Dwelling too much on the past can make one myopic, but paying cursory attention is instructional. The juxtaposition of two articles in Monday’s New York Times gave pause. One dealt with the past; the other a hint of the future. The first was an article on page A4, “In Poland, Unearthing a Barbarous Past.” The second, an article on page A6, “Tensions Surge in Estonia amid a Russian Replay of Cold War Tactics.” Lessons to be drawn: technology may change, but people do not, and bad leaders take advantage of weakness, real or perceived.
The human remains pulled from the muddy clay around an old prison near Bialystok, Poland are anonymous victims of Nazis, Soviets and Soviet-directed Polish secret police. They are reminders that, as much as we may wish it otherwise, man has never lived peacefully. Whether the causes are economic, geographic or cultural, war has been and always will be ever-present. Nothing has happened in the past few decades to suggest that his behavior has changed. To assume that the Twenty-first Century will be absent the curse of inevitable conflict indicates a naïveté that is based more on hope than experience. That sense permeated Europe 100 years ago, in the early years of the Twentieth Century preceding the First World War.
Today’s complacency toward the ambitions of Vladimir Putin is based less on naïveté than on war weariness. For almost a decade and a half we have been at war with Islamic extremism. We are deluged with horrific images, often in real time. War is no longer something that happens “over there;” it is on television, in our kitchens and living rooms. We see the results of exploded IED devices and what a suicide bomber can do to school children. Postings of beheadings are viewed on YouTube. Images of water-boarding torture and the inhumane treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib Prison caused some of us to look upon ourselves as perpetrators of violence. The perfectly natural emotional reactions of people to the horrific consequences of war make it difficult for democracies to make the hard decisions necessary to defeat the evil we face.