February rains
Cold fire on warm cities
Armies march
On empty fields
No sunflowers will grow
In the shell holes.
Next year.
March rains
Blood in the mud again
Generations of bones
Marching as one.
The inevitable ghost
Of the 20th century
Comes back to choke us
Blind our minds.
With ashen rain.
If we cannot learn
It never changes
No sunflowers will grow
In the East this year.
–Jack Blare
History as it is being written today belongs to the world and is written by the thousands of images and videos created by the people who documented it. As much as states try to censor information technology will always be ahead of them. Cellphone footage of a chemical weapons attack in Syria taken by the losing side of the civil war spoke volumes more to the international community than any of the state media’s propaganda.
Even if dissent can be silenced inside the country, once the proof is out internationally it has already been remembered, written or copied in countries all over the world. An early example is the Tiannenmen tank man. China suppresses it but outside of it that brief video is burned into the memory of everyone that sees it. I don’t even like technology much but I will admit the global popularization of smartphones with cameras is already writing history and average people can now document things that would have been suppressed or forgotten otherwise.
As long as people keep documenting history and sharing it, it belongs to the people. The problem now is people with strong opinions and little to no historical education or genuine interest in the past are misunderstanding and misrepresenting the past to fit their own views and convincing themselves of their infallibility. This and the general trend towards anti-intellectualism and emotional reasoning is setting us right down the same road again. In the 50’s politicians understood the cost of war. Now most people have no concept of it, no fear. Bravery out of ignorance is stupidity. I don’t think we’re ready for the responsibility of nuclear weapons if people can’t have their beliefs questioned without threatening mutually assured destruction. History belongs to the people but only if the people care about history, otherwise history will repeat itself in blood and genocide and even nuclear war. That will be the last time.
-Jack Blare, June 13, 2021
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