...by making war a priority in our curriculum – organizing teaching units around it, surrounding ourselves with gripping stories about it – we actually make war a priority in ways that it wasn’t. We construct a past that never was, and in doing so construct a future that need not be: a world in which war is a constant presence, a fellow traveler....
He's also got some interesting thoughts on where those gripping stories come from - not from the battlefields themselves, but from the narratives constructed after the event, by politicians and generals, to justify the sunk cost in human life and by the bereaved, to give some sort of meaning to their loss:
Fearing that some evil is gratuitous, that everything might not happen for a reason, we seek to invest such events with meaning. But rarely does that meaning come from simple admiration for lives well lived. We must act in such a way, echoing Lincoln, that these dead shall not have died for nothing.
As a result, he fears that the righteousness of war has been turned into a dogma and violence has been sanctified, even after futile or disastrous military campaigns that achieved nothing to justify the loss of life. 'Violence is the spirituality of our society ... It has virtually been accorded the status of a religion' goes a quote from one Walter Wink in Simon's essay. In insisting that sacrifice of latest war could never have been made in vain, we may be helping to make the next one more likely. It's not an argument for pacifism, but it's a compelling appeal to not to censor our critical faculties and rubber-stamp the case for war out of misplaced respect. It's well worth reading the whole thing here.
At the very least, keeping a critical head on when thinking about war is a damn sight more respectful than what some scandal sheets got up to while they were emotionally claiming to 'support our boys' .
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