Tonight the sun goes down.

Not only did we fail to learn very much from the past--this would hardly have been remarkable. But we have become stidently insistent--in our economic calculations, our political practices, our international strategies, even our educational priorities--that the past has nothing of interest to teach us. Ours, we insist, is a new world; its risks and opportunities are without precedent. Writing in the nineties and again in the wake of September 11, 2001, I was struck more than once by this perverse contemporary insistence on not understanding the context of our present dilemmas, at home and abroad; on not listening with greater care to some of the wiser heads of earlier decades; on seeking to actively forget rather than to remember, to deny continuity and proclaim novelty on every possible occasion.

[...]

Americans have forgotten the meaning of war. In part this is, perhaps, because the impact of war in the twentieth century, though global in reach, was not everywhere the same. For most of continental Europe and much of Asia, the twentieth century, at least until the 1970s, was a time of virtually unbroken war: continental war, colonial war, civil war. War in the last century signified occupation, displacement, deprivation, destruction, and mass murder. Countries that lost wars often lost population, territory, security and independence. But even those countries that emerged formally victorious had similar experiences and usually remembered war much as the losers did. [...] Compared with the other major twentieth-century combatants, the U.S. lost relatively few soldiers in battle and suffered hardly any civilian casualties. As a consequence, the United States today is the only advanced country that still glorifies and exalts the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown today. America's politicians and statesmen surround themselves with the symbols and trappings of armed prowess; its commentators mock and scorn countries that hesitate to engage themselves in armed conflict. It is this differential recollection of war and its impact, rather than any structural difference between the U.S. and otherwise comparable countries, which accounts for their contrasting responses to international affairs today.

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"I do not suppose that at any moment of history has the agony of the world been so great and widespread. Tonight the sun goes down on more suffering than ever before in the world."



REAPPRAISALS. TONY JUDT.