ISMAIL LAGARDIEN: One person’s memorial day can be another’s day of mourning
Sunday November 11 is the anniversary of the day 100 years ago when World War 1 ended
There is an anniversary, or a memorial day of a kind, on every day of the calendar somewhere in the world. Some anniversaries are personal and private, others public. On Sunday, November 11, we pass the anniversary of the day 100 years ago when World War 1 ended. Given, as we are, to Ptolemaic parochialism, very many South Africans will probably dismiss the last day of the Great War as inconsequential. It was not. There is a lot to learn from the settlement that was reached, and much more from the political and economic consequences of the peace that followed, the least of which was the way the Great Depression of the 1930s introduced “a new era of economic theorising”. There have been suggestions of a causal relationship between the Keynesian revolution in economics and the Great Depression. This is for another discussion. Let us return to the idea of anniversaries as mnemonic events. Incidentally, November 11 is also the day, seven years ago, when the first working draft of the Na...
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