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Story Time
In the tense debates of **World War I**, politicians often displayed the **Dunning-Kruger effect**—overestimating their grasp of strategy while lacking true military insight. Their speeches tried to **elicit** patriotism, yet soldiers in the trenches needed **empathy**, not empty words. Many became **enervated** by endless mud, gas, and gunfire, their spirits worn thin. Back home, newspapers sometimes **excoriated** commanders for failures, though the public could do little to alter the course of war.
Artists responded through **exhibition** and protest, turning to **expressionism** to capture anguish and chaos. Their paintings rejected calm landscapes, instead portraying jagged figures and colors that conveyed despair. To critics, such images seemed **fatuous**, even grotesque, but to veterans they echoed a deep **foreboding** that words could not capture. Techniques like **foreshortening** twisted perspective, mirroring a world bent out of shape.
Teachers and reformers used the war years as a kind of **formative assessment** of society, asking what lessons might be learned to prevent repetition. Architects carved names of the fallen into stone **friezes**, memorials where silence spoke louder than oratory. But even remembrance was contested—leaders practiced subtle **gaslighting**, insisting the sacrifices were glorious, masking how wasteful the slaughter had been.
A century later, digital memorials grow vast, measured not in stones but in terabytes. One could call it remembrance on a **giga** scale: archives, letters, and photographs spanning continents, preserved so that the lessons of one catastrophic war might still be heeded by generations to come.
Artists responded through **exhibition** and protest, turning to **expressionism** to capture anguish and chaos. Their paintings rejected calm landscapes, instead portraying jagged figures and colors that conveyed despair. To critics, such images seemed **fatuous**, even grotesque, but to veterans they echoed a deep **foreboding** that words could not capture. Techniques like **foreshortening** twisted perspective, mirroring a world bent out of shape.
Teachers and reformers used the war years as a kind of **formative assessment** of society, asking what lessons might be learned to prevent repetition. Architects carved names of the fallen into stone **friezes**, memorials where silence spoke louder than oratory. But even remembrance was contested—leaders practiced subtle **gaslighting**, insisting the sacrifices were glorious, masking how wasteful the slaughter had been.
A century later, digital memorials grow vast, measured not in stones but in terabytes. One could call it remembrance on a **giga** scale: archives, letters, and photographs spanning continents, preserved so that the lessons of one catastrophic war might still be heeded by generations to come.