Tag: war

Excerpt: Changing the Subject: How the United States Responds to Strategic Failure

Andrew J. Bacevich

Fig 1: Operation Mountain Viper (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Kyle Davis) (Released)

Excerpted from Chapter 9 of NOT EVEN PAST: How the United States Ends Wars edited by David Fitzgerald, David Ryan, and John M. Thompson.

A successful marriage is one in which partners find ways of reconciling their own individual needs with those they share as a couple. The challenge is to enable me and you to coexist with us in relative harmony. To indulge in wedding day illusions of being exempt from such challenges—to fancy that a new us transcends me and you—is to guarantee mutual disappointment. The sooner all parties jettison such illusions the better.

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War Magic & Warrior Religion: Sorcery, Cognition & Embodiment

This post is the transcript of an electronic interview between D. S. Farrer and Berghahn blog editor Lorna Field.

D. S. Farrer is the co-author of the article Chants of Re-enchantment: Chamorro Spiritual Resistance to Colonial Domination and special issue editor of Social Analysis Volume 58, Issue 1: War Magic and Warrior Religion: Sorcery, Cognition, and Embodiment. 

 

 

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If Monuments Could Talk

War memorials are more than a simple, objective way to commemorate the past; they can also, as a visual message, guide the memory of a society in certain political and ideological directions. Author Elisabetta Viggiani looks at and into war memorials in Northern Ireland — and what these say about the broader culture — in her just-published Talking Stones: The Politics of Memorialization in Post-Conflict Northern Ireland. Below, the author gives an introduction to her work, followed by an excerpt from the volume.

 

 

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If memory was simply about the past, why would governments and public authorities be prepared to put their ever-shrinking budgets at its service? The answer is because memory is seldom about the past, rather it is about the present moment; as Pierre Nora puts it, ‘through the past, we venerate above all ourselves’. Talking Stones investigates how collective memory and material culture are used to support present political and ideological needs in contemporary society.

 

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