My country has had a civil war, invasions by the french, by the spanish, more recently a revolution that threw a fascist government, followed by a very colourful period of internal squirmishes between anti-regime forces, but we settled those events and that was that: off to the history books.
What motivates so many people to re-enact battles from the American Civil War?
It sounds cruel. Re-enacting a war where so many died gruesome deaths.
America likes to romanticize the past even in the way they approach teaching history in schools. They don’t put in explicit words, the true nature of horror of war and death but instead make it palatable for children. Because we grow up hearing stories of war under the guise of heroism, and gallant men. We lose sight of the nameless and faceless dead in wars. They exist only as numbers in a page and nothing you actualize in your mind. I feel if we thought with honest and explicit recounting of events things would be better as there would be no appetite for war. One thing that always stood out to me is how we learn about the forced migration of indigenous peoples out west. In the US we learn of it as “The Trail of Tears” and my god if that isn’t the most saccharin romanticized way to describe a holocaust. Call it what it was the forced death march of indigenous people. See when you change the language even though we’re talking about the same thing the internal response is very different to those two characterizations.