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History
Unheeded
What
does it take for peo-ple to learn from history?
Something convinced people that Verdun, where over 700,000
soldiers died, was worth the agony.
The author Robert Daley, visiting the massive concrete colossus,
Fort Douaumont, wrote:
“The
view to all sides is stupendous, which of course was why the
fort was built there in the first place. Although clearly
impregnable, Fort Douaumont fell to the Germans without a
shot being fired. It was re-taken eight months later almost
to the day, also virtually without a shot being fired. In
between it cost the French 100,000 lives. All it ever was,
was a symbol.
“How
they did believe in symbols in those days. In that war men
died for symbols by the millions. Verdun itself was a symbol—the
German generals had mounted their offensive against the one
spot in the 300-mile-long front that French honor would feel
obliged to defend to the last man. And of course, the very
war was a symbol. It was supposed to be ‘the war to make the
world safe for democracy.’ And if that slogan didn’t convince
you, it was also supposed to be ‘the war to end all wars.’
”
What does it take to convince people?
Allen J. Frantzen, author of Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice
and the Great War, makes the claim that, unfortunately,
chivalry, as a medieval code of heroic sacrifice, is not dead.
“Chivalry
reinforces group identity as it models heroic masculinity.
Whether we are excited or disturbed by these avatars, we need
to understand the medieval ideas, the moral and theological
meanings beneath them, for these ideas, old though they are,
help to explain violence in the modern world.”
What does it take for people to learn from history?
“In
our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in
South Vietnam, nothing which could happen that realistically
threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to
justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia,
or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom
. . . is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is
that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country
apart.”
That’s what John Kerry said to the Senate Committee on Foreign
Relations in 1971.
What does it take to convince people?
“Support
Bush. Trust Jesus.”
That’s what I heard two pro-Bush marchers were carrying on
signs when they ran into the cloud of witnesses gathered in
New York to oppose his re-election.
If the foolish, misguided, widespread assumption is that the
party for Christians is the Republican party, then the tenets
of both Christianity and the United States’ political process
are gravely misunderstood—and both undermined.
What does it take for people to learn from history?
e.e. cummings, unlike the poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried
Sassoon and Robert Desnos and Miklos Radnoti and Tadeuz Borowski—and
on and on and on—was a poet who saw the war and lived to tell
of it:
“next
to of course god America I
love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth nnnoh
say can you see by the dawn’s early my
country ’tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by
gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more
beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?”
He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water
What does it take to convince people?
Garrison Keillor isn’t staying mute:
“Our
beloved land has been fogged with fear—fear, the greatest
political strategy ever. An ominous silence, distant sirens,
a drumbeat of whispered warnings and alarms to keep the public
uneasy and silence the opposition. And in a time of vague
fear, you can appoint bullet-brained judges, strip the bark
off the Constitution, eviscerate federal regulatory agencies,
bring public education to a standstill, stupefy the press,
lavish gorgeous tax breaks on the rich.
“Here
in 2004, George W. Bush is running for reelection on a platform
of tragedy—the single greatest failure of national defense
in our history, the attacks of 9/11 in which 19 men with box
cutters put this nation into a tailspin, a failure the details
of which the White House fought to keep secret even as it
ran the country into hock up to the hubcaps, thanks to generous
tax cuts for the well-fixed, hoping to lead us into a box
canyon of debt that will render government impotent, even
as we engage in a war against a small country that was undertaken
for the president’s personal satisfaction but sold to the
American public on the basis of brazen misinformation, a war
whose purpose is to distract us from an enormous transfer
of wealth taking place in this country, flowing upward, and
the deception is working beautifully.”
—Jo
Page
You
can contact Jo Page at jopage@graceniska.org
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