351. A Catch-All Explanation of Twentieth-Century Horrors

Everything is Understandable: A Poem

You read a history book and say how could a people like the Germans so intelligent such a great culture art and architecture and music oh god the music how could such a people do the things they did in world war two the Holocaust and you read other history books and say to yourself if you had to accept a peace treaty that ground you into the dirt and gave you no way to get up and made you responsible for every bad thing that happened to you and everybody else when you believed you weren't even defeated and thought you were only signing an armistice you'd do terrible things too those things all following from the terrible thing war that keeps demanding more and more terrible things until there's nothing left that's not terrible and though you don't have to go as far as Hitler did that's the chance you take.

Then you read the big history books and see how all the European nations were building up to the Great War bumping their chests together in Africa and read that it wasn't just the Great War they were building up to it was everything in every field science and philosophy and medicine and art and music and geography jesus geography pressing around every ocean and pushing to the poles just as they were doing in physics and chemistry with the whole world catching on my god what energy until you think of the Great War that started the chain of terrible things as just another part of the energy and you couldn't take the parts apart.

But you didn't learn that you really couldn't take them apart until you read Thucydides' history which you should have read first because it showed you that giving the first big push toward all those good things the Academy and the Parthenon and all were people who did terrible things like get into a great war with the Spartans that made them do the all the usual terrible things and worse like kill all the Melians and the only thing that stopped them from doing more terrible things was that they didn't have the machine gun yet and Thucydides' only explanation for their behavior was that they were energetic people who couldn't let themselves or anybody else rest and that exactly fits the European nations bumping chests in Africa up to the Great Bump in Europe and that makes all the terrible things of the last century understandable as a manifestation of energy you can't separate into parts the digging in the atom from chest-bumping in Africa not even to explain the Holocaust.