Notes:
[1] Paul Ricoeur, “The hermeneutical function of distanciation,” in From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, trans. K. Blamey and J. Thompson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 75–88.
[2] Chris Hedge’s War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (New York, NY: Public Affairs, 2002) provides a not-so-subtle assessment of this reality.
[3] Nigel Hunt traces the societal impulse to memorialize in the aftermath of war in Memory, War, and Trauma (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
[4] Aristotle, Politics, I.2, 1252b30; III.9, 1280a32-3.
[5] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edition (London, UK: Verso, 2006). Anderson is more concerned with simultaneous experience than the telos of nation-states, but his insights are nonetheless useful in this context.
[6] Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1959) is here providing a loose translation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s original dictum found in his Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer (1889). See also: Ben Connable et al. Will to Fight: Returning to the Human Fundamentals of War (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2019), https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10040.html.
[7] Patrick Wintour, “The revenge of history in Ukraine: Year of war has shaken up world order,” The Guardian, December 26, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/26/ukraine-war-revenge-of-history-how-geopolitics-shaping-conflict.
[8] Wintour, “Revenge.”
[9] George Packer, “This is Not 1943: How Putin twists the history of World War II,” The Atlantic, February 3, 2023, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/putin-stalingrad-russia-ukraine-war-nazi-germany-propaganda/672934/.
[10] Eduardo Baptista and Greg Torode, “Studying Ukraine war, China’s military minds fret over US missiles, Starlink,” Reuters, March 7, 2023, https://www.reuters.com/world/studying-ukraine-war-chinas-military-minds-fret-over-us-missiles-starlink-2023-03-08/.
[11] Steven Watson, “‘We created our own weapon’: the anti-invasion magazines defying Putin in Ukraine,” The Guardian, April 27, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/27/magazines-art-photography-war-ukraine-russia
[12] The individual memoir, concomitantly, has become the preeminent literary genre of GWOT.
[13] One need look no further than the recent alleged actions of Airman 1st Class Jack Teixeira.
