Get Inspired by Famous Battles
Famous battles are the grist for the rumor mills of history, seared into the memories of victor, vanquished and their descendants.
Each nation’s, or people’s, memory and current outlook are so often bound up with an historical military victory or defeat. The states with which they identify, or dream of, are the product or object of a war and its defining events – usually famous battles and their consequences.
The emotional impact is passed down through generations, conjured as a seminal event in that people’s history. Such recollection serves to feed inter-generational psychic scars, and perpetuates the emotional baggage that results in inevitable misrepresentations of verifiable truth.
This common patrimony, a specific, but not necessarily communal memory, generally exalts heroes of a revolutionary war, struggles to pour balm on the fissures of a civil war, or draw modern lessons from a world war.
Feats are immortalized on the faces of coins. Down through the ages, military paintings have embellished valor or victory, the theme depending on whether it was commissioned by the vanquished or their conquerors.
Historical records are based mostly on subjective interpretation. The history of the Greeks omits the Slavic origins of their greatest military figure, Alexander the Great, a Macedonian. Is it appropriate to rejoice in his historical “greatness” without lamenting the 15 languages eradicated by his merciless campaigns against cultures brought under his sway? – And this was achieved before he died at the tender age of 32!
The diversion of parlous resources into raising and feeding an army is as endemic to world history as is any other organizational achievement of mankind, save possibly the institutionalized religions often close to power in pre-democratic societies.
Whether on land, at sea, the sway and fear engendered by armies have been used to promote that most emotive of modern concepts – citizenship. The Roman Empire used its legions far from Rome to extend its franchise over the ancient world. Economic and political stability accompanied the local presence of a legion comprised of men from Africa, Europe and Asia. Rome instilled in its subject peoples a desire to attain the status of a Roman citizen as it vbrought property and civil rights unavailable to others.
Today an on-line game can vault us into a firefight in Vietnam embroiled in a French colonial war or answering the call of duty as a conscripted grunt in one of America’s many cold war battlefronts. Just as US and coalition forces waged war in Iraq and today in Afghanistan with online resources, the battle buff need no longer idle away hours in a museum to establish a living connection to their nation’s battle history.
Video-wizardry in movies, simulations and virtual reality technologies place the participant in an endless war zone. Consumers and history buffs can relive the exhilaration or devastation of famous battles through games online that are a virtual reality, a living history laboratory.