THE WAGES OF WAR

BY
DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

The outcome of the Bush War on Iraq was a foregone conclusion long before the first missile was launched: there would of course be a swift and overwhelming victory over a demoralized and technologically inferior force. Just before the pre-emptive strike, even the majority of Americans were against starting the war without the world's approval; but the president started it anyway for the good of the world against it. Of course most Americans approved of the killing after it had begun; to do otherwise has long been deemed traitorous to one's own kind. Since the immediate victory was as swift if not swifter than expected, the nation rejoices. The ethical questions are rendered irrelevant by victory. The polls say our youth see the military as strong, trustworthy and ethical now. Each victory, no matter how arrogant and immoral the sitting president might be, serves to reduce public apprehension and reinforce what may very well be irresponsible conduct.

The best fight was not put up by the professional military forces of Iraq but by paramilitary guerrillas officially labeled "barbaric terrorists" because they did not adhere to the advanced civilized standards of methodic mass murder. The traditional caution expressed on the jingo cable networks by retired U.S. military officers who either feared or wished for a prolonged war was grossly mistaken in light of the ever higher technology and the purportedly higher moral ground of the only superpower in the world. After all, the United States has proven that it is the virtually unstoppable leader of civilization upon whom an attack is an unforgivable assault on civilization itself. According to our historians, war has undeniably made "this great nation of ours" even greater in its global influence than that enjoyed by the Roman Empire in its much smaller world.

Indeed, when prominent journalists for the leading patriotic rags and jingo news services returned from Iraq, they attested with beaming faces to the fact that war makes America great. Moreover, they said being "embedded" with the troops was awesome, and that war brings out the best in Americans - we might add, especially when broadcasted live to the entire free world. However, an interview with one journalist on a jingo news show had to be quickly cut short because, when asked what impressed him most about Saddam's rise to power and the wars on Iraq, he said it was the role of the United States in bringing it all about. "That discussion for another time and place," said the cable journalist.

Although one American soldier killed is one too many, one over whom the entire nation weeps, American casualties were exceedingly light in comparison to the vast damage done: about 200 heroes dead in comparison to many thousands of the despicable enemy killed. And the infrastructure of the Iraqi people was virtually destroyed - Baghdad resembles bombed-out Hanoi - it will take decades for Big Business to reconstruct Iraq in its own image. Victory!

We can always find some moral justification for war before or after the fact no matter what flag we might rally around to prove that the part is better than the whole. In this case we already have the gruesome evidence of Saddam's brutal regime. Instruments of torture have been found. Cadavers are being unearthed as we speak, including the bodies of the Shias whom were encouraged to rebel then were abandoned by the current U.S. President's father. A smoking gun will be found some day, of that much we can be certain. As for the nearly one-million innocents killed by the sanctions, people who do not rise up against their leaders because of sanctions are simply not innocent enough; besides, those deaths can be blamed on their leader even though everyone knew that the sanctions were only serving to enrich him while killing even more of his people. Again, "That discussion is for another time and place," and that place is not on the jingo cable "news" show where angry white males are being catered to.

Is Victory after a glorious moment of triumph always this bitter-sweet? We would prolong the after-glowing glory of this war because we wonder what we have really won as the suicide-bombers continue to detonate their deadly loads - one jingo cable network has renamed them "homicide-bombers", as if that usage demonstrates anything besides the stupidity of its producers and editors. Something seems wrong with this victory. The financial burden of the Bush War on Iraq and the Third World War on Terrorism both real and imagined has been enormous and will continue to mount unless something much better is built on the ruins from which, according to Schumpeter's principle of creative-destruction, we might all profit materially.

Yet we suspect materialism and economic determinism. We know material poverty might lead to war; but so might material wealth when a people are spiritually impoverished. How many times did the great prophet warn Israel not to trust in the riches provided by YHWH? How many prophets averred that those who are crushed are closest to the Lord? We fear perhaps that the wars the militarists wage in our national name are too easily won today; that our generals, their right-wing commander and his hawkish court rely too much on might instead of right nowadays because they have thus far little disincentive to do otherwise. The material wealth and high technology of the United States seems to have resulted in an almighty, unstoppable force, a nation with an unlimited divine right to do whatever it might in the name of its awesome, fearsome god; to kill people for their own good; never mind the killing of innocents, the collateral damage from misguided missiles and political sanctions. Higher technology, lower morality, becomes the equation for those who do not suffer the painful consequences of their wars. When we are fat, dumb and happy, absent natural catastrophes such as earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, plagues, and assured of winning any war, war gradually loses its moral justification.

We have arrived at a crucial question, one that we might oversimplify for convenience's sake. Assuming that pain is a necessary defense mechanism, What is the fate of a creature who no longer feels pain? Of course a nation is not identical to an individual organism, but in common parlance, at least, we are doomed to figures of speech. Doctors used to think a little bloodletting restored the organism to a healthy balance. The same was thought of warring states. With the advance of technology and universal military conscription, the trickle became a flood of blood. The Great War, once rivers of blood were flowing without palliative effect, was then fervently desired to be the war to end all wars. After a brief pause in the hostilities, fifty-million more lives were lost. Despite the continued insistence of pacifists, that organized state-murder is irrational and does no good at all, many authorities continued to extol war as the best means to the highest good because "man is a fighting creature"; the most desperate struggle, it is supposed, the life-or-death struggle of war, improves by ultimate trial the moral lot of humankind. That there be no fair trial without a great deal of widespread suffering is almost universally agreed upon. War is not merely a game, although it might be a gamble for god's chance thumb up, or down.

