The lessons we remember today

But the act of memory can be larger. We can recall, equally, what the searing experience of World War I did to the conscience of humanity. That war's unprecedented scale of mechanized death forced a new awareness on men and women that war is no longer tolerable. In their desperation to avoid future wars, they made a first stab at constructing a new social order. Old empires disappeared, new political arrangements were adopted, and finding alternatives to violence became an international priority.

After the "appeasement" of Munich, that idealistic impulse was regarded as a mistake. Hitler and Stalin exploited the soft legacy of Nov. 11, 1918. The urgent requirement of stopping each of them has been taken ever since as proof that the post-World War I dream of peace was not only unrealistic, but irresponsible.

And yet, on Remembrance Day, perhaps we can revisit the question. The post-World War I generation was determined never again to send the flower of youth into the maw of destruction. After World War II, in which urban devastation and gas chambers replaced the trenches as signals of evil, the defeated nations reinvented themselves as pacifist peoples, and even the victors resolved to leave war behind.

"The weapons of war must be abolished," President Kennedy told the United Nations, "before they abolish us."

But again the vision fell short of being realized. In America, an open-ended embrace of those weapons, justified by the threat from Stalin's children, not only defined a main national purpose, but changed the meaning of politics, tied universities to war theory and defense grants, and created an unbreakable economic dependence on military manufacturing. Then the Cold War ended, and the whole world seemed ready, at last, for the establishment of a realistic and dependable peace. An ultimate "peace dividend" seemed about to pay out.

Washington alone, of the great powers, still regarded war as meaningful and war preparation as a priority. The now enemy-less Pentagon insisted on maintaining forever the "hedge" of its nuclear arsenal, and the White House, especially under George W. Bush, replaced the dream of an international order based on diplomatic agreement with the idea of a Pax Americana based on "full spectrum dominance."

On Remembrance Day, look at what has been forgotten. Washington's view of the world, replicating imperial Prussia's of 100 years ago, treats the main epiphany of the 20th century as if it did not happen. As if no lessons were learned in the trenches of Flanders, the fires of Dresden and Tokyo, the fallout of Hiroshima, the countless peasant wars which threw back the great powers, the genocides which sacrificed whole peoples to ferocious versions of the truth.

The much derided human impulse to find another way in fact succeeded, with the nonviolent overthrow of the Soviet empire from within, but that, too, is forgotten in a Washington that prefers to think of itself as the Cold War victor. The rituals of remembrance are all military, and the ethos of war is still made to seem ennobling. Alas, a new generation of the young are being fed with this lie -- and into it. That the roster of America's war dead is being added to on this Veterans Day should outrage the nation's conscience.

We began by thinking of Iraq, and we end there, too. Reports come back that many GIs have inadequate equipment and faulty protective gear, but their vulnerability is worse than that. They lack the protection of a clear and just cause. Their enemies multiply in the poison cloud of Bush's callow taunts. Bush has put this country's soldiers in an impossible position, for no good reason.

This betrayal of the young is a betrayal of the old, too. Bush's war defiles what the heroes of the last century saw when they saw through war, and betrays the memory of their bravely imagined alternative future -- peace -- which is the only future there can be.

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.