The Mythologizing of History - An Essay for Memorial Day by Capt. Paul Watson

[Annces]

of Sea Shepherd


Occasionally I walk through cemeteries and I notice that as the stones age, they lose their meaning. No one comes to visit them. Visitors see a name and some dates that bear no relationship to the realty of the person whose bones lie beneath. In time, the stones will be weathered away. As the rock group Kansas once sang, "we are dust in the wind."

History as related in books is an academic undertaking. The American Civil war was the first real war that took place before the lens of the camera and thus the first war that emotionally involved society as a whole. It is no accident that the first photographed war was the war that spawned the war memorial. The Great War was also photographed but became even more intimate because of news reels. World War II was the news reel war, the radio war and the cinema war. The Vietnam war was the first large scale television war and with television, there came complete emotional involvement.

The Pentagon recognized just how potent television was in turning people against war and wars by America ever since have been edited wars where the military controls what people see and the reality of the conflict is then sanitized through recreations of the war in a more politically favorable light like the production of the television series Over There.

Today we do not know what the holocaust was, we remember the Hollywood interpretation of the event. Our perception of the genocide of the American Indian has also been shaped and reshaped and reshaped again by media. We have lost history as an academic study and we have replaced it with revised and politically updated media memories of the event. What was real no longer has any meaning. History has become mythology. We have fictionalized our predecessors and made them more honourable, more romantic, more courageous, more evil and more treacherous than they ever were with negative or positive depictions dependent upon our political or sociological perspectives.

What veterans need today is not war memorials. They need the support of their government and their people. They need medical coverage. They need to have their families taken care of if they died. They need to be respected while they are alive. These things are far more meaningful than a stone monument to the slain.

Memorials are meaningless. Respect, gratitude, empathy and support should be the priority. The warmth of gratitude for the surviving veteran is a far greater tribute than a stone cold marble slab or a lifeless bronze statue. Instead of Memorial Day, perhaps we should call it Respect for Veterans Day, a day that honours the living and the future. The choice is between caring for those who defended their country or erecting a monument that pretends to care for those same veterans. The difference is that the monument is cheaper.


(Full article - I only posted the last 1/3rd of the article).

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=165320542&blogID=268607295&MyToken=9be0e7c3-ad7c-46a2-ac17-124305e4b7f8






Operation Ragnarök - This is an old Nordic word that means "destruction of the powers." We intend to take our intervention to the land of the Norse - straight to the coast of Iceland - for a confrontation with the outlaw Icelandic whaling operations. We intend to create an international incident over Iceland's refusal to comply with international protection regulations.

http://www.channelg.tv/video.php?project_id=46

[Annces]

1. kick for a slow Sunday

[Uncle Joe]

2. Sorry, I missed this earlier, Kicked, too late to recommend

Thanks for the thread Annces

[Annces]

3. Thanks

Always good to get at least one response. He is doing valuable work.