turned to guerrilla warfare that lasted at least until 1871, when the last major paramilitary Taiping army was defeated. In certain regions, the sectarians continued to operate until the end of the nineteenth century...

The Taiping Rebellion was the beginning of the end of three thousand years of Chinese monarchy, an event that had disproportionate consequences for both Asian and global history. And its traces can still be seen today, for example when a person buys a new Tablet or mobile phone for ridiculous money, as a result of a chain of events that began quite inconspicuously, with a madman who suffered from `visions` and who, together with a few friends, founded his own cult.

(Roger Mortis, 110)

Anniversary

November 11, 107 years ago, at 11:11 a.m., the armistice between the Entente and the Central Powers came into effect, officially ending the Great War, later hastily called ``World War I.'' Although it was not even remotely the first global conflict (that honor would go to the Seven Years' War, the French Revolutionary War, and its spin-off, the Napoleonic Wars), it was the first global industrialized slaughterhouse in history, the first world conflict in the Machine Age.

Although it officially ended in the sign of four aces, it continues to cast its shadow to this day, as arguably the greatest turning point in modern history. Without it, there would have been neither Adolf nor Lenin nor Ataturk nor Yugoslavia nor the House of Saud...I fear that not 107 but 207 years will be too short to heal the wounds that began on a sunny Sarajevo morning on June 28, 1914...Despite the passage of a century, despite the death of the last known veteran a few years ago - the tail of that conflict is still dragging around. The war of all wars. The second one was only the second half. The banal phrase that `those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it` implies that people can learn from the past.

As can be seen, it is obvious that no one understood anything...

The first war is much less present in the media, public discourse, in cooperative conversations and in the memory of paradise - than the second one. Why this is so is a mystery. Perhaps because the second war was black and white enough to be experienced as a clash between good and evil. Or perhaps it was just a more photogenic clash. The first war has no shortage of iconic characters and weapons, Lawrence of Arabia, the Red Baron, Old Charles, Fat Bertha, Mata Hari, Zeppelins over London, the Apocalypse at Skagerrak, and even the greatest military tactician of all time - the never-defeated Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck, who with a handful of colonists and native Askari tied down disproportionately large Entente forces in southern and central Africa.

But despite this, it lacks the attention it deserves. And it all started so naively...The Austro-Hungarian government, irritated by the alleged participation of the Serbian government in the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, opened the war with river armored ships that shelled Belgrade. A few days later, Germany attacks Belgium for some reason (Schlieffen Plan) and later France. Russia, as an ally of France, attacks Germany from the east and Britain joins immediately, first at sea and later on land. Along with Britain, the dominion states of the Empire join in and in less than a month the war becomes global. People enjoyed the summer, in some countries people went on vacation, loosely... and oops! In two weeks the whole world is at war...

It is considered the first global conflict in which the industrial method of killing entered the scene. Until then, you often had to kill the enemy by looking him in the eye. Since then, you can also do it from afar. The machine gun (it had existed before, but this time it was used en masse, by entire villages) the mortar, poison gas, the tank, the submarine, the airplane and barbed wire enter the scene. Probably the most innovative war in human history, never before have so many revolutionary ways of killing people debuted as they did then.

The number of victims is difficult to determine, some claim 10 million and some go as high as 40 million. It depends on the methodology, whether the epidemics that spread because of the war are counted as victims of the war, whether the Armenian genocide is counted as part of the war, whether the shit in Ireland is counted, and so on, but an average figure would be 21 million dead and at least five times as many maimed, wounded, sick and displaced. Not the second, but the first war is responsible for today's map of the world. Why is it so long and wide? As for these areas, the number of people who died here is at least twice as high as in the second war. The devastation is also incomparable, an entire front passed here, Bitola was ruined by shelling. In Bitola there are both French and German cemeteries where thousands of dead are buried.

And the second war has all the hype, the first one is forgotten. That's probably because of the Nazis, they were an impressive bunch, with uniforms from Hugo Boss. The turning point of the war was the so-called `miracle of the Marne` in 1914 when the French stopped the Germans and the war from then on turned into a trench party on the Western Front, without any changes until the end. Another moment is the defeat of the German submarines who (fun fact) were the closest to winning the war for the Central Powers. Germany is falling apart from within, they have no resources and the people there are fed up with war, mass desertions, revolutions and uprisings break out, the Kaiser flees to the Netherlands and Germany surrenders.

The Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary and the German Empire cease to exist. In their place, new states emerge, Germany becomes a republic, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia appear on the scene and with Versailles - the stage is set for the next carnival of Evil, after 21 years - which will be three times larger.

There is a category of citizens who glorify the past, who look for mythical 'real men' in the uniformed sheep of that time. For those who think that post-traumatic stress syndromes and Vietnam syndromes are an invention of the new spoiled generations and that the old ones were brave men who didn't even bother with a fly, think again. Except that back then, trauma was called shell-shock and all the symptoms remained a family taboo. No one was allowed to know about the daily nightmares, about the shaking of various parts of the body, about the immense pain rooted in the soul, about wetting his pants at any loud sound. Such was the time, a man was not a man if he showed any emotion in front of his family or the public. And most often he had to hide it from himself.

Because future generations would also have to be sacrificed. It would have been extremely selfish for an average believer in a supernatural or secular God of that time to break the cycle of evil. New generations should have been given the chance to witness new mass slaughters.

(Roger Mortis, 109)