Peace, Redefined

GETTYSBURG, Pa.—The lights on the map flashed and darkened. A line of blue dots formed a fishhook curve as the red lights advanced.

I was sitting in a darkened room as the battle played out in front of me. “In what many historians regard as the bloodiest fighting of the entire war…” a recorded narrator intoned. We watched the red lights blink towards the blue lights, hover, and fall back.

Three days. And 50,000 casualties.

The blonde woman in front of me shook her head.

The narrator moved on to the predictable ending. “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

I am well aware it was a cliché, but my breath still caught in my throat.

Afterwards, my friends and I strolled across the street to the National Cemetery. It was hot and we walked slowly, trying to poach some information from the group ahead of us that had shelled out $45 for a guide. We snapped photos of the gaudy monuments, but our eyes kept returning to the long arcs in the grass. These were rows of marble blocks, each carved with a number. “84,” “361,” “920”: the battle’s nameless dead.

This, I kept thinking, is the closest I will get to war this summer.

And those beautiful words kept echoing in my head. “The government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

There is no better definition of democracy. But as our government tries to spread this creed across the world, it keeps encountering the same stumbling block. In Iraq, it seems, “the people” do not exist. There are only competing groups who lack faith in each other and, more crucially, in their central authority. What good are elections or constitutions without this foundation of trust, the decision to be one people? That is what nation building really means, I thought while walking the once-bloodshed Gettysburg battleground.

But then I put Lincoln’s words in rightful context. There was no single “people” in America when he delivered the Gettysburg Address. He spoke in the middle of a bitter civil war to encourage one half of “the people” to keep fighting the other half.

Lincoln’s words ring true to Americans now, comfortable in our certainty that we are one people. When Americans talk about the situation in Iraq, there’s often an air of condescension. Too bad the Iraqis can’t keep it together. Guess they’re not ready to handle democracy. Reading about the acts of barbarism occurring every day in the Middle East, it’s easy to pass judgment on a violent foreign culture. We’ve conveniently forgotten how our own country was preserved.

Back in the American 1860s, two irreconcilable factions shot at each other and blew each other up until one faction managed to conquer the other.

Brutal violence, occupation, and submission kept the United States together, not some diplomatic solution. If Iraq follows our example, fighting will continue until one group subdues the rest. If they resolve their conflicts peacefully, they will have accomplished something the United States could not do.

Half a million died in the Civil War. Another half-million were wounded. One side beat the other and imposed the conditions of its victory. That’s why we enjoy the unified country we have today.

And it wasn’t just lives that had to be sacrificed to achieve that unity, but the whole Southern way of life. Victors, as always, wrote the conditions, past and future. They were the good guys who ended slavery, so helps to our own self-image. But we don’t know which way of life will win in Iraq, and which will wither away.



Democracy allows a plurality of views to flourish. That’s its virtue. But our own history shows us that there are some differences of opinion a democratic nation cannot sustain. Then, it’s force that ultimately determines the will of “the people.”

I saw “Peace at Gettysburg” near the fields. She poised on one foot atop a monument. Clutched by her side was an olive branch. But in her upraised hand, she held a sword. When I hope for peace in Iraq, I wonder what I’m really asking for.



Lois E. Beckett ’09, a Crimson news editor, is a social studies concentrator in Leverett House. She is interning for the Reading Eagle Newspaper, and in her free time, reading newspapers with her pet, which is, you would guess, an eagle.