Professor Barry S. Strauss is director of Cornell's Peace Studies Program. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation.
War is hell.
Yet human beings have nearly always gone to war quickly and with great zeal. Yet in the first millennium, when the Assyrians conquered the Near East, enemies were flayed alive and their skulls piled high. So despite the global wars this century, the Holocaust, the continuing proliferation of nuclear weapons, the dozens of smaller wars and slaughters, the body counts numbering in the tens of millions, Strauss remains guardedly optimistic. And the fact that we've lived the last 50 years under the shadow of humanity's ability to destroy itself has, I think, awakened us to some small extent. Within Arts and Sciences alone, faculty and graduate students from government, history, classics, anthropology, chemistry and physics participate in the program.