War, it turns out, is much, much worse than we civilian history students thought. Worse than the victims knew, those poor young boys and girls killing and being killed.
The new insight into the old plague War comes from those young victims themselves. From those young people wounding, and their wounded.
Cameras built in to the now ubiquitous mobile phones are providing the new evidence. The very few platforms brave enough to share the horrible video evidence give the few willing to see it an unwanted glimpse into just how evil war has always been.
Always, I insist, because I cannot pretend that this generation invented the horrors of War. They are merely the current players in a very old narrative. The propaganda and motives for it vacillate between hatred and greed, but the story plays out the same every time. It’s just that historical memory serves war as obediently as the young soldiers drafted to experience it.
The victorious whitewash war of its evil and replace its horrors with noble tales of heroism and virtue. These truly evil servants of war ensure the persistence of the plague by robbing us of its cure. They lie! They deceive and delude. They are fooled by the fools who came before them into sanitizing and glorifying war as a necessary evil.
The documentarian soldiers and casualties of today’s wars are calling bullshit on those lies.
FDR famously quipped, “I hate war”, and this civilian history student couldn’t agree more. But today’s lesson is that war is evil, but it’s not necessary. It must be purged from every society like the plague it is, and that’s never been more possible thanks to those youthful primary sources documenting it for us.
You wealthy and powerful sit atop mountains made of greed and hate and war profiteering. Greed and hate make war possible, but the young and youthful minded are realizing that even greed and hate are not inevitable or necessary. The masses pondering this plague of war are looking up and seeing you up there trying to hide behind your whitewashing machines.
And they’re coming up.