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

The Triumph and Tragedy of Revolution

November 15, 2016

It has been only a bare week after the election of the most authoritarian-minded president in American history, an unapologetic bigot to whom immigrants, Muslims, gay people, women, and minorities are lesser beings, an avaricious businessman whose career illustrates the very worst of American capitalism, enriching only himself while short-changing workers, contractors, and consumers. Those across a broad spectrum of political opinion, those with any humanity at all, must lament the elevation of Donald Trump and struggle to prevent progress from being rolled back in every arena of public life.

Yet at this time in which fascists and racists are assuming high governmental posts, a time when, if ever, a popular united front seems required, I choose to present a critique of the history of the left. I used to hear that even some conservative Italians used to vote Communist because the Communists were the only politicians who were not corrupt. We have not only our program but also our honesty and our candor to distinguish us from the selfish reactionary opportunists. We have as well the record of centuries to testify that steady organization and pressure from the masses can move history forward. First the aristocrats, then the middle class, and finally the laborers have gained power along with a greater share of what they produce. We have eliminated slavery, child labor, and prohibitions on homosexuality and have granted women the vote and workers the right to organize. No step forward in human society has ever occurred at the urging of conservatives; rather, progress has always come from those at first labeled radical, then liberal, then mainstream. This pattern will not be readily ended.

Yet the history of the left is not entirely noble. The student of Greek history will note that “tyrants” arose from the popular party and that autocrats throughout history often enjoy high levels of support. “Democracy” fails when the majority chooses to oppress the minority. We have just witnessed in America the very first candidate who doubts the value of democracy, who forms mutual admiration societies with dictators, who fears education and celebrates white supremacy. Why, then criticize the revolutionaries? Because we can afford to be more honest. The facts and the trends of history still favor us even after the rise to power of a hateful and ridiculous man.


     I have always called myself a revolutionary socialist. The qualifying adjective does not imply that change can come only through an armed uprising, but only that to be effective the revolution must be radical and thorough-going, not the patchwork ameliorations of European social democracy. What is required is social ownership of the means of production; anything less could provide only symptomatic relief for the problems of capitalism. I do believe that a ruling class will never cede power if another viable choice exists. Many factors short of bloodshed can constitute sufficient force: an army that will no longer obey a tyrannical regime (as in Portugal in 1974), the increasing financial cost of maintaining the status quo (probably the major motive for Britain’s giving up on empire), or, everybody’s favorite, massive and well-organized resistance that makes governing impossible (as in Tunisia in 2011). Frederick Douglass was right when he said, “If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle.”
     I cannot claim to be a pacifist (though I admire pacifists) because I think I would be justified in resisting an assault on me or on my loved ones (ineffectual though my resistance might be). If this is allowed for an individual, how much more it must be for a society when the well-being of multitudes is involved. Oppression and institutional violence deprive people of the lives they deserve no less than physical brutality. The slave may be fed daily, but who would doubt his right to revolt?
     Indeed, evidence seems to point to the potency of blood when argument has proven futile. John Brown declared with action his belief in the Biblical principle that “without shedding of blood there is no remission [of sins].” [1] One may regard Old Ossawatomie as an extremist, but Abraham Lincoln said very nearly the same in his eloquent Second Inaugural Address: “If God wills that it [war] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’"
     Would the United States have become independent without war? (Canada, of course, did.) Or the French have rid themselves (temporarily) of the Bourbons? The executed martyrs of the Easter Uprising in Dublin, after plunging into an unwinnable military contest, enjoyed vastly multiplied influence in death. And, in the USA, who can deny that the deaths of children in the Birmingham church bombing in 1963 and of college-age volunteers during Freedom Summer in 1964 hastened the progress of civil rights? Or that the violence in America’s cities stimulated the so-called War on Poverty”? Surely the deaths at Kent State advanced the struggle against the war in Vietnam. At a state-sponsored correctional services seminar, I was told that only after Rockefeller’s murderous assault on the inmates of Attica in 1971 were inmates granted twenty-six of their twenty-seven demands.[2] These are only a few examples of an all-but-self-evident principle.
     Yet the very efficacy of blood as a catalyst for social change testifies to its dangerous power, equal, as Freud came to believe, with that of sexuality, in the unconscious. Any human can feel the blood boil as provocation mounts, and most any human may, in the heat of the moment, act with unjustifiable force. Anarchists like Sorel and Malatesta celebrated violence, as did some in the IWW and later in the Weather Underground. If such figures seem to occupy only the fringe of American political thought, one need only cite the homage paid to military veterans, revered specifically for their use of force, by mainstream opinion.
     The invocation of such a formidable psychological force is highly hazardous. The pacifists would have us believe that the practice of violence itself brutalizes the sensibility and the oppressed may easily become an oppressor after a bloody victory. Again history offers countless examples. Hundreds of thousands at any rate died in la Terreur and the suppression of the revolt in the Vendée that followed the French Revolution. The Irish Free State in its attempts to consolidate its position killed more combatants than had died in the War of Independence. Even among partisans of socialism (indeed, especially among us) the monstrous crimes of Stalin, Mao, and the Khmer Rouge and the lesser betrayals of self-described people’s regimes in Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, Venezuela and elsewhere must be admitted, examined, and analyzed. Yet each of these struggles was fundamentally just at the start; each overturned a violent and viciously backward regime.
     What then is to be done? One warning sign of a wrong turn is the rise of cult of personality. In political groups as in religious movements one does well to beware any leader touted as irreplaceable and superior to all others, with the guaranteed answer to any question. [3] Yet many throughout history seem to seek such leaders, to voluntarily cede individual decision-making and to become instead units in a larger system. This is the distinctive appeal of the dictator and the cult-leader; it must be no part of the left. No person is always or predictably right; no country owns virtue. This is not to say that distinctions do not exist. They do, and the responsible citizen will often select the least of evils.
     Secondly, the left must realize that the people’s interest is almost always for peace. While a mortal struggle may on occasion seem unavoidable, it must remain a genuine last resort, used with the greatest caution. It is wise to abandon the romantic appeal even of violent poses. Suffering is bad and thus war is bad and only in the rarest cases might it be less bad than peace.
     Even in our present state of submission to the plutocrats it is necessary to recall the history of people’s movements, glorious and hopeful, but on occasion dismal as well. Though progressives have led all social advances achieved by our species, they have also proven all-too-human in victory. American radicals have at times emulated the authoritarian model of Stalinism, mindlessly enlisting their best efforts in support of tyrants and murderers. While many have selflessly pursued a vision of betterment, those in leadership ranging from union leaders to heads of state have sometimes sought self-aggrandizement no less than those on the right whose philosophy explicitly values selfishness. It can never be wise to cede one's own discernment to a "great man" however charismatic. Great disasters have arisen from those who claimed to represent people's power. It may seem far from reality to warn in these reactionary days against excesses from revolutionaries, but every share of actual power brings new hazards and pitfalls. The broadest human self-interest is given form by socialism, but its advocates must always guard against the darker regions of the backbrain. These will never vanish, but we can cultivate our gardens, making vegetables out of earth and sweat and tending with equal care our solicitude for all others, including opponents.


1. Hebrews 9:22. The passage is describing the earlier Mosaic practice of animal sacrifice and its replacement by the higher order sacrifice of Christ.

2. The only unsatisfied demand was that rebels might be allowed to travel to a sympathetic foreign country. (Algeria was a refuge for some Panthers and for Tim Leary at the time.)

3. Apart from leadership from the Comintern or from the Fourth Internationale, one may note such personality cults as those around Bob Avakian of the Revolutionary Communist Party.