Last night, Bill Moyers closed his program with a brief reflection on Memorial Day. In it he calls attention to a reflection on war and memory by his friend Louis Bickford on Huffington Post. And Bickford, in turn, reminds us of Friedrich Nietzsche:
Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher, identified three forms of history: antiquarian, monumental, and critical. The first sees history as quaint, curious, distant and irrelevant to our current lives. The second celebrates victory, heroism and tragedy in the past as precursors to current glory. The third suggests an engagement with the memory of the past, seeing the linkages between past, present and future and seeking to understand them.
Former Vice-President Dick Cheney is seeking to convince Americans that torture was justified. It is clear that he is interested in how this period is remembered; he is speaking both to us and to our progeny. He wants the history books and national memory to validate his time in office, and he is making active attempts to guarantee that they do. He wants to create a monumental history of the period.
If former officials succeed in making us forget that there was torture and that it was contrary to our values, they will establish impunity for the present and also for the future. That must not be allowed to happen. Extreme violations of human rights in any context, including a war, are too important to forget. We want future generations to remember that we insisted on accountability for them. Those are good reasons to have Memorial Day.
Memorial Day, for the most part, has been commandeered by those engaged in monumental history. But it began quite differently, as noted on Wikipedia:
According to Professor David Blight of the Yale University History Department, the first memorial day was observed in 1865 by liberated slaves at the historic Washington Race Course (today the location of Hampton Park) in Charleston. The site was a former Confederate prison camp as well as a mass grave for Union soldiers who died in captivity.
The freed slaves disinterred the dead Union soldiers from the mass grave to be inhumed properly reposed with individual graves, built a fence around the graveyard with an entry arch, declaring it a Union graveyard. A daring action for freed slaves to take such in the South just shortly after the Union's victory. On May 30, 1868, the freed slaves returned to the graveyard with flowers they had picked from the countryside and decorated the individual gravesites, thereby creating the first Decoration Day. Thousands of freed blacks and Union soldiers paraded from the area, followed by much patriotic singing and a picnic.
Blight tells this story in his book Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which traces the way in which the meaning and significance of the Civil War was reshaped in the 50 years following it, to essentially erase its central meaning and significance. The monumental approach to history always requires this, of course, though in markedly different ways with the few good wars and the overwhelming majority of bad ones.
Blight explores three different broad visions of Civil War memory-reconciliationist, emancipationist and white supremacist-which serve to illuminate one another through their contrasting interpretations and various interactions. The reconciliationist vision began with wartime responses to its terrible brutality. This was epitomized by Walt Whitman's experience of tending the wounded and dying of both sides. Given the extreme hostility that pervaded the air, it's hard to see anything but guileless innocence in Whitman's actions. Yet, by the time Blight's story is done, the reconciliationists will have utterly abandoned everything the Union fought for. The book concludes at the time of the 50th Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, a reunion of Northern and Southern veterans to which no blacks were invited, and which Blight justifiably calls "the triumph of segregation."
I cannot help but think of Obama's endless calls to "look forward not back" even while we're still in the middle of this "long war" as Cheney and the neo-cons so fondly call it, as yet another attempt to craft a reconciliationist narrative which is surely bound to end in nothing but a pure pack of lies, unless it is furiously resisted.
Earlier in Bickford's reflection than the passage quoted above, he writes:
Imagining the future, we may choose to remember the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, for example, more in terms of heroism than error, since that is the tendency of all nations. We may remember the irreparable loss of life of those who went to fight, and we will think about their families and the suffering they endured. Our national memory may focus on the deaths of the Americans, in the same way that our memories of Vietnam focus largely on American causalities.
Will we remember that there was a place called Abu Ghraib on the dusty outskirts of Baghdad, and that torture took place there, for which we were responsible? Will we remember that we acquiesced to a terrible policy put forward by our leaders and with the endorsement of many -- Democrats, Republicans, journalists, legal scholars -- that allowed for us to ignore international and American law prohibiting torture?
If we care about the future, we must, first, clarify the truth. Second, we must find ways of clearly condemning torture wherever and whenever it was committed. Third, we must take steps so that we remember our rejection of those acts. Our thinking about future memory is one way of preventing torture in the future.
