On August 10, 1915, British physicist Henry Mosely—who would’ve likely won the Nobel Prize that year—died in perhaps the most disastrous error mankind has thus far made, The First World War (1914-18). Bright and pious fellow humans that had absorbed German, French, British, Russian “identities”; students, fathers, engineers, “great minds,” and “experts,” who even shared a common European Christian heritage, reverted to their tribal ape-like nature. For “God, honor, flag, and country” they slaughtered each other, leading to about 20 million deaths and millions more left invalid. At 7:30 am, July 1, 1916 the Battle of the Somme began. On this single day, the British had about 20,000 fatalities and 35,000 wounded. Once the fighting commenced, a British soldier was killed or wounded on average every second. Taking into account about 12,000 German casualties, every 5 seconds 6 people would be killed or wounded.

Militaries—usually being the biggest competition-immune monopolies, protected by flag-waving tribalism—tend to be the most wasteful and slow changing bureaucracies around. By the beginning of the 20th century, the machine gun had already proven its worth, making cavalry charges and frontal assaults disastrous tactics. As military technology improves, toughness, valor, determination, etc. become less and less important, wounding our manly pride, and especially that of those cavalry men who were once formidable fighters, men like British Generals Douglas Haig and John French. Instead of using their reason and putting their flamboyant cavalry-riding years behind them, they spent their lives defending old techniques and downplaying the superior effectiveness of newer weapons like planes, tanks, and machine guns, at the expense of thousands of soldiers. In his 1907 book, Cavalry Studies, Haig declared that “the role of Cavalry on the battlefield will always go on increasing.”….

WWI ended on Nov. 11th, 1918, a day which was remembered as ‘Armistice Day’ in the US. Yearly we’d be reminded of this tribalistic calamity and inadvertently be made to ponder how our “great leaders” and “intellectuals” were utterly powerless to prevent the slaughters and were in fact their promoters. Unfortunately, on June 1, 1954, the Eisenhower administration renamed Armistice Day to the current Veterans Day.

Instead of thinking about the root fallacies leading to needless wars, we now praised young men for blindly taking orders to courageously and valiantly kill fellow human beings. In his classic essay “Patriotism” (1902) by the great Herbert Spencer, he describes how he once shocked a British general who was lamenting how British troops in Afghanistan were in danger when he told him: “When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don’t care if they are shot themselves.” This name change was a disastrous idea which may be inadvertently responsible for much of the militarism and warmongering that still plagues mankind.