"There is no such thing as a winnable war. It's a lie we don't believe anymore."
Sting
(From the song, "Russians", on his debut solo album, The Dream of the Blue Turtles, 1985.)
For the longest time, I thought to myself, "Self, that's an admirable sentiment, but not really true. There have been wars that we unquestionably "won". After all, taking the most obvious example in our cultural consciousness, we decisively "won" WWII, right? Right."
For six+ decades on this planet, there have been so many things that I simply cannot unsee; the graves, the mass graves, the ash pits, the forever wounded and the forever scarred, the lost hopes and promises of so many people, so many cultures and so many countries. Now? Unequivocally, I know that Sting was right. There IS no such thing as a "winnable" war. We didn't "win" WWII. The best we can say is that we ended WWII. We ended what the fascist fucks started, stopped them from imposing their evil idea of "world order", and instead imposed our vision of what a just world should be.
Or, at least, we tried to create a just world.
As it turns out, all we succeeded in doing was temporarily beating back the fascists into the shadows. We utterly failed to address the fascist ideals that had been quite evident in our country in the decade leading up to WWII. As a result, they cloaked themselves in a veil of respectability and continued perverting any effort to realize the promise of a truly just society.
Someday, history may very well say that while we won the decisive battles of WWII, we ended up losing the war to the fascists.
Christopher Dinnes
Chief Sherpa
Dinnes Farm
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