War

 

 

     War –what is it good for?  Absolutely nothin’!

                                            The Temptations, 1969

      Somebody please stop that war now.

    Jimmy Cliff, 1969

 

     So then why is it that wars have never ceased throughout human history and around the world?  Every day brings news from Gaza and the Ukraine of the suffering and waste caused by war, the toll in pain disability, and dearth, the rapid senseless destruction of what had been built brick by brick, the reinforcement of the most ignorant prejudices and absurd rivalries.  We scarcely hear of other armed conflicts which just now include fighting in Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Myanmar, and Ethiopia.  For as long as written documents have existed, not only have people fought to the death, but valor in battle has been the most highly praised quality of men.  Patriotism has generally been lauded as a paramount value, its only competition being piety, with which it is often conflated.  I used to pass a Catholic school with the phrase “pro deo et patria” over the door, as though the young scholars were to absorb this lesson even before opening a book of grammar or mathematics.  To some it seems nationalism and piety are not merely compatible, but are virtually identical, as though Christ had not been undeniably and consistently pacifist.  Nationalism, by definition a tribal sort of sentiment dependent almost entirely on the chance of birth, is considered an absolute value.  Dissent during wartime is very nearly treason. 

     The acceptance and even more the celebration  of something as horrific as war implies deep-seated motives.  The aggression reflected in fighting is one of the most fundamental human drives, equal to sexuality in its power to influence action.  To kill another person is surely the most extreme way of exerting power, and the experience is applicable to nations as well as to individuals.  Whether Freud’s specific formulation of Eros and Thanatos is accurate in detail, one cannot deny that life is lived in the tension between love and hate, altruism and selfishness, cooperation and competition.

          In traditional societies the balance may be straightforward.  The individual must observe strict laws when dealing with an in-group while mandating no such standards in dealings with outsiders.  It is perhaps inevitable when resources are insufficient for people to fight over food, water, and land, but such conflict is today wholly unnecessary.  Current technology in both agriculture and manufacturing might afford everyone on earth a good standard of living were it  not for the selfishness that manifests in politics.  During the Irish potato famine, large amounts of food were still exported from the country as landlord’s profits took precedence over starving tenants.  Amartya Sen has demonstrated that all modern famines are caused not by limits in the food supply, as had happened regularly in the past, but are due to poor people’s inability to pay. 

     Violence itself will never vanish, but one would think that the large-scale savagery of war, in which an entire nation adopts the attack on others as its chief priority, might be eliminated.  After all, on the individual level, it is rare for a stronger neighbor to make off with a householder’s possessions, and, if such a thing occurs, the victim has legal recourse.  Since such arrangements have long been in place in civil societies, it is difficult to see why they would not be possible internationally.

     Should that criminal neighbor commit assault as well as theft, immediate resistance is justified.  Though Christ counseled turning the other cheek, people’s instincts urge them to fight, and such action would be all  but universally approved as moral.  If fighting in self-defense is acceptable, surely the same prerogative is available to nation states.  A similar rationale applies when a government is so exceedingly oppressive that its rule amounts to institutional violence.  The citizens of such a tyranny have the right to rise in revolution to overthrow their masters.  Invasion by another country, then, and extreme injustice in one’s own are the sole justifications for war. 

     Some combatants, whatever their ideology, are motivated by an attraction to the experience of deadly games.  The thrill of danger, the heightened nervous excitement of a frontline soldier, can be to some pleasurable and, indeed, even addictive.  Some find a sort of ecstasy in killing, a taste that might serve one well in a life and death struggle, but which is inappropriate in all other settings.

 

Some for love of slaughter in imagination,

learning later  . . .

some in fear, learning love of slaughter

                        Ezra Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”

 

Those who are conscripted have no choice but to defend themselves as best they can and, in the end, the reluctant combatant is as likely as a more enthusiastic comrade to behave bravely under fire.  Such conditions, by focusing the consciousness on survival, reduce other distinctions to triviality and foster the closest relationships among people thrown together in extreme conditions by chance.  Such experiences are often among the most profound of a person’s life and, when losg past, may be regarded with nostalgia.  Fifty years after his service in WWII my father maintained contact with men who had been in his unit in France and Germany.  The intensity of wartime experience burns its traces into the brain of veterans, creating bonds between comrades and eliciting acts of valor and sacrifice from many ordinary people.

     Apart from the bonds formed under fire, of course, even a strongly anti-war stance cannot in justice deny the altruism of all veterans and the particular admiration due to wartime acts of courage.  For anyone who is not inherently bloodthirsty, the prospect of spending long periods in harm’s way, of delaying whatever one’s life goals may have been, usually suffering grueling material conditions even apart from constant danger, represents considerable hardship.  Since the call to arms is socially generated, the recompense must also come from society at large, and soldiers have, since antiquity, been lauded by their communities and awarded pensions and other compensation. 

