On Conflict, Memory, and History

I write now of forgotten stalemates. No battle is ever won; one side or the other simply forgets to continue fighting. It may be trite to imply that death is but another face of forgetting. Surely, in any contest there is a loser, and history's defeated masses stand in silent testament to that inexorable fact. But that one side loses does not mean that the other has won.

It is not bodies which clash, but ideas, of which we are simply instruments. The repetitions of history are proof enough of this precept. Humans take up their various arms under the banner of one particular vision of life against another, and the war rages until one side runs out of bodies. Death is one source of this shortfall. Forgetting is the larger.

What is important, then, is that nothing is forgotten forever. All victories are hollow because all enemies persist. The winner's false hubris collapses under its own weight, while still more bodies search amid the rubble for the forgotten banners, and are filled with great pride and misplaced nostalgia at the remembrance of something which stood against the inadequacy of the status quo.

Perhaps what matters, then, is the sides you take. I speak not of dedication to a single idea, but the rigorous self-definition entailed by the remembrance of so many forgotten stalemates. In a century such as this, it may well be that there is nothing left to die for. Paradoxically, there might neither be some one thing left to live for. So many forgotten battles are history's great burden on its youngest children, and if we are to live well, we must not only bear this burden, but do so with pride.