One hundred years ago today, my late maternal Grandfather prepared to go into the trenches of France with his Infantry company in the 42nd Infantry Division. He marched with the Christian morals and values of his time.
You look at these times with your inherent over-valued beliefs in your moral and intellectual superiority. It was a different time, with different beliefs. I do not subscribe to the beliefs that just because we are viewing the past with 20-20 hindsight, we are morally or intellectually superior. Just more prone to baseless arrogance.
That being said, Santayana was right.
“One hundred years ago today, my late maternal Grandfather prepared to go into the trenches of France ...”
Redleg Duke’s grandfather earned my respect and admiration generations before I was born. As did a great number of other troops, in that conflict and later ones. Also earlier ones. My respect and admiration came about many years after the fact, generations later in some instances. I was unable to honor them and reward them directly, as they deserved.
I found their accomplishments and sacrifices so worthy of note that I deemed it was my duty to make the lot of their aftercomers better; thus, it fell to me to spend more than half my active-duty career of just over 24-1/2 years in the search for better ways to save the lives of current troops in combat, and to the testing of systems already in use, to gather accurate and objective information on how good such devices actually were - as opposed to accepting a poorly-vetted collection of anecdotes and “common sense” notions, and muddling along. If our forces, thus inexpertly served, could in truth muddle through instead of merely failing outright.
Moral notions - fervently believed in or otherwise - have no meaning, if we do not prevail on the battlefield and as a consequence fail to survive. Only after surviving could we indulge our preferences and actually practice morality. If we do not get the sequence right, we are guilty of not taking the situation seriously. Are ideas like these moral & intellectual arrogance?
George Santayana was right, and wrong. Cycles of history do repeat - in a broad, generalized fashion. It happens even when people have learned the various lessons from history e found useful. But from the viewpoint of the people caught in the horrors, blunders, and overall messiness of this or that particular cycle, it’s always different. Each round of suffering is inflicted anew, upon different victims. Earlier victims are already dead and buried, and thus beyond harming. Or helping.
If we’re going to make any claims that we are successfully learning from history, I submit that our first duty is to be accurate: in factual detail, in formulation of concepts, in analysis, in the drawing of conclusions, and in predictions. Determining what exactly did happen in past times (especially during earlier armed conflicts) is not quite so simple, not quite so straightforward, as many citizens have come to believe. Mouthing platitudes and imperfectly understood “home truths” does not measure up. But it is what a great many Americans do - on both sides of the political divide. Indeed, many of us cling to inaccuracies, folk wisdom, and nonsense, in preference to documented, tested, and verified realities.