And Mankind’s folly
Ahead of the Memorial Day holiday, a book arrived unexpectedly from an old friend. John Nation writes about his exploration of WWI battlefields in France in “A Nomad in No Man’s Land.” It began with a simple road sign, Ligne du Front–“Front Line.” The Somme battlefield.
Brian Klaas reflects today on his recent visit to Normandy cemeteries.
“From the beginning, then, there was a tension” in memorials to the Confederate war dead, Klaas writes, “between paying respects to those who had died—the sons and fathers and brothers—and a debate over whether you could ever separate out the injustice of a war’s cause from those who fought in it. For some, the answer was absolutely not. After all, Confederate soldiers fought to keep others enslaved, one of the great stains on human history.”
Above the WWII beaches in Normandy stand memorials to the “sheer scale of that human tragedy” that occurred there marked by row upon row of white marble headstones: 9,387 in the Allied cemetery. The Nazi cemetary, Klaas expplains, “is dark and black. The gravestones are cut from a rough, plain brown/black stone, a striking juxtaposition with the pristine white marble”: 21,222 German soldiers buried in a field off a busy two-lane highway, both “perpetrators and victims,” Klaas observes:
Even if we accept that a 17 year-old conscript bears less moral responsibility than a 40 year-old Waffen-SS officer, there can be social utility in ignoring that nuance in pursuit of reinforcing the more important message: that the Nazi scourge must never repeat itself.
These are the moral wrinkles brought to the surface by warfare. Social science research from the Milgram Experiment to studies of brainwashing and propaganda, has demonstrated how seemingly ordinary people can commit extraordinarily brutal acts. If you study authoritarianism, as I do, it’s impossible to miss this complexity. Ideology, it turns out, is the catalyst of mass atrocities, and when it’s at its most potent, as in totalitarian states, few are immune from its poison. How would you behave today if you had been born into a family in North Korea?
This is not to absolve perpetrators, or the regimes they fight for, but to better understand them—and to understand how a 17 year-old German teenager ends up dead in a cemetery in France.
The casualties at the Battle of the Somme were even more horrific.
We share a terrible legacy, including that of the war that ended slavery, and for which this country has never fully come to grips. A century and half later, that itching scab has left many of our embittered countrymen itching for another.
Klaas warns:
Wars sometimes become necessary—to defend innocents from horrific aggression wrought by tyrants and dictators. But as we remember the sacrifice of the brave, we must also remember the broader lessons: that totalitarian, fascist ideologies are a scourge of our species and that the human cost of wars is a nauseating waste.