…the world is created anew each generation. We still call China by the same name, we still draw it the same on a map, but essentially all of the people who remember the Long March, or the Rape of Nanking, or the Battle of Shanghai are dead and gone. The hard-won wisdom that they received as inadequate compensation for suffering through those terrible events has vanished into the entropy of history, and their descendants have only war movies and books and half-remembered tales to give them thin, shadowed glimpses.
And so the new people who are now “China” are able to believe that war is a glorious thing instead of a tragic one. They are able to imagine that by coloring Taiwan a different color on a map, their army will redress the wrongs of history, bring dignity to their race, spread the bounties of communist rule, fulfill a nation’s manifest destiny, or whatever other nonsense they tell themselves. They imagine themselves either insulated from the consequences of that violence, or purified and ennobled by their efforts to support it.