AFTER VIOLENCE: 3R, RECONSTRUCTION, RECONCILIATION ...

Cold War is by now a classical case: the evaporation of the "East"
as a conflict partner was unexpected; new enemies of the Nation
(or super-Nation) are being excavated from History, with the help
of God and Law (Muslims, Serbs)./24/
Wars wreak havoc with structures and cultures. And the more
wars we have had, the more do we see the result as normal.
Time: As mentioned, a war serves to equip time with the
glory and trauma points that in turn serve to define nations. But
in addition to that structure and culture also possess a certain
inertia. They both drift through vast stretches of time, like in
a placid river, largely unchanged at the level of deep structure
and deep culture, below surface ripples and eddies. There are
waterfalls, "revolutions" for structures and "change of ethos" for
cultures; But they are far between. And further down the river
the water tends to be about the same.
We live in an inter-intra/state-nation system, to a large
extent shaped by well-defined wars, with poorly defined peace as
between-wars periods. Each new war reinforces the image of war as
normal and natural, as a layer sedimented on top of the other in
the national archeology. The nations are vehicles for the
transmission of structure and culture, including the pattern of
war; much like violent behavior is transmitted in the family./25/
Major vehicles for transmission are the national language and
religion, the myths expressed in popular art and the monuments/26/
dedicated to the sacred points in time and space./27/ All this is
transmitted through family and school. A national army, and arms
including nuclear weapons, is telling evidence of the readiness to
translate the myths, those public dreams of the collective
24