[Peace-discuss] The lessons we remember today

[patton paul]

 The Lessons We Remember Today
by James Carroll


VETERANS DAY in Canada is called Remembrance Day. On this day in 1918,
World War I ended, and the date was first set aside to honor that
decimated generation of men who fell into the abyss of the trenches.
Eventually, in the United States, Veterans Day became a time of
remembrance for all Americans who lost their lives in war, as well as for
those who served in defense of their country. Today, properly, the prayers
of the nation go to the national cemeteries, and its thoughts to those in
uniform. We carry in our hearts, especially, the young men and women
serving in Iraq. Whatever the moral and political burdens of the war, and
however much in dispute remain the decisions of the country's leadership,
the people of the armed services deserve to feel the gratitude of their
fellow citizens. Today we remember our soldiers, above all.

But the act of memory can be larger. We can recall, equally, what the
searing experience of World War I did to the conscience of humanity. That
war's unprecedented scale of mechanized death forced a new awareness on
men and women that war is no longer tolerable. In their desperation to
avoid future wars, they made a first stab at constructing a new social
order. Old empires disappeared, new political arrangements were adopted,
and finding alternatives to violence became an international priority.

After the "appeasement" of Munich, that idealistic impulse was regarded as
a mistake. Hitler and Stalin exploited the soft legacy of Nov. 11, 1918.
The urgent requirement of stopping each of them has been taken ever since
as proof that the post-World War I dream of peace was not only
unrealistic, but irresponsible.

And yet, on Remembrance Day, perhaps we can revisit the question. The
post-World War I generation was determined never again to send the flower
of youth into the maw of destruction. After World War II, in which urban
devastation and gas chambers replaced the trenches as signals of evil, the
defeated nations reinvented themselves as pacifist peoples, and even the
victors resolved to leave war behind.

"The weapons of war must be abolished," President Kennedy told the United
Nations, "before they abolish us."

But again the vision fell short of being realized. In America, an
open-ended embrace of those weapons, justified by the threat from Stalin's
children, not only defined a main national purpose, but changed the
meaning of politics, tied universities to war theory and defense grants,
and created an unbreakable economic dependence on military manufacturing.
Then the Cold War ended, and the whole world seemed ready, at last, for
the establishment of a realistic and dependable peace. An ultimate "peace
dividend" seemed about to pay out.

Washington alone, of the great powers, still regarded war as meaningful
and war preparation as a priority. The now enemy-less Pentagon insisted on
maintaining forever the "hedge" of its nuclear arsenal, and the White
House, especially under George W. Bush, replaced the dream of an
international order based on diplomatic agreement with the idea of a Pax
Americana based on "full spectrum dominance."

On Remembrance Day, look at what has been forgotten. Washington's view of
the world, replicating imperial Prussia's of 100 years ago, treats the
main epiphany of the 20th century as if it did not happen. As if no
lessons were learned in the trenches of Flanders, the fires of Dresden and
Tokyo, the fallout of Hiroshima, the countless peasant wars which threw
back the great powers, the genocides which sacrificed whole peoples to
ferocious versions of the truth.

The much derided human impulse to find another way in fact succeeded, with
the nonviolent overthrow of the Soviet empire from within, but that, too,
is forgotten in a Washington that prefers to think of itself as the Cold
War victor. The rituals of remembrance are all military, and the ethos of
war is still made to seem ennobling. Alas, a new generation of the young
are being fed with this lie -- and into it. That the roster of America's
war dead is being added to on this Veterans Day should outrage the
nation's conscience.

We began by thinking of Iraq, and we end there, too. Reports come back
that many GIs have inadequate equipment and faulty protective gear, but
their vulnerability is worse than that. They lack the protection of a
clear and just cause. Their enemies multiply in the poison cloud of Bush's
callow taunts. Bush has put this country's soldiers in an impossible
position, for no good reason.

This betrayal of the young is a betrayal of the old, too. Bush's war
defiles what the heroes of the last century saw when they saw through war,
and betrays the memory of their bravely imagined alternative future --
peace -- which is the only future there can be.

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.

 Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.