On War Memorials

Unitary Moonbat's excellent post yesterday at Progressive Historians about a proposed war memorial for a fallen Navy SEAL got me thinking about the politics of memory and the construction of popular history in America. Moonbat asks whether we, as left-leaning (and antiwar) historians, should support monuments to American casualites in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Here's my response:

First of all, thanks for bringing this up. You're right that this is off the radar for most progressives in this country.
To answer your question, i think it's quite useful to look at the politics of memorials in Germany, where they (obviously) are much more fraught with the ambiguity of good war/bad war than the bombastic, patriotic, and decidedly one-dimensional memorials in this country. In Germany, they actually make a distinction between monuments meant to commemorate a great event- `Denkmal', roughly `think about it', or `remember this', and memorials meant to warn about a past tragedy- `Mahnmal', from the verb mahnen, to warn.

For progressives or anti-war activists in this country, it is very hard to support a Denkmal for a criminal war we did not support. (And yes, for the record, I am talking about Afghanistan, as well as Iraq, here.) It's a question of frame-- Are we more interested in memorializing one soldier, who fought and died bravely "for his country", obeying the orders of his superiors, regardless of whether we support the war, or are we more interested in lessons for the society as a whole? (For the record, I do agree with your distinction between the motives of individual soldiers on the ground and the disastrous and evil policies of the political and military brass in Washington.)

Do I care that by memorializing a brave man who sacrificed his life for his country--- but whose life, as you said, was defined by violence, at the expense of the peoples the United States military oppresses around the world--- I'm also implicitly condoning what his idiot bosses decreed from Washington?

For me, it all comes down to the formation of public memory- what the Germans (again, sorry) call Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung, "coming to terms with the past." What do we want our children and grandchildren to glean from their whitewashed, simplistic history books in 50 years about the Bush years? Do we want them to see violent monuments glorifying war and conquest, or do we want them to see a Mahnmal reminding them of the tragedy of imperial hubris and the thousands of Americans (and hundreds of thousands of non-Americans) who died because of it?

I think my answer is pretty clear from the rhetorical question. Obviously, I'd rather our children learn from our mistakes, not repeat the idiocies of manufactured patriotism and start more wars.

But to come back to your main point, that does not mean that I would necessarily oppose this particular Denkmal. Honestly, I'm pretty indifferent to it- there are much more important things for us to oppose than this. Let the town commemorate their fallen son. And the concept of portraying him without his weapon is just ludicrous-better to depict the warrior with his tools of destruction than whitewash them.

Me, I'm too worried that one of us will have to be the next Gibbon, writing the Decline and Fall of the American Empire.