This is so elementary that it's utterly astonishing we even have to be reminded of it. Still more astonishing that we almost never are reminded of it in the normal framework of accepted political discourse. But we have a "progressive" President--our first Black President, no less--who is constantly insisting on just the opposite: that we must forget the past, must not think about it, indeed, must go blindly forward ignoring every possible lesson we might learn.
This, quite simply, is madness. The very madness from which war is born in the first place.
Bickford continues:
We need to know the full truth, including who among us was complicit in allowing this to happen, even if it means looking inward to our own communities. Why did not more of us protest more loudly and sooner? Why did so many permit government lawyers to pervert the law for dubious ends, making a mockery out of the idea of reasonable legal interpretation?
We must engage in a serious inquiry and introspection with the goal of accountability. Journalists and scholars should continue their investigative research and analysis of what has transpired. A nonpartisan commission of inquiry should also be a part of this picture, as should the continued declassification of government documents. We should also help others transform Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and other sites of torture into sites of learning for the future. Seen from the perspective of memory, fair trials of those most responsible for wrong-doing are essential. The documents produced by trials would be vital elements of a true historical record. And trials are the strongest way of representing moral condemnation of wrongful behavior.
This is what democracies do. This is what democracy requires. If those who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan have died for anything noble, then it is surely this: that we learn from their sacrifice, even if what we learn is how deceitful was the reason for it.
Here, in conclusion is what Moyers said in full:
Finally, this week, my friend Louis Bickford spends his days, and often his nights, on the healing and prevention of atrocities and crimes against humanity. Cruelty, horror, and misery are part of his portfolio at the International Center for Transitional Justice, along with the power of memory.
On The Huffington Post, Louis has an essay in which he says that Memorial Day is meant to remind us of the hardship of war. But he goes on to ask, "What does it mean to choose how to remember?" What does it say about us, for example, if "...we choose to remember the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, more in terms of heroism than error..." This, he reminds us, is the "...tendency of all nations."
Louis got me to thinking that when we meditate on war this weekend - our recent wars that is - will we overlook the suicides? Sweep under history's rug the recent murder in Iraq of five American soldiers by a comrade who may have been driven mad by the horrors around him? Will we forget the death from friendly fire of a Pat Tillman and the shameful cover-up by the brass, including the role of the very general who now heads our operations in Afghanistan?
What of all those villagers killed by drones remotely fired in our name? Why aren't they part of the narrative we tell ourselves about war? Louis Bickford wonders if we'll ever remember, "...that there was a place called Abu Ghraib on the dusty outskirts of Baghdad, and that torture took place there, for which we were responsible?" After all, he says, it was the complicity of Republicans, Democrats, journalists and lawyers - some of them scholars - that allowed us to ignore international and American law prohibiting torture.
Over some 40 years now it has seemed to me that as time goes by we tend to remember wars, and the suffering they bring, as if they were inevitable, natural acts of history, rather than politically inspired choices. But war, as was famously said, is politics by another means - the lethal legacy of failed leadership, enabled, even ennobled, by propaganda, the partisan opiate of politics. It is good to be reminded, as my friend Louis so eloquently reminds us, that war is too important to forget, and that's one reason to observe Memorial Day. There is another - to hold before our face a mirror, so that we might see the images of war reflected in our own eyes.
Drawing on the latest Department of Defense statistics and data collected by icasualties.org, the Institute's analysis shows how the concentration of military bases in the South has caused states in the region to suffer disproportionate losses from the Iraq conflict:
Nearly half of U.S. based troops killed in Iraq-48%-came from the South. When one includes all U.S. troops-including the 9% stationed in Germany and other places overseas-Southern bases still accounted for 43% of those killed in the war.
More than a third of those killed in Iraq-38%-have come from bases in just four Southern states: Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina and Texas.
Of the 20 military bases that have lost the most troops in Iraq, eight are in the South. Fort Hood in Texas has lost more than any other base (479). Camp Lejeune, N.C. (294), Fort Campbell, Ky. (224), Fort Bragg, N.C. (190) and Fort Stewart, Ga. (171) are among the 10 bases in the world that have lost the most U.S. troops.
The South's share of military bases has steadily grown, exposing more communities to the losses of war. An Institute for Southern Studies report in 2002 found that 56% of U.S. troops were stationed in 13 Southern states. A follow-up report by the Institute in 2005 found that the Pentagon's latest round of base closures actually resulted in a net gain of over 15,000 military personnel at 50 Southern bases.
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