by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Interesting that this was written soon after the first World War had ended. I am tempted to research and see if I can find evidence of bias towards those who show a lack of conviction — ones who look before leaping.

The most famous line here “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity” is cited in a personal appeal by Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, on the Dunning-Kruger effect.

The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to the situation in which less competent people rate their own ability higher than more competent people.

No conclusion is provided by Wales other than what the research shows on its own. He brings up various types and forms of bias but leaves out the role of historical events such as World War I.

Today marks Armistice Day, the 1918 surrender of Germany that ended hostility on the Western Front in World War I.

It also is known as Veteran’s Day in the US, thanks to sentiment from Kansas, as I have written before.

Poppies are used for remembrance in reference to one of the most heavily contested areas of Europe, Flanders, which sits between French, German and British control. The flowers grew all around the battlefields and expanding cemeteries of Belgium.

A poem called “In Flanders Fields” was written by Canadian Colonel John McCrae while fighting there and published in 1915:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
      Between the crosses, row on row,
   That mark our place; and in the sky
   The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
   Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
         In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
   The torch; be yours to hold it high.
   If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
         In Flanders fields.

Poster from the Canadian War Department

The reference to crosses is not universal for more reasons than one might expect. Today the German news points out that some of the dead are treated differently from the other casualties in Flanders.

The Langemark cemetery is the final resting place of 44,294 German soldiers. More than half of them are buried in one mass grave, the Kameraden Grab, their names etched on large dark plaques running alongside the site.

[Andre de Bruin, a World War I guide and founder of Over The Top Tours] points to rows of gravestones that lie flat on ground, explaining: “Belgium imposed very strict restrictions on German memorials. Headstones were not allowed to stand, not like those of the Commonwealth soldiers and there were many other rules that applied only to Germans.”

There were hundreds of burial sites of German soldiers after 1918 but in the 1950s, Belgium ordered that the bodies be regrouped in no more than four sites, of which Langemark is one.

“It was probably done out of hatred for what happened, especially during World War II when Belgium was occupied. They even forbade the use of crosses above the headstones,” de Bruin said.