Operation AXIOM
Seventy-two years ago to the day, 1 September 1939, the Second World War—the most destructive & bloody conflict in the charnel house that is human history—began in earnest. The seeds of the war were sown in the retroactively numbered First World War, the world had been in crisis for a decade before the Nazi war machine leapt across the frontier & began the rape of Poland, & the crisis reached a fever pitch in 1937 when Imperial Japan launched a savage invasion into the heart of China, but the scores of millions of deaths that were to result from the war—& the acts of genocide that attended the ebb & flow of conquest—could still have been avoided up until this day in 1939. The world we inhabit, both for good & for ill, is a direct consequence of the Second World War, which began seventy-two years hence, on 1 September 1939. Lest we forget.

(I considered posted W. H. Auden's poem "September 1, 1939," but deemed the work of insufficient quality to endorse through reproduction.)