Years of Poems and Spirits

Today is Veteran’s Day. On the radio, there is a program telling the stories of surviving WWI (First World War that is!) veterans. The reporter said as the story was produced, his interviewees died out one by one. But all had the wishes that their stories be remembered. And history not forgotten.

But whose history is it anyway? Are we really interested in their story? Can we relate to their story? If we can do a time-warp and travel back, with the veterans, to the exact moments in their past, do we see the same “history”? By and large, what is history anyway?

If history was just a collection of facts, it would not have had the kind of prominence in philosophy (for example, a collection of fact can never produce the kind of dialectic process which by definition is dynamic and progressional).

Does history even exist as a structual being? I am not sure. What is more likely, history is the current interpretation of the past. But the past is definitely not the history.

In the WWI veterans’ case, what history is in their mind is their interpretation of what happened. Even if we travel back with them, we have a totally different set of reference points from theirs. Although we are seeing the same events, we are sure to interpret them very differently. Subsequently, after we travel back to today, when we have to reconstruct history for a common audiences, the stories will come out very differently.

In that sense, history is now. Contrary to the impression that history belong to the past, it is actually more “ours” than “theirs”. In other words, when reference for the past always has the past embedded, one will never see the full-frontal, if you will, of the past.

Sun Zi (or Sun Tsu) said, “What is more fundamental to a state than rituals and wars?” Rituals generates and reaffirms symbols and meanings (again, Geertz), therefore, it is the core of nation building before nationalism. But why war is as important? Carl von Clausewitz almost footnotes Sun: War is merely a continuation of politics.

How does this footnote help us today? If Sun and Clausewitz are correct, that war is a different form of politics, then one may deduce that, if a goal/strategy works in a war, it should work in the politics accompanying the war.

If the above statement is true, logic dictates the following being true too: if a strategy fails in politics, it shall fail in the related war too.

So what was the U.S.’ political strategy prior to the 2003 Iraq War? It is almost a joke to say there was a political strategy: the engagement was never really political and there was little strategy in that engagement either.

If there wasn’t any political strategy to ouster Sadam and to build a new Iraqi nation, how can there be a military one–given both Sun and Clausewitz are right? No wonder we are in such deep shit today.