It follows, then, that the American people have not been morally improved by the recent, relatively painless wars, and that they must eventually pay a much higher price in real physical suffering. Why? Because prolonged domestic peace is the main cause of the most horrible wars of all.

General Friedrich von Bernhardi, hardly an unbiased generalist yet one who still has the sympathies of many militarists, scoffed at the pacific ideals expressed by political leaders: "They usually employ the need of peace as a cloak under which to promote their own political aims," he said. "We can hardly assume that a real love of peace prompts these efforts." Furthermore, "This desire for peace has rendered most civilized nations anemic, and marks a decay of spirit and political courage such as has often been shown by a race of Epigoni. 'It has always been.' H. von Treitschke tells us. 'the weary, spiritless, and exhausted ages which have played with the dream of perpetual peace.'" Of course war interrupts trade and makes man brutal, hence, "It is therefore a most desirable consummation if wars for trivial reasons should be rendered impossible." Nevertheless, let us not forget that "War is a biological necessity of the first importance, a regulative element in the life of mankind which cannot be dispensed with, since without it an unhealthy development will follow, which excludes every advancement of the race, and therefore all real civilization." He must therefore quote Heraclites: "War is the father of all things."

General Bernhardi knew who was destined to conquer: "In the extrasocial struggle, in war, that nation will conquer which can throw into the scale the greatest physical, mental, moral, material, and political power.... It is clear that those intellectual and moral factors which insure superiority in war are also those which render possible a general progressive development. They confer victory because the elements of progress are latent in them. Without war, inferior or decaying races would easily choke the growth of healthy budding elements, and a universal decadence would follow." We may imply from this that the superior force not only conquers but saves the vanquished peoples from their inferiority; it seems then that the United States may be in effect realizing the German war aim, to save the world from its degeneration. As Count Moltke said, "Perpetual peace is a dream, and it is not even a beautiful dream. War is an element in the order of the world ordained by God.... Without war the world would stagnate and lose itself in materialism."

And just what is the 'moral' of General Bernhardi's story? "Might is at once the supreme right, and the dispute as to what is right is decided by the arbitrament of war. War gives a biologically just decision, since its decision rests on the very nature of things." But to what end? As our popular success-courses tell us, success has as many ends as there are individuals; but our good general is not an anti-social personalist, he is a patriot who believes that only the State can provide the highest degree of life. "This highest expansion can never be realized in pure individualism." And what is the ethical end of this super-individual, the State? "War... will be regarded as a moral necessity if it is waged to protect the highest and most valuable interests of a nation. As human life is now constituted, it is a political idealism which calls for war, while materialism - in theory, at least - repudiates it." Valuable interests, then, equal X.

Bernhardi said materialism makes people weak and fearful for their own security; the good fight is the spiritual fight. Almost in the next breath, he expresses Germany's spiritual interest in acquiring or controlling foreign territory - the spiritual fight is presumably superior, for power and sovereignty. Prior to the Great War, Germany's thinkers were convinced that a redistribution of the world was forthcoming, and they were unabashedly interested in other people's property; encircled by other robber-states, Germany resorted to a pre-emptive war in self-defense of the expanded property and soul the Fatherland would be entitled to under god's grace. Germany was not a democracy then. Pre-emptive wars presumably in self-defense are not the means preferred by democracies. We recall here Franklin Delano Roosevelt's exchange with Harry Hopkins after they read the latest intercepted message from Tokyo to Washington: Hopkins said, "This means war," and he said it was too bad the U.S. could not make a pre-emptive strike. "No, we can't do that," said Roosevelt. "We are a democracy." Not any more, we reckon, at least not that kind of democracy.

Let us turn, now, for another example of the moral justification of inevitable war, to the eminent American historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. In a paper on the Civil War, he took to task revisionist historians who believed that the Civil War, and by implication other wars, were not inevitable on moral grounds.

According to sentimental and weak people, war in itself is unnecessary and immoral, and their opinion is often affirmed by revisionists historians who believe wars are economically determined and can be prevented by a better distribution of goods. Nonetheless, the holy writ laid down in rivers of blood proves that war is necessary to resolve moral conflicts and is needed to dislodge the moral logjams of an inherently disagreeable and originally evil people - so that they may realize X>. Man is naturally a fighting creature. As every laboring woman and every fighting man who survives knows very well, without excruciating pain there can be no worthwhile gain. Schlesinger had this to say about the pain without which there is no moral gain:

"Man generally is entangled in insoluble problems; history is consequently a tragedy in which we are all involved, whose keynote is anxiety and frustration, not progress and fulfillment. Nothing exists in history to assure us that the great moral dilemmas can be resolved without pain....

