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

An Undercurrent of Pacifism in the Song of Roland

 

     During the Vietnam War, while I was yet an undergraduate, protected for the time by a student deferment, I recall speaking with a visiting lecturer, a British professor who specialized in Celtic and Old Norse literature.  Current events had brought him to a new view of the subject matter to which he had devoted his career.  “I realize now,” he said with soft regret, “virtually everything I have been studying glorifies war.”  He might have made his objection much broader: since the development of writing, martial valor has indeed been the touchstone for male excellence, as beauty has been for female. 

     Possible responses to this scholar’s anxiety might include the reminder that artistic representation of an action by no means entails endorsing what the fictional characters do.  Even if the persona explicitly expresses values other than the reader’s, this hardly justifies rejecting the text.  One need not accept Platonic Forms to profit from reading Plato, nor must one be a Roman Catholic to value Dante.  Finally, of course, people who have never participated in war are nonetheless certain to have had challenging experiences of other sorts for which military ventures make a fitting analogue or figure of speech.

     In an  interview conducted at about the same time as my conversation with the medievalist , with perhaps similar concerns in mind, Kenneth Rexroth maintained that every heroic poem contains, along with praise for the courageous warrior, “a profound condemnation of war” [1] as well.  In general, literature itself blossoms when employed to articulate ambiguities and ambivalences, and evidence is not lacking for Rexroth’s sweeping claim.  When Andromache pleads with Hector to avoid the hazards of fighting, he responds that his reputation demands that he put himself at risk.  Though he envisions her being forced into slavery, as indeed happened following the fall of Troy, her husband cannot turn from his duty.  This, of course, is a woman’s objection, but when Odysseus summons Achilles’ shade from the Underworld in the Odyssey and praises him for his distinguished career, noting that even in death he rules [2], the principal hero of the Trojan War tells his former comrade-in-arms he would rather be a poor but living man than lord over all the dead.  Here is a sharp critique of the pursuit of fame through combat.  Similarly, amid the heroics of Prince Hal and Harry Hotspur, Falstaff punctures the illusion of the glory of combat with a perspective closer to that of Mauldin’s hard-pressed Willie and Joe.

 

There’s honor for you. Here’s no vanity. I am as hot as molten lead, and as heavy too. God keep lead out of me; I need no more weight than mine own bowels. I have led my ragamuffins where they are peppered. There’s not three of my hundred and fifty left alive, and they are for the town’s end, to beg during life.  [3]

                                      

      A similar moment occurs in the Song of Roland, in the very conclusion where it might best influence the listener or reader’s impression of the whole.  Summoned to yet another combat, Charlemagne reacts with weary resignation.

 

Li empereur n’y volsît aller mie:

“Dieu,” dit le Roi, si peineuse est ma vie

Pleure des yeux, sa barbe blanche tire.” (ll. 4261-4263)

 

[“The emperor did not want to go.  “Oh, god,” the king said, “how painful is my life,” as with weeping eyes, he tugs on his white beard.”]

 

     While the placement of this image at the poem’s end increases its weight of significance, it is hardly the first anti-heroic passage.  Throughout the poem Charlemagne has been regularly depicted in such thoughtful moods.  Indeed, the beard-stroking is a leitmotif, the visible signification of his pensive attitudes, associated in general with his authority and wisdom, but numerous time the gesture accompanies distressed reflections of the suffering of war [4]. 

     What should the reader make of Roland the hero, given that Charlemagne, the most sagacious figure in the story, feels such ambivalence?  Roland’s judgement is far from unerring; his decisions are sometimes clouded by vainglory and impulsiveness (resembling in this the most courageous of fighters both on and off the printed page).  His nomination of his treacherous stepfather, who is also Charlemagne’s brother-in-law, for the mission to Marsile, which Ganelon takes as an attempt to do him in, is the origin of the story’s crisis, so Roland might be seen as inviting his fate.  Even in strictly military terms, Roland’s gallantry verges on hubris when he long refuses to blow the trumpet out of concern for appearing cowardly. 

      In the genre of chansons de geste Roland embodies a rashness in the face of death the very seriousness of which validates the hero’s indifference to consequences while Charlemagne represents the more mature judgement that peace, while less glorious, makes more sense.  I am reminded of Shel Silverstein’s 1973 country music song “The Winner” (performed by Bobby Bare) in which Tiger Man McCool resists a needless fistfight, recounting how his body has been battered by a lifetime of brawls and readily conceding “Well okay I quit I lose you're the winner.”  This leads his challenger, to whom he says, “you remind me a lot of my younger days,” to the realization that since “my eyes still see and my nose still works and my teeth're still in my mouth,” “I guess that makes me the winner.”  Machismo and sensible self-preservation are directly opposed, but only the elder’s cooler head can ignore the impulse to fight.    The tension between aggression and survival instinct is perennial and will continue to be enacted on the world stage as well as in song as long as rash youths like Roland pursue fame through violence.

  

 

1.  See Rexroth, Kenneth, "On Peace" (1966). Special Collections: Oregon Public Speakers. 34.  Rexroth is not alone in this claim.  See, for instance, Caroline Alexander’s introduction to her translation of the Iliad, the first by a woman.

2.  XI, 485.

3.  (Henry IV, part 1, Act V, scene iii, ll. 35 ff.)

4.  See for examples, lines 215, 2930, 2943, 2982, and 3712.