Wolves of War

Memorial Day remembers those who died protecting the nation, those who valued some quality greater than life itself. It is the other side of homicide where another's life is felt inferior to a larger concept or truth.
These hierarchies can get messy and confusing: How does one's circumstances of birth create a sacrifice and an executioner, as it does in Marxism? How does one god of benevolence toward some demand murder of the nonbeliever? How are some arbitrary or historic geographies triggers for combat and death? Indeed, how are the incarnations of Materialism, Naziism and Marxism, to be opposed? 
More, in our increasingly materialistic world of evolving biologic and historic accidents, how is anything worth fighting for?
Memorial Day is more than a day of sentimentality, it honors the rejection of nihilism. It is a declaration of values.


                                      Wolves of War

The writer Paul Auster visited his grandfather's home town, the western Ukrainian city of Stanislaus now Ivano-Frankivsk, an area of the world where, during the war, all the Jews were massacred. He spoke to a local poet about a period in the town during the war.

The Jewish half of the population between 1941 and 1943 had already been killed, but when the Soviet army rolled in to capture the city in July 1944, the poet said, just six weeks after the Allied invasion of Normandy, not only had the Germans already cleared out but the other half of the population was gone as well. They had all run away in one direction or another, east or west, north or south, which meant that the Soviets had conquered an empty city, a domain of nothingness. The human population had dispersed to the four winds, and instead of people the city was now inhabited by wolves, hundreds of wolves, perhaps thousands of wolves.

The poem by Georg Trakl—Eastern Front--a World War I poem from 1914 written about Gródek, a Galician city not far from Stanislau that ends with the stanza:

               A thorn-studded wilderness girds the city.
               From bloody stairs the moon
               Chases terrified women.
               Wild wolves have stormed through the gates.