Remembrances and Triumphalism

Veteran’s Day, Remembrance Day, Armistice Day. Every November, we gather to mourn and honor our military’s dead. This year’s ceremonies have been particularly poignant, marking two important anniversaries. It has been one hundred years since the shooting of Franz Ferdinand that sparked the start of World War I, and twenty-five since the fall of the Berlin Wall symbolized the end of the Cold War.
Some of the principal actors in these conflicts have been commemorating these milestones in truly lovely ways. In London, 888,246 red ceramic poppies were planted at the moat of the Tower, one for each British and Canadian soldier who died in World War I. In Berlin, ten miles of illuminated helium balloons divided the city to mark the erstwhile boundary between East and West in the Lichtgrenze 2014 exhibit. The British memorial, “Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red,” has already attracted five million visitors and has become the centerpiece of Britain’s remembrances. Tens of thousands of celebrating Berliners crowded the streets on November 9 to watch the release of the 8000 balloons into the night sky at the culmination of their city’s remembrance events.
These temporary memorials deserve praise for more than their stunning aesthetic beauty. They are monuments which memorialize the past by evoking contemplation rather than blind pride. Visitors to the Tower can hardly help but reflect on the horrific scale of death caused by the war when gazing on the countless rows of red poppies thickly coating the moat. Likewise, few could walk through the brightly lit balloons lining Berlin’s streets and not ponder upon the futility and foolishness of arbitrarily dividing a city. By using their visual appeal to both commemorate the past and initiate thought and dialogue about it, the memorials become far more than just another stone pillar, gun salute, or military parade. The beauty of these memorials also lies in what they do not say. Pertinently, they do not glorify a victory over the military enemies of World War I or over the ideological foes of the Cold War. Rather, they invite remembrance of the dead and appreciation of unity.
It may seem to be a given in the twenty-first century that we should not memorialize conflicts by glorifying victors at the expense of the feelings of those who have lost. It is a lesson we learn early in life on the playground (“don’t gloat”) and from history textbooks (“a leading cause of World War II was Germany’s humiliation after World War I”). In today’s world, triumphalism is frowned upon. The phrase has a negative connotation because we realize that when celebrating victory against a defeated political enemy, we also often cruelly rejoice in the suffering of an unfortunate citizenry. Yet even as the West seems to have shied away from unbridled pride in its memorials and monuments, Mikhail Gorbachev chided the West for succumbing to triumphalism. Attending the Berlin celebration, Gorbachev warned, “Euphoria and triumphalism went to the heads of Western leaders” in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall. He cautioned that Western triumphalism had isolated and punished Russia, and has pushed the world to the brink of another Cold War.

There is substance to his claim. In the decades following 1989, scholars and politicians alike acclaimed the “victory” of the Western political system. Francis Fukuyama wrote with utter finality in 1992 about “the end of history … the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Western leaders, particularly in the United States, cried that they had beaten the communists just as they had beaten the Nazis and the Japanese. In 2002, President Bush announced, “The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise”. There were no boots tramping through the USSR, but according to William Kristol and Robert Kagan in 2006, the United States had “defeated the evil empire” and should thus embrace its role of “benevolent global hegemony.”
The actions and attitudes of the West in the post-Cold War era have matched this triumphalist rhetoric. Bereft of a counterweight ideology to balance their influence over the world, the West has inferred that its political ideology of liberal democracy and capitalism is the right one. This has undoubtedly benefited the world in areas such as human rights, the spread of free media, and the growth of women’s rights and suffrage.
However, there is a flip side to this coin. Try as it might, the West cannot actually force the entire world to agree that capitalist, secular democracies are the best option. The logic of “one right system” has led to the demonization of any who dare to hold a different view. In this black and white world, Castro was the devil’s advocate, Putin is the Grim Reaper, and the Chinese state is made up of fire-breathing hacker-dragons. Yet, the perpetuation of this gross lack of subtlety by the media leads to the public misunderstanding international affairs or reading them in a simplistic, good vs. evil, winners vs. losers approach.
This naïveté that triumphalism has bred in the post-Cold War era in the West has created the assumption that any alternate system must be both incorrect and immoral. Why? Because otherwise,“they” would have won the Cold War, not “us”. We won, so we must be right. We won, so we must correct those who have still not seen the light. Operating on this assumption, the West will be perpetually drawn into the internal conflicts and conflagrations of other countries in which the question of governance systems is not settled. Every terrorist’s battle will be worth fighting, every dictator’s throne will be worth overthrowing.
Which only means that we, as a society, are going to need many, many more artistic, delicate, beautiful memorials to lost lives.
Image Sources: Paul Pitman/Flickr, Graham Veal/Flickr, DoD News Features/Flickr.