"The most cherished myths of American culture tell us that, while war is terrible, our wars are noble, fought only under duress, and in the service of freedom, human rights, and democracy. If we fail in our ventures, as we did in Vietnam and Iraq and probably will in Afghanistan and Syria, that failure was not in our intentions, which were righteous, but merely in our execution. Our worst sins, in these myths, are not ambition, cruelty, or greed, but hubris and lack of foresight. Against such myths, which can be found articulated in the latest Hollywood movies, in the editorial pages of The New York Times, in Brookings Institution essays, and in Amazon’s “Hot New Releases in World War II History,” Brecht’s ideological critique, which is founded in its own mythology of good and evil, can do little or nothing. Indeed, it’s not clear what one can do about such myths at all, since the power they have is precisely that which deforms and obscures reality into something comprehensible, tractable, and bearable; they are not only gratifying but in some sense also necessary. Those who insist on conveying the bitter truth that we live in a world of suffering beyond human understanding and control should expect no thanks for delivering their message, unless they have also brought along a salvific god or compensatory utopia. The best that can be done under such conditions, it seems, is to work to save something concrete from the ruinous tides of time and delusion that wash over us anew each hour. An artifact, a book, a collection of photographs or etchings or poems, a specific moment in which a specific human being lived, brought up out of the dark waters of myth into the light of knowledge: the stuff of history."

The shipwreck of history