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Boing Boing
By Michelle | January 29, 2008
I’ve come to conclude that very little of great interest happens in my life. Or rather, each day in my eyes seems more or less ordinary. Thus, when I sit down to update my forlornly neglected blog, my head goes completely blank, and all that I’m left with is a nagging feeling of guilt that it’s been days and days since I last wrote. But let’s see if I can manage to dredge something up.
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I watched the 2003 documentary Fog of War, which is subtitled “Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.” McNamara was the US Secretary of Defense under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and although he’s undoubtedly a controversial figure in US history, I highly recommend this movie to anyone of my generation — i.e. those of us who only just barely remember the end of the Cold War but who are living in and ultimately shaping this post-Cold War world. If you’ve already seen the documentary and need a little refresher, McNamara’s lessons are as follows: |
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- Empathize with your enemy.
- Rationality will not save us.
- There’s something beyond one’s self.
- Maximize efficiency.
- Proportionality should be a guideline in war.
- Get the data.
- Belief and seeing are both often wrong.
- Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning.
- In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.
- Never say never.
- You can’t change human nature.
If you haven’t seen the movie, the above list may not make a lot of sense — But what I particularly appreciated about the documentary was how, about 107 minutes after I pressed the “play” button, I was left with an almost unpleasant feeling that nothing in history, nothing in human nature, nothing hardly at all is simply black and white. How easy it is to look back at the past and make judgments, find scapegoats, make excuses. But our beliefs are apt to lead us astray, and well, we all know how history repeats itself.
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