The North Coast times-eagle., May 01, 2002, Page 4, Image 4

PAGE 4
WAR & PEACE AT
BY MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER
If the dead mean nothing to us (except on Memorial
Day weekend when the national freeway is clotted with surfers,
swimmers, skiers, picnickers, campers, hunters, fishers, foot­
ballers. beer-busters), what of our wounded? Does anyone know
where they are How they feel? How many arms, legs, ears,
noses, mouths, faces, penises they've lost? How many are deaf
and dumb or blind or all three? How many are single or double
or triple or quadruple amputees? How many will remain immobile
for the rest of their days? How many will hang on as decere­
brated vegetables quietly breathing their lives away in small,
dark, secret rooms?
-DALTON TRUMBO
The most shamelessly exploited minority in American
society is its war dead. They died horribly and most of them
unwillingly, but they are not left to rot in peace. Their molding,
mutilated corpses are eloquently exhumed as spearheads for
the next war, their deaths extolled to recruit new armies.
A language of lies develops. The dead always died
for their country, heroically and nobly, and all of them willingly
made the publicly acclaimed final sacrifice. None raped, pillaged
or burned or committed other than sanctioned murder or terror­
ism. None died because of simple bad luck or from their own
stupidity or that of their commanders or from callous or asinine
battle strategies. None died from accidental shelling or bombing
by their own side. All of them were killed facing the enemy, not
running away. Their deaths are glorified as justifications for the
wars that killed them.
Nations are haunted by their war dead. Monuments and
Memorials are built in every city and somewhere near the center
of every town. The war dead assume a purity in death most
would have found difficult to attain in life. The official piety is
that the cultural lifeblood is sustained by their deaths rather than
drained, and only by sacrificing themselves in the same manner
will the living gain a similar historical legitimacy. Service to the
state is always a possibility to the young, and death in its service
is presented as either an ideal or an unavoidable necessity.
Families of the dead who should protest the slaughter of their
young are instead willing accomplices in the demand that
warfare is the only acceptable response to an unruly world.
Those who resist that specious reasoning are compared to
the heroic dead as unworthy cowards and traitors implicitly
responsible for their deaths "War would end if the dead could
return," Stanley Baldwin said But the irony of war deaths
exploited as coercion for others to murder and die is lost in
the thunder of voices calling for vengeance and righteous war.
War survivors are used as shabbily as the dead.
They are contained within government sponsored veterans'
organizations that rubberstamp their approval on everything
military They are given parades and empty honors. The horror
of their experiences is shielded from public view, goldplated
in boilerplate and pageantry, yet they are undeniably represent­
atives of humanity's darkside that civilization attempts to
disregard or abstract even while perpetuating it through them.
War is blood, carnage and death, which is so obvious a fact
we often ignore it in our preoccupation with the rationales,
strategies, weapons and the machines of war.
Each generation seems to think it should not be outdone
by its predecessors. It must leave its bloody mark on history
no matter how absurd or pointless. Every generation has been
incapable or unwilling to arrest the pattern of terror and suffering
each inflicts on itself, and our own risks world holocaust because
of a compulsive insistence that our time, which is noteworthy
only because we live in it, be no less dramatic than the histories
we imitate
Albert Schweitzer warned in 1924 that the suicide of
civilization was in progress because humanity has lost "the
consciousness that every man is an object of concern because
he is MAN," and predicted that "the advance of fully developed
inhumanity" was only a matter of time. "We have talked for
decades with ever increasing lightmindedness about war and
conquest as if these were merely operations on a chessboard,"
he wrote, asking how else that might be possible than "as a
result of a tone of mind which no longer pictured to itself the
fate of individuals, but thought of them only as figures or objects
belonging to the material world."
Half a century later philosopher Donald Wells offered
another explanation. The problem of war and conquest and the
diminished value of human life was not due to a vague tone of
mind but the demand of government authority over the masses.
Wells wrote "If it is presumed at the outset that the life of the
state transcends that of the individual in value, indeed, that the
state is more important than all the citizens, then the fact of
human death, on even a cosmic scale, will prove irrelevant as
an argument against war."
Inhumanity is exclusively human. History seldom
mentions compassion or 'the consciousness of every (human
being) as an object of concern' as vital ingredients to the
structure of civilization Humanity's history is of wars. The
most fierce and acquisitive sweep away the gentle and least
avaricious It was that way when our hairy ancestors thrust
pointed sticks into each other; it is that way now when the
weapons of our industry are able to reduce continents to
radioactive ash in minutes The only real significance of the
eternal conflicts of our species is the epic flow of blood, the
slaughter of millions at each turn of history's gory pages for
reasons as brief as their lives The names of the multitudes
are lost, only their numbers are marked, aggregates of killers
and killed
Our mental evolution of the past ten thousand years
has not eradicated the savagery or the terror of our most
primitive ancestors. We continue to regard every other human,
and by extension other cultures, nations, religions and races,
as our blood enemies We continue to war or think of war as our
right to dominate or destroy whoever is weaker, different or in
the way We refuse to think of ourselves as parts of the same
family or to understand the rarity or privilege of life.
