This presentation is from the Discussion Leader Training of the Justice and War: The Experiences of Military Personnel and their Families Program.
The ”Justice and War: The Experiences of Military Personnel and their Families” program works with veterans, active service members, their families, and civilians to explore the relationship between the lived experience of war and concepts of justice. The program puts participants’ own experiences in dialogue with the past through discussion prompts that flesh out the concept of justice through themes such as duty, heroism, suffering, loyalty, and patriotism.
This program was made possible by the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Why Difficult Wars Make Good Lessons (Christopher Nichols)
1. CONFRONTING DIFFICULT HISTORY,
WHAT MAKES IT DIFFICULT,
WHY DIFFICULT WARS MAKE
EXCELLENT LESSONS
Christopher McKnight Nichols
Professor of History, Wayne Woodrow Hayes Chair in National Security
Studies, Mershon Center for International Security Studies,
The Ohio State University
4. “‘Instead of making history,
we are made by history.’
The Rev. Martin Luther King
Jr. meant the words as an
admonition to his
congregation when he
addressed them in 1954.
King saw these two things
— making history and
being made by history —
as opposing forces.
As historians, we see them
as two parts of a process: In
order to make history, we
first have to understand
how history has made us.”
–Brian Rosenwald and
Nicole Hemmer, June 26,
2017, Washington Post
5. DIFFICULT HISTORY
Approaches
• Confronting the past, collective memory
• Present evaluation, revisionism, presentism
• The importance of context (usually multiple)
• For example, (de)naming, monuments
Applications
• Research, education, conversation(s)
• Solid principles, agreed on starting points
Challenges/Strategies
• What wider publics want to hear, can hear, can take on
board, can take with them -- a “useable past” (key words,
phrases, ideas)
• The good, the bad, the ugly
6. DIFFICULT WARS
WHAT THEY REVEAL AS “GOOD”
LESSONS
•American Way of
War
•Myth of America
•Ideology and
Ideals
J.S. Pughe, Peace (Puck,1905)
7. BRIEFLY THROUGH SOME WARS…
On difficulty | What makes “difficult” history difficult?
Difficult history comes from the concept of difficult knowledge, itself coined in
relation to traumatic, sensitive, and violent pasts
***
“What makes difficult history difficult is not how it confirms or complicates a
particular [person’s] prior historical understanding but the degree to which it
challenges or undermines the dominant societal narratives.”
-Magdalena Gross and Luke Terra (2018)
Difficult Wars, Some examples:
• Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino
• World War I (?)
• Vietnam
Comparison: World War II as the “good war”
8. Literary Digest, No. 17, November 26, 1898
The
Spanish-
American-
Cuban-
-Filipino
War
11. Japan Times (May 11, 2015)
What is known in Vietnam as “the American War”
12. KEY CHARACTERISTICS
DIFFICULT HISTORIES
• 1. Difficult histories are central to a nation’s history (whether or not they are so recognized
by political elites).
• Periods or events that are parochial or only loosely connected to the national past may also be
important, but they do not need to be integrated into the national storyline.
• 2. Difficult histories tend to refute broadly accepted versions of the past or stated national
values.
• They are often dissonant with the narrative template that characterizes the overall memory of a
national past (Wertsch, 2002), or they contradict such national values as tolerance or equality.
• 3. Difficult histories may connect with questions or problems facing us in the present.
• That is, they are relevant to the world around us.
• 4. Difficult histories often involve violence, usually collective or state sanctioned.
• This is where war and conflict are central. Even when it is not state sanctioned, this type of violence
may be committed by citizens of good social standing. Violence approved by the state or enacted by
groups of supposedly upstanding citizens cannot be easily dismissed as aberrations or exceptions.
• 5. Partly as the result of the other four conditions, difficult histories create disequilibria
that challenge existing historical understandings.
• To integrate these periods or events into an existing historical understanding may require people to
change their assumptions or beliefs. Such a process comes at a cost, either individually, in adjusting
our relationship to the nation and state, or collectively, in the national story we tell.
Adapted slightly from Gross and Terra, “What Makes Difficult History Difficult?” (2018)
13. THE EXPERIENCE OF WAR
DIFFICULT HISTORIES
AND THE USES OF HISTORY,
HUMANITIES
• Some takeaways on the uses of history in conversations overall and about the
experience of war, clarity of thought, and decision making:
• How policy-makers use history and how better approaches for them can help us in
talking about difficult history and difficult wars by thinking in “time-streams”
(George Marshall)
• “Enlightening questions are the point of every method we propose, questions
that shed light almost regardless of answers.”
• “We tend to overuse analogies, especially in argument, and underuse all else” –
histories of issues, individuals, institutions
• Three assumptions:
• “In employment of government power, particulars matter.”
• “Marginal improvement in performance is worth seeking.”
• “A little thought can help.”
• Ricahard Neustadt and Ernest May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision
14. THE TRANSCENDENCE OF
TRAGEDY
• “We find genuine tragedy … only in that destruction which
does not prematurely cut short development an success, but
which, instead, grows out of success itself.
• Breakdown and failure reveal the true nature of things. In
failure, life’s reality is not lost; on the contrary, here it makes
itself wholly and decisively felt. There is no tragedy without
transcendence.
• This transformation may go the way of deliverance, where man
rises to supreme reality through conquest of the tragic.
Otherwise the transformation may go the way of decline into
irresponsible aestheticism of the spectator: man distracted,
drifting, falling off into nothingness.” –Karl Jaspers, Tragedy is
Not Enough
