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When the war (WWI) finally ended it was necessary for both sides to maintain, indeed even to inflate, the myth of sacrifice so that the whole affair would not be seen for what it was: a meaningless waste of millions of lives. Logically, if the flower of youth had been cut down in Flanders, the survivors were not the flower: the dead were superior to the traumatized living. In this way, the virtual destruction of a generation further increased the distance between the old and the young, between the official and the unofficial.
Robert Hughes The Shock of the New
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When the war (WWI) finally ended it was necessary for both sides to maintain, indeed even to inflate, the myth of sacrifice so that the whole affair would not be seen for what it was: a meaningless waste of millions of lives. Logically, if the flower of youth had been cut down in Flanders, the survivors were not the flower: the dead were superior to the traumatized living. In this way, the virtual destruction of a generation further increased the distance between the old and the young, between the official and the unofficial.
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Robert Hughes

The Shock of the New

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Mind", can't make differences between real and not..., (OFF NOW THAT..., then that...), you are saying lie after lie..., then believing in false stuff. And thinking in positive sides so to scream not much as the other do, but as always you one moment scream you can't stop it... Now putting against me a knife and saying "Go away... give me my daughter... give me her back"..., don't you see the people laugh at you, don't you see it. Look their faces, with so many smiles, but they aren't people, they are from the army, off, off for god sake they are soldiers which have guns. Have killed few people, have taken your daughter and they are many as a number than you and your whole family... Probably this part as an General I must skip it, because it's logical however look it and from this side, nobody will sacrifice so you to be happy... you will die.. O, o, the poor little girl crying in front of the people, she just saw her mother pointing with a knife against the soldiers and now she is killed by one of the soldiers.

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That same moment he ordered the hateful portrait taken out. But that did not calm his inner agitation: all his feelings and all his being were shaken to their depths, and he came to know that terrible torment which, by way of a striking exception, sometimes occurs in nature, when a weak talent strains to show itself on too grand a scale and fails; that torment which gives birth to great things in a youth, but, in passing beyond the border of dream, turns into a fruitless yearning; that dreadful torment which makes a man capable of terrible evildoing.

NG
Nikolai Gogol

The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol