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Highlands Today

Revering Violence

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Randy Ludacer

Published: December 8, 2008

The problem with our view of history is we revere the violence rather than review the issues that caused it.

Movies display in detail the attack on Pearl Harbor, the D-Day invasion, the Battle of the Bulge. Re-enactors playing dress-up perform in Kabuki-like ritual, a dumb show, reliving the carnage of Civil War battles, parading about old battlefields, while we dissect the tactics, the geography of military movement but rarely focus on the causes, the events which brought us into conflict.

Little study is devoted to those elements of the treaty of Versailles, which set in motion the imbalances which brought Hitler to power; the abuses of the czarist regime which led to the Russian Revolution; the social and economic imbalances which brought about the attack on Ftort Sumter .

The history of war is a study of the results of our mistakes but too little attention is paid to the preliminary causes which brought about the bloodshed. As Santayana once observed, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

On days devoted to remembering the anniversary of the events which tore society apart and crippled and killed millions of children, it would be useful to examine those events which led us to the conflicts, to highlight and study the flash points to be avoided in the future.

Clausewitz observed that "...war is not merely a political act, but is the pursuit of those same objectives which could not be achieved by peaceful means." The lives of our children and the potential for peace in the world depend on us doing better.

Perhaps rather than focusing on memorials to past mistakes we should direct our attention to problem solving for the future. Therein lies the hope for generations yet born.

Randy Ludacer
Lake Placid

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