"We cannot therefore be relieved from the duty of moral judgment on issues so appalling and inescapable as those involved in human slavery; nor can we be consoled by sentimental theories about the needlessness of the Civil War into regarding our own struggles against evil as equally needless."

Schlesinger believed that 'revisionist' historians who deny the necessity of the pain of war for moral improvement deprive themselves of the painful insight into the moral dimension of war. They do not feel the anxiety themselves: "Because the revisionists felt no moral urgency themselves, they deplored as fanatics those who did feel it, or brush aside their feelings as the artificial product of emotion and propaganda." The moral crisis was over slavery, and the logjam could only be resolved by civil war; therefore war was inevitable; all the arguments to the contrary made by armchair philosophers can be summarily dismissed. The conflict was 'irrepressible' for a moral reason. Slavery was not about to be tolerated or eliminated by peaceful means, therefore a just war was once again waged against an immoral practice that constituted yet another "betrayal of the basic values of our Christian and democratic tradition."

How many lives were lost in the American Civil War? And what were the moral gains? Might they have been had by nonviolent means? Apparently not. The very life of a people in its nation must be at risk in order to resolve important moral differences that they may evolve to X or find themselves in Valhalla or Heaven.

We find a similar reasoning in Jacob Burckhardt's reflections. Now Burckhardt was a historicist. He respected the individual and the particular. He believed in the power of ideas, but his ideas could come and go. Although he considered history as a continuous flow, he repudiated rational historical systems and thought the idea of a Hegelian world spirit rolling inevitably to a certain end, zigzagging along the way to suit the cunning of reason, was absurd. Yet he thought war was a necessary factor in higher human development. He too quotes Heraclites's dictum: "War is that father of all things." Sometimes we think people would improve if they stopped reading the same historical suggestions. Burckhardt turns to Hinduism: "Indians worship Shiva, the god of destruction. The warrior, he says, is filled with the joy of destruction, wars clear the air like thunderstorms, they steel the nerves and restore the heroic virtues, upon which States were originally founded, in place of indolence, double-dealing, and cowardice. We might here also recall H. Leo's reference to 'fresh and cheerful war, which shall sweep away the scrofulous mob....' Lasting peace not only leads to enervation; it permits the rise of precarious, fear-ridden, distressful lives which would not have survived without it and which nevertheless clamor for their 'rights,' cling somehow to existence, bar the way to genuine ability, thicken the air and as a whole degrade the nation's blood. War restores real ability to a place of honor.... War, which is the subjection of all life and property to one momentary aim, is morally vastly superior to the merely violent egoism of the individual; it develops power in the service of a supreme general idea.... Since only real power can guarantee peace and security of any duration, while war reveals where real power lies, the peace of the future lies in such a war. Yet it should, if possible, be a just and honorable war...."

And now comes a warning from decades ago and quite pertinent to the status quo: "It must be a genuine war, with existence at stake.... The wars of today are certainly aspects of a great general crisis, but individually they lack the significance and effect of genuine crises. Civilian life remains in its rut in spite of them.... These wars leave behind them vast debts, i.e. they bequeath the main crisis to the future. Their brevity too deprives them of their value as crises. The full forces of despair do not come into play, and hence do not remain victorious on the field of battle, and yet it is they, and they alone, which could bring about a real regeneration of life, i.e., reconciliation in the abolition of an old order by a really vital one."

After perusing the moral justifications for war, we might come to believe they might be vain and morbid rationalizations of a deeply rooted socio-psychological disease, no matter how pious or high-sounding they seem. Nietzsche, an anti-Christian German philosopher, criticized what he considered to be the degenerate and hypocritical morals of his day. He arrived at about the same conclusion as many orthodox moralists; his phrasing was more malevolent than benevolent; many hypocrites were converted to his frank way of thinking. "It is mere illusion and pretty sentiment,' Nietzsche observed, "to expect much (even anything at all) from mankind if it forgets how to make war. As yet no means are known which call so much into action as a great war that rough energy born of the camp, that deep impersonality born of hatred, that conscience born of murder and cold-bloodedness, that fervour born of effort in the annihilation of the enemy, that proud indifference to loss, to one's own existence, to that of one's fellows, that earthquake-like soul-shaking which a people needs when it is losing its vitality."

Now, then, it may seem that, during the course of this essay, it's author has been converted to war mongering by the power of suggestion conveyed to him while he was quoting eminent authors. It may further appear that he believes the wages of war in units of blood spilled have not been sufficient for moral progress, hence he would have millions of people perish in war for their own good, that the survivors may arrive on the bodies of the dead at a higher, more virtuous morale, on the way to X. Such is not the case. He hopes the ironies and absurdities of the sophistries just presented in favor of war are not lost on those who are unduly predisposed to war.

 

Sources:

Wells, H. G. (Herbert George), 1866-1946, The outline of history, being a plain history of life and mankind, New York: The Macmillan company, 1921.

Burckhardt, Jacob, 1818-1897, Force and Freedom, Reflections on History, Ed. James Nichols, Boston: Beacon Press, 1964

Friedrich von Bernhardi, 1849-1930, Germany and the Next War, Transl. Allen H. