Before and after the day job, I finished All Quiet on the Western Front (spoiler alert: pretty much everyone dies) and started The Guns of August. I'd forgotten that all The Powers were pretty much expecting war from 1910 or so onwards; it was just a question of when.
Although I consider myself over-imaginative, I have trouble imagining the mindset that puts "natural" expansion of one's country over the lives of millions (like, twelve or so) human beings. Even though the Germans expected WWI to last only 39 days (literally: Schlieffen's war plan called for marching up the Champs Elysees on day 39) that's still no excuse for what followed.
How little we learn. The current Administration had a Sturm und Drang strategy too, right? But if it didn't work and there was resistance, there was no plan to deal with THAT, much less the rebuilding of a country and a society. I'd say that Dubya should have to read the bitterest of the war poetry - Sassoon, Owen, the free verse guy whose name I'm forgetting - in a jail cell somewhere until it sinks in. Would it ever?
Our seminar profs noted (in passing, but with bemusement) that those of us who spoke of trauma in our final presentations - the genocide in Rwanda, genocide in general, the devastation of cities such as Dresden - spoke poetically, as if normal academic speech was inappropriate to our purpose. It's going to be a huge challenge for me academically to find the right voice to speak forcefully but persuasively about the moral issues I care about in Geography. I think poetry is a good start - but it unsettles the older generation, who think of Geography as a science, with universal truths that can be extracted by tramping through fields (metaphorically), conducting inquiry according to the prescriptions of scientific method, and dispassionately writing up and publishing those results.
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