But such official commemoration does not enhance our appreciation and awareness of the past. It serves as a substitute, a surrogate. Instead of teaching history we walk children through museums and memorials. Worse still, we encourage them to see the past—and its lessons—through the vector of their ancestors’ suffering.. marked by its own distinctive and assertive victimhood. ...
This contrast merits statistical emphasis. In World War I the US suffered slightly fewer than 120,000 combat deaths. For the UK, France and Germany the figures are respectively 850,000, 1.4 million, and over 2 million. In World War II, when the US lost about 420,000 armed forces in combat, Japan lost 2.1 million, China 3.8 million, Germany 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 10.7 million. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC records the deaths of 58. 195 American over the course of a war lasting 15 years: but the French army lost double that number in six weeks of fighting in May-Jun 1940. In the US Army’s costliest engagement of the century –the Ardennes offensives of December 1944-January 1945 (the “Battle of the Bulge”)—19,300 American soldiers were killed. In the first 24 hours of the Battle of the Somme (July 1, 1916) the British Army lost 750,000 men and the Wehrmacht almost as many.
With the exception of the generation of World War II, the US thus has no modern memory of combat or loss remotely comparable to that of the armed forces of other countries. But it is civilian casualties that leave the most enduring mark on national memory and here the contrast is piquant indeed. In World War II alone the British suffered 67,000 civilian dead. In continental Europe, France lost 270,000 civilians. Yugoslavia recorded over half a million civilian deaths, Germany 1.8 million, Poland 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 11.4 million. These aggregate figures include some 5.8 million Jewish dead. Further afield in China, the death count exceeded 16 million. American civilian losses (excluding the merchant navy) in both world wars amounted to less than 2000 dead.
As a consequence, the USA today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknocn today. ... For Washington war remains an option—[in Iraq] the first option. For the rest of the developed world it has become a last resort. Judt, NYRB, 5-1-08, p. 16, 18
We must start now to recognize our crimes and our complicity. We are all guilty, and we must all take action in whatever way we can. Torture and abuse are not American. They are foreign to us and always should be. We need to exercise them from our souls and make amends.—Col. L. B. Wilkerson, US Army (Ret.) former chief of staff to Colin Powell, NYRB. Ibid, p. 43
[on the date marking the deaths of 4000 American troops in Iraq] no one can give you a figure of the number of Iraqis souls that have been lost in the five years so far of this conflict. ... We’re talking about—on conservative estimates between 80,000 and 100,000 Iraqis have lost their lives. And that’s not to mention more than 4 million Iraqis are displaced from their homes... NYRB ibid, p. 56
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