Instead we make war more ardently than love. War
gives our lives a transcendent vitality that daily living and its
squalid defeats squeeze out of us. We feel that we are a vital
part of great events, that our normally diminished lives serve an
*
became more settled and civilized the laurels inevitably
transferred from the stealthy hunters of animals to the slayers
of human beings. All of our great civilizations and empires
have been structured on the expenditure of human blood,
the conquest and often decimation of tribes, cities or nations
unlucky to be along the march of more ambitiously militant
societies.
War has affected civilization tremendously but its
effect upon those who suffer firsthand is given little consider­
ation. Wars determine the reaction and consequent effect upon
a society and recovery is often a long slow process. Those with
personal involvement in a war are not accorded the same
respect for their own process of recovery. Their private horrors
and nightmares of war are dealt with impatiently and with scorn
at possible psychological or physical disabilities, although
collectively these sorts of disruptions and discontinuities are
accepted as part of the historical process.
The ambiguity of history might be encompassed in
a phrase used often by Oliver Cromwell and others: Pray for
Peace, Prepare for War. Earth bristles with preparation. Yet a
grim irony of this Brobdingnagian era is that we have reduced
human participation in warfare — with the exception of possibly
dying in appalling numbers.
The invention of the harpoon gun and the exploding
harpoon decimated the whale. The chainsaw has cut down the
world's forests. By also inventing such weapons as the machine
gun and hydrogen bomb we nearly match our reckless despoil­
ion of the home planet by abetting our own extinction.
We have perfected war, refined it to an instrument of
digital logic that no longer depends upon human rationale or
justification; no philosophy or psychology, only strategy and
provocation. Although armies are unnecessary now, they are
kept around to engage in traditional fratricide without provoking
megadeath. Dead soldiers are like the Christ in a sense. They
die as surrogates for the rest of us. Unrestricted warfare in the
20th century also enlarged the soldiers' always shadowy and
disavowed parallel roll as surrogate executioners.
important purpose at a watershed moment, and we are never so
unified, so able to collectively surmount tremendous obstacles
as when we make war against each other.
We make excuses for warfare and accept it as a
consequence of living. We seldom think of war as our invention.
We treat it instead as a natural phenomenon; an earthquake, a
flood or volcano. We feed its insatiable thirst for blood with the
best bloodstock we produce. Until recently the highest honors a
nation or people could bestow were upon the men who draped
themselves in the blood of others. Life's heroes have always
been the men of death
As with most other effects of insatiable technology
warfare has advanced far beyond nature's strictures of weather
or geography. The world's militaries, even the poorest from the
most obscure nation, are able to make war anytime anyplace.
State of the art weapons float around the world, sold by arms
merchants to anyone with money, credit or good prospects.
Even drug gangs in American ghettos are armed with high-
status automatic weapons, as are sociopaths and vengeful boys
who spray school playgrounds with bullets. The industrial nations
are arms bazaars, producing and marketing exotic weapons and
high-tech weapons systems, vicariously enraptured by the
increased carnage rockets and jet fighter/bombers make of
tribal-level squabbles. Perhaps abstract engagement in wars
made possible by outlandish weapons designed in the manner of
video games (and ardently viewed on TV screens) is verification
of the popularity of reality through image without participation.
This defacto decadence might be related to the
hallucinatory dread of nuclear obliteration, which has been
almost too large a horror to bear for more than half a century.
It seems inconceivable that humanity has made itself capable
of its own extinction, and that by our own will we can disappear
from history as absolutely as dinosaurs and dodo birds. Most
folks refuse to think we could be so foolish; yet they suspect our
leaders have few qualms or sufficient fears, urged instead to
the possibility of the unthinkable by the prospects of opportunity.
In such a world reality hurts. We turn away as we would from a
glare of sunlight. We submerge into banality to mute our angst.
Genesis might be a warning: Instead of a myth of instant
birth it is a prophecy of mega-death. Perhaps we are still in the
Garden of Eden, which is a metaphor for life. Evil might not be
sex after all (or knowledge) but humanity's careless brutality that
leads irresistibly toward plucking the ripe fruit of specicide.
War has advanced civilization as brutally as it has
destroyed civilizations. Humanity is as accustomed to warfare
as breathing and copulating. We are a killing species: we rule
earth because our ancestors were clever, ruthless and well-
organized predators, and we have always butchered our own
as readily as any other creature. We kill individually, which
is murder, or we organize murder and name it war. We have
throughout history honored the killers among us, and as we
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I
Although Americans like to think of themselves as a
peaceable society, we are among history's most successfully
warlike Our nation was created by war, maintained its union
by war, became a continental power by invading our southern
neighbor and stripping it of its northern half; and became a world
power by terminating the decrepit colonial empire of another.
The two World Wars made the USA a superpower
during which we built a war machine unsurpassed in history
while demonstrating a productive capacity that overwhelmed
allies and enemies alike. This nation now dominates global
politics with its immense and highly sophisticated potential
for total war as the only reigning superpower after emerging
successfully from a half century 'Cold War1 against Soviet
Russia, which was characterized by inconclusive brushfire wars
and a horrendous nuclear arms race that economically and
politically broke our competitor but seriously injured our own
economies and ideologies (and possibly unhinged our sanities).
In all the USA has fought in eleven major wars, but one
must also not forget the incessant three century war against
Native Americans which is comparably among the most savage
and genocidal ever fought. Our expansion across the continent
— our Manifest Destiny’ — necessitated in the minds of the
expansionists the continued extermination of the primeval tribes