The song (by Sabaton) came on as I was heading to work this Thursday, and I found myself tearing up. It’s the first time in a few years that I heard it and it hit differently. I’ve got relatives and friends of friends in active duty.

Not anyone I’m in touch with, but I’ve met them, and I hear of them. The price of a mile is the suffering and lives of them, their friends, and so many other young men.

One of my bubbles has been burst by what’s happening in Ukraine & Israel. War is no longer history, news and reports. It has become a lot more real to me, and it’s something I could end up being a part of.

This feels like a rather serious topic for a community called casual conversation, but feel free to share your thoughts on this, or a “bubble bursting” moment of your own.

  • Visiting the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders in 2003 was sobering. My mother was visiting me in China at the time and she insisted she wanted to go see it, to show me some family history.

    That wasn’t the bubble bursting. It was sombre. There was some eye-opening. But nothing really that I didn’t already know, and I’d already experienced Bergen-Belsen, so the sheer inhumanity of human beings was nothing new to me. Further, the people attending it looked by turns somber and shocked, but that was about it. The Chinese people in attendance were basically reacting like I did.

    Or so I thought.

    The bubble bursting moment was this song¹. This is where I found out that there is no forgiveness for this. That there is still a very strong undercurrent of raw fury at Japan and others that’s just lurking quietly beneath a facade of joviality. The bill for the massacre has not yet been paid, and it became clear to me in about 2020 how big that bill was likely to be.

    Oh, and where I found out that the rage is infectious.


    ¹ It’s a common joke to say “don’t click on this link!” to the point that this warning will likely fall on deaf ears. But do not click this link if you are in any kind of a fragile state. The song is brutal and unrelenting (as is the whole album it is from). There are no happy feelings. There is incalculable pain, misery, rage, and resignation. It is not something to experience lightly.

    • IcebladeOP
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      28 months ago

      The song itself was lost on me as I don’t understand the language, but the imagery and text were quite evocative. Yet, with these kinds of things, I try to remind myself that the perpetrators of these horrors are long gone. The important part is to prevent these sorts of things from happening again, because if all of these “debts” of our long-gone ancestors were to be repayed in kind, nothing would remain of humanity but a pile of corpses, nigh all of them innocents.

      Personally, I hope for a future where our great-grandchildren will think of war and its horrors as a legend of the past, barbarity consigned to the history books, lest it be forgotten and repeated.

      • I try to remind myself that the perpetrators of these horrors are long gone.

        For some value of “long” I guess.

        Some of the most notorious perpetrators of Japan’s war crimes died in my lifetime. Hirohito died, for example, when I was 23.