Don't glorify heroes

I've been doing a bit of fiction reading lately and reacquainting myself with some of my Pratchett books. I found myself coming to the end of "Night Watch" where Vimes and Vetinari discuss the possibility of a memorial to Watch Men who'd died during a skirmish in the city many years previously. The conversation ends with Vimes saying "What good would a statue be? It'd just inspire new fools to believe they're going to be heroes."

And this reminded me of the beginning of Ch.3 in the TTC:

Don't glorify heroes,
And people will not contend.

All of this set me thinking about rememberance, particularly of those who've fought battles and have died. Here in the UK, every year we have Rememberance day and at the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month, we have 2 minutes silence where a great many people across the country stand still and remember; on Rememberance Sunday, wreaths will be laid at the war memorials across the country, from tiny villages to London itself to remember the sacrifice of the dead. All this is done in quite a restrained sort of way but it is not done in a way which glorifies war or heroes, it doesn't dress war up and make it glamourous; rather it remembers the dead and honours their sacrifice and memory.

We have plenty of films and TV movies that tend to show war in a glorious light; the baddies always lose, the goodies always win and they all live happily ever after, riding off it the sunset sort of thing. And the longer we, in the Western nations, go with directly suffering the privations of war, the more we seem to glorify what happened and gloss over the suffering and the needless waste of life. All the war we know about today appears on our TV screens and, unless we directly know someone in the armed forces, we are unlikely to be directly affected by it. We can understand what is going on theoretically, we can sympathise with those who lose family members, but we don't really understand what it means.

And this seems to link back to what Vimes was saying "what good would a statue be?". In the end, a statue doesn't really tell us very much, with or without an 'inspiring slogan'; it may give us names and dates and a brief history of why the statue is there, but it doesn't tell us about the waste, the loss, the betrayals, the downright stupidity that may have lead to that situation. Statues can be many things: beautiful, awe inspiring, heroic. They are like the blurb on the back of a book, that tells you any number of things about it except what happens in the end. And descriptions of 'glorious' victories or last stands have a tendency to leave out severed limbs and miles of guts because, strangely enough, there doesn't seem to be anything 'heroic' about them.

One man's 'glorious victory' is another's 'devasting defeat'; this leads to revenge, to evening the score, to wiping out the shame of defeat and so it goes round and round, without ever coming to an end. So if we can avoid glorifying heroes, people might not seek so earnestly for revenge.

Just a thought.