     This social gratitude does not alter the fact that war, particularly modern war, is in general destructive to all combatants.  Everyone suffers, but positive consequences may follow the pain: the American Revolution overthrew control by a feudal regime, the Civil War ended American slavery, WWII defeated fascist aggression, and the Vietnamese finally ousted their foreign invaders.  Yet none of these victories was absolute.  Free from King George, Americans oppressed slave and native people, more than a century and a half after the Emancipation Proclamation, racism still permeates this country, Stalinist expansion replaced the Nazis in Eastern Europe, and North Vietnam gave little voice to the fighters of the National Liberation Front.  So who can do the moral accounting to determine whether a certain quantum of gain is worth the flow of blood?

     One cannot avoid attempting such calculation, inaccurate thought it may be.  All but pacifists accept that, unfortunate, even paradoxical, as it is, at times violence reduces violence.  The reckoning of when that is true is, however, a matter of opinion.  If a mass shooter is felled in the act of attacking others, who would criticize the gunman who brought an end to the killing with one final death?  A slave who turns on his tormentor and kills him would seem to most justified.  A Guatemalan who takes up arms against the massive institutional violence of an oppressive system has my support.  Yet, in dealings between nations, the imperative is rarely so clear.  I had no doubts, during the Vietnam War that the US had no right to be in Southeast Asia at all and that I would certainly not allow myself to be drafted.  On the other hand, I think that, had I been young in 1941, I would have felt that stopping fascism was imperative even if the cost be high.  Yet I will concede that thoughtful people differed about both these judgements, and I respect both those who conscientiously objected to military service in WWII and those who fought in Vietnam, believing themselves to be not imperialists, but defenders of the local population. 

     Neville Chamberlain is mentioned today most often to condemn his appeasement of Hitler but he spoke the truth when he said that “in war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers.”  Still, this statement ignores the possibility that there are circumstances in which one would be an even greater loser by failing to fight.  All anyone can do is to treat war as a highly undesirable last resort, yet judging when a given war is a “good” one must remain controversial. 

    

     

