We need to learn from history or we are bound to repeat its mistakes, or so the saying goes. Maybe if we can figure out what leads to conflicts and wars, we can learn how to prevent them or at least discourage them. But here I am reminded of the passage early on (p. 4) in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, when the narrator is contemplating writing an anti-war book:
“You know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing anti-war books?”
“No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?”
“I say, ‘Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?’”
What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.
What Vonnegut is saying here is so full of common sense that it has to be true. There is no realistic way to stop all wars. Maybe we can at least learn from past wars’ mistakes?
Such is the subject of an article by Arthur I. Cyr published in the Korea Times titled “Lessons from Vietnam.” As the Obama administration approaches an amped-up approach in Afghanistan, there are lessons to be learned from Vietnam, just like there were in Iraq. But will we heed them? On PBS’ “News Hour,” former Congressman Lee Hamilton, a co-chair of the Iraq Study Group, “noted how [Afghanistan] has not changed for ‘a thousand years’ and expecting any transformation is utopian.”
Maybe talks are possible. An Al Jazeera article by Imran Khan suggests that Obama is hinting at the possibility of talking to the Taliban in Afghanistan, with the goals of getting them to stop supporting al-Qaeda and be more cooperative with the democratization process in the country. Concerns are there. Khan’s article poses the question: “Are there any ‘moderate’ Taliban [the U.S.] can reach out to?”
Increased amounts of troops sent in to Vietnam were not the answer then, just as sending larger amounts of them into Afghanistan is not necessarily the answer now. As Vonnegut states, maybe wars will always occur. But maybe, just maybe, we can learn from our mistakes and avoid making similarly catastrophic ones in the future.
*Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, 1969
As you are, I am hopeful that we will learn from out mistakes. That people ruling over nations could take a step back and few the whole picture (as the Tralfamadorians do in Vonnegut’s book). As a species, it has become apparent we will not avoid war completely; however, it seems many of us agree that we could be more intelligent about it. In school, we study history, which means war, conquests, colonialism, and crusades. It is practically bred into us, that war and conquering is the way to handle disputes. Not often in my history classes did we actually discuss the lessons learned from war. It moral lesson was, “We won, they lost.” Or they taught all the bad other countries did to their people and why America is so grand, (breeding patriotism is another way of encouraging support for wars). I wish we could learn from all of our past mistakes and wars, but it is hard to feel optimistic about the topic when even in the twentieth century a country can be sent to war on what now have been verified as lies (The War in Iraq). One would believe we would not get duped like that again, we believe ourselves to be educated and advanced, but clearly, we are just as susceptible to government forced lies as every nation that got behind something.
By: Jesse on March 22, 2009
at 8:36 pm
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By: Comments « Three Little Birds on April 19, 2009
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