Whether in Africa, the Middle East or any of the other war-torn regions of the world, hatreds tend to run deep. Once the carnage ends and the conquerors pin their medals, the defeated often seethe with resentment, fueling cycles of revenge and retaliation that can last generations.

But does war have to be a permanent reality- In a few bloodstained places, in a few small ways, people are questioning the very “us-versus-them” foundation of war and are seeing, as Dwight D.Eisenhower once did, “its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”

Among brutal, futile and stupidly managed conflicts, the First World War is nearly unrivaled. But in the Belgian village of Poperinge, a new kind of memorial has been erected. Next to a simple pole rests a plaque inscribed with a verse from Rudyard Kipling:“I could not look on death, which being known, men led me to him, blindfold and alone.”The marker commemorates the many hundreds of men who deserted the senseless slaughter of the Great War’s trenches, only to be tied to poles and shot by their countrymen.

As John Tagliabue wrote in The Times, the monument, which honors deserters of all nations, aims to depict“the war’s inhumanity rather than the victors and vanquished.”

Another bitter conflict flared on the Korean peninsula in 1950, in a clash between the pro-American south and the Soviet-backed north. But in many small villages, neighbors waged violent ideological crusades of their own. In Kurim, in the south, about 300 people were stabbed, shot and burned to death by their fellow villagers, and deep-seated hatreds have seethed ever since. Recently, though, the villagers have been honoring all of those killed on both sides and are planning a memorial.

“It’s time to bury the past and its vengeance,”Choi Jae-woo, 85, told The Times’s Choe Sang-hun.“Both sides must realize we were all victims of the war. We must forgive and forget.”

Israelis have fought, and won, many wars since the nation’s birth in 1947. But as Ethan Bronner reported in The Times, the nation has“tended to dismiss the psychic damage that can result from being a soldier in war.”

Recently, an animated documentary called “Waltz With Bashir” has struck a deep chord with Israeli audiences. It recounts the traumas of one former soldier, Ari Folman, after he witnessed the massacre of Palestinians by Lebanese Christian forces during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

Ron Ben-Yishai, an Israeli journalist, spoke to Mr.Bronner about some of the questions the film is raising.“I know we didn’t kill them,” he said of the massacred Palestinians,“but are we really better than the Europeans who stood by when the Holocaust took place?”

Another time-honored approach to repudiating war - at the ballot box - remains as eloquent as ever. American voters rewarded Barack Obama for advocating an end to United States involvement in Iraq. And in Kashmir, Muslims have been expressing their long-smoldering resentment of Indian rule with record turnout in elections this month.

As Somini Sengupta reported in The Times, many are still sympathetic to the militant cause but have grown weary of life in a war zone. Manzoor Ahmad Reshi, a carpenter who has been shot by the Indian Army and also by the Muslim rebels, told Ms.Sengupta that the prospect of more fighting inspired dread.

“The problem will not go away,”he said.“Unless there is a political solution, it will diminish; it will not go away.”