Playing With Triggers

Whenever we read an account of the beginning of WWI it’s necessary for the historian to first lay out the landscape of interlocking defense treaties that turned Europe into a sort of Venn diagram of fantasy militarism. To me, it’s a reminder of the great Avalon Hill game Diplomacy which we played in my high school Military History Club (AKA: D&D club) – everyone secretly negotiating with everyone else against everyone else. For Europe, the results were grim, and I needn’t go into them.

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Racist Representations, Colonial Representations, Imperialist Representations…

When I started to realize I’d been fed a diet of lies, I began trying to pick things apart and re-assess most of what I had ingested. Howard Zinn was a huge help, for me, not because I think he’s right about everything, but because he offers a different perspective on established history. We’re left to our own devices with so much, otherwise – the “is this racist?” or “is this offensive?” conversation – it has to happen as an inevitable consequence of re-assessing the constructed history of a time. I’ve had discussions about this in some strange places, about some strange times; probably my favorite was “why isn’t there a lot of Vietnam War reenactment?” (My answer to that: “because bombers are too expensive to reenact.”)

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