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8/26/2007


 

Why Study War?



VDH: Try explaining to a college student that Tet was an American military victory. You’ll provoke not a counterargument — let alone an assent — but a blank stare: Who or what was Tet? Doing interviews about the recent hit movie 300, I encountered similar bewilderment from listeners and hosts. Not only did most of them not know who the 300 were or what Thermopylae was; they seemed clueless about the Persian Wars altogether.

[Snip]

What, then, can we do to restore the study of war to its proper place in the life of the American mind? The challenge isn’t just to reform the graduate schools or the professoriate, though that would help. On a deeper level, we need to reexamine the larger forces that have devalued the very idea of military history — of war itself. We must abandon the naive faith that with enough money, education, or good intentions we can change the nature of mankind so that conflict, as if by fiat, becomes a thing of the past. In the end, the study of war reminds us that we will never be gods. We will always just be men, it tells us. Some men will always prefer war to peace; and other men, we who have learned from the past, have a moral obligation to stop them.

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HUMINT: War is a form of cultural communication. It is the most destructive of all possible mergers between two sides. When each side agrees to kill the other and die for their respective causes, both assert their identity with violence. The United States of America was born as a liberation movement. I happen to believe our nation’s birth was preordained as the natural trajectory of mankind. The proof exists in our DNA. Human beings are social, highly communicative and prone to disrupt pockets of dysfunction. The American experiment is the latest and most successful incarnation of what mankind intends to do with its future.

Woe to the man who abandons humanity so that he may hide and prosper among his people’s dysfunction. One day, his brother’s wrath will strike him down. These days, his brother wears an American flag on his shoulder --- but that peculiar red, white and blue symbol of liberty is as humanistic as it is nationalistic. Freedom is the ultimate cause, and no where on earth is mankind more free than inside these United States.

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