Nie Wieder Krieg! (Never Again War!) Kaethe Kollwitz

Nationalism

      A local guide named Milan was explaining the glories of the unfinished St. Sava Cathedral in Belgrade, telling us that it would be the largest Orthodox church in the world. Under construction since 1935 it is grand indeed, with a commanding prospect atop the Vračar Plateau, though one might wonder what the Christ who praised humility and frowned upon ostentation would have thought of it.
     Christ may not, however, be the inevitable focus for Milan when he visits St. Sava. The saint is a national patriotic icon, considered founder of the Serbian Orthodox Church and its original leader, and the patron of the nation. The Serbs regularly sought the magical aid of his relics and used his image on their battle flags when they opposed the Turks. In 1594 the Turks burned his remains on the present site of the St. Sava church in the course of suppressing a rebellion.
     Milan’s pride in his nation was evident and capable, I think, of refracting his judgment. His Guinness Book of Records sensibility in describing the temple had more to do with assertive patriotism than with spirituality, but St. Sava’s is not, in fact, the largest Orthodox church. While his objections to the NATO bombing of his country in 1999 are understandable from the perspective of civilian noncombatants, he never mentioned the brutal ethnic cleansing that provoked the attacks, nor the earlier atrocities of the Serbian army, most infamously the Srebrenica and Markale massacres, that had motivated an earlier wave of NATO bombing in 1995.
     Milan declared as though it were unarguable that, to be a nation, three elements are required. First of all, he said, the citizens must share a common religion. So much for the ethnic Albanians and Bosniak Serbs. To Milan Kosovo is not merely part of Serbia, it is Serbia’s essential historic center, and it is quite true that after the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 it became the chief city of medieval Serbia both politically and in church organization. To Milan the Muslim separatists there, who came to dominate the population and prevailed in the UN, are of a piece with the evil Turks of the past who sought to subjugate his country. We are so accustomed to the rhetoric of multiculturalism that the candid expression of such sentiments surprise Americans.
     Secondly, Milan said a nation must all speak a common language. So he would, I suppose, be among those Americans who are irked to hear Spanish in their local supermarket. Thirdly, he said they must be aware of their history. This last is surely unexceptionable except when centuries-old conflicts are made the basis for present-day hostilities.
     Opinions such as Milan’s are widespread, in his own country and abroad. Indeed, when the brutal general Ratko Mladić, later found guilty of war crimes, was a fugitive and the United States was offering a reward of €1.3 million for his capture, a poll indicated that two thirds of Serbian respondents said they would not turn him in. When Mr. Bush the younger undertook his disastrous campaign in Iraq, those of us who objected encountered calumny and an unthinking rejection of our position, as though we were not merely politically wrong, but were in some way immoral.
     War is the great friend of the dictator, the great enemy of civil liberties and truth. Shortly before meeting Milan, I had been in Sofia, Bulgaria on the country’s Armed Forces Day and witnessed a huge military parade, with an endless succession of tanks, amphibious vehicles, and artillery trucks passing by while young and pleasant-looking men waved and fighter jets streaked overhead. How dreadful that focus on might, as though a nation is distinguished in a desirable way by such displays of potential violence. The streets were choked with people of all classes and ages in uplifted but sober holiday mood, waving flags like automatons.
     An American may remember with some pride (which is not the same as nationalism) how George Washington, a career military man, felt that such displays were out of place in a civilian-ruled republic. Just as one may, with more or less justice, feel proud about individual achievements, one may entertain similar feelings about national history or supposed national characteristics. The problem arises only when a person expects a better deal than others, when “I” or “my sort” seek precedence over others. Nationalism is pernicious the moment it becomes the excuse for tipping the scales in favor of one particular country at the expense of others. It leads directly to the atrocities for which Karadžić, Milošević, and Mladić are infamous, though their cousins may be found in every country.
     With our coy American codes imperialism and racism have been accustomed to receive kinder titles. During the Vietnam era of the attempt to impose foreign domination on a small and distant nation was described paradoxically as a “defense of freedom.” Militarism masquerades as support for servicemen, and the denial of civil rights hides under the banner of states’ rights or religious rights or the right not to be “politically correct.” Irrational chauvinism is no more reasonable when disguised (sometimes even by academics) as “American exceptionalism.”
      At certain moments in history, nationalism (like racial or ethnic pride of other sorts) does have a progressive potential. For instance in the nineteenth century revolts against the Ottomans and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the struggles of the Indians, Algerians, Vietnamese and others for self-determination, in the black power movement of the latter half of the sixties, nationalism provided a highly emotional temporary dynamo to motivate activism in a just cause. Yet nationalism is ultimately wrong and frequently poisonous because it is based on the inherently vicious proposition that one’s own country is to be preferred to others. While it is certainly natural for people, especially unsophisticated people, to remain committed to beliefs and practices they have known since childhood, this need not imply a denigration of other ways of being human.
     Yet patriotism is exalted around the globe as one of the highest and most moral of convictions, a significant marker of good character. I used to pass a Catholic school with the words “pro deo et patria,” a popular phrase that appears. among other places, on the Boy Scout religion merit badge, the insignia of the military chaplains, and, in English, as the title of a Dolly Parton album. The fact is that spirituality and nationalism are in an insoluble opposition. To Christ all children of God are equal, and his parables (such as the good Samaritan) regularly challenge his own community’s complacency. He was sufficiently subversive that the Roman government that had subjugated his region put him to death. Christ the pacifist would surely have mourned the use of his name by jingoists, yet this has never given pause to Christian militarists, any more than Buddhism’s compassion for all sentient beings inhibited the samurai code.
     Dangerously, the most certain routes to nationalism and support for any country’s ruling class are war and the threat of war. The most unpopular dictator can seem a beloved leader in conflict situations, making nationalism the regular resort of tyrants. At the same time, as Milan in Serbia and Trump in the USA demonstrate, nationalism customarily involves racism, xenophobia, and the suppression of minorities and civil liberties.
     The fact is that the nation-state is a relatively modern and highly artificial concept. Often boundary lines have ignored cultural and linguistic factors. The pope once divided South America, the continent of Africa was carved up by European powers at the Berlin Conference, and the English and the French Mandates covered the Middle East. Yet the residents of all these areas can be roused to patriotic fervor. “Nationalism,” as Orwell says, “is inseparable from the desire for power.” [1]
     Now in a time of renewed racism and impending fascism in the United States under the slogan “make America great again” it is important to recall the crimes committed in the name of what we are deceived to think are high ideals. The cosmopolitan Einstein was quite right when he told an interviewer “Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.” [2] Pride in oneself and in one’s land is appropriate as long as one wishes to be accepted as one among equals. The moment the sentiment extends to thinking one should take precedence nationalism becomes indistinguishable from racism and altogether poisonous.


1. In “Notes on Nationalism.”

2. December 22, 2015, The Saturday Evening Post “What Life Means to Einstein.”