More counter-intuitive wisdom from Chris
Written by: Beck
It's important to learn from history. History is in the past, it's important to move on. Both of these statements hold true. It all makes sense once put in perspective over at
man-sized target.
While the extreme leftist position, which held the American soldiers, government, and the country as a whole jointly responsible for the war faded in recent years, a replacement view that the soldiers fought honorably in a hopeless cause replaced it. This latter view permitted reconciliation between veterans and their society, without requiring an endless debate on the hypothetical prospects of victory. Even so, competing views of the nobility of the cause existed up to the present that did not mesh directly along political lines. Especially those not alive at the time, maintained the war was winnable and was lost for lack of will. Others said it should never have been fought. But the recriminations of veterans largely disappeared . . . to our collective benefit.
History is not a linear thing. Old wounds can reemerge years, decades, even centuries later at the slightest provocation. For Serbs, the 14th Century Battle of Kosovo might have easily happened yesterday. For blacks, the sins of slavery remain more prominent today, even though no slaves are present within living memory and institutionalized racism of "Jim Crow" largely disappeared in the mid-1960s.
The problem with certain "lessons of history," is that they become an albatross for contemporaries, preventing reconciliation and progress, requiring old fights to be refought under the logic of the vendetta. The lives of Palestinians and Israelis, most prominently, remain intertwined by these kinds of equally vital conceptions of history, which fuel an identity of victimhood.
Read it all, as a man says.
