"What Have We Learned, If Anything?"I re-read Judt's essay tonight, and it reminded me why I chose it for the seminar in the first place. Judt is a prolific author, despite suffering from the really scary degenerative disease, ALS. Recently, he published Postwar, the history of Europe since '45 (or the evocative "Stunde Null", an appropriate German moniker). What I love most about him is his conceptual clarity--Judt has managed to develop a narrative history that fully reveals just how frought and revolutionary the post-war period has been. (And here I have to mention that he is the director of NYU's Erich Maria Remarque Institute--how cool is that?)
Judt insists that we have replaced our consciousness of history with a "moral memory palace"; a space where we celebrate the suffering and victimization of individuals and groups. He argues that the "mosiac" of history actually "separates us" from one another in a way that national histories did not. Certainly, it's true that relying on a ethnic, gendered, or racial identity at the expense of something more universal reduces the power of nation-state identity, but I don't know if I'm convinced that it has reduced the meaning of the past to a collection of "our many and often contrasting present concerns."
What I found absolutely convincing was his argument that Americans have "forgotten the meaning of war". He notes that all European states, even Great Britain, were economically devastated as a result of the Second World War, while the United States walked away relatively unscathed. His statistics regarding military and civilian casulties are even more shocking. Our glorification of military virtues and military men; our muscular foreign policy, and our willingness to countenance torture as a positive necessity are all a function of our failure to learn from the past. "War," he writes "brutalizes and degrades winners and losers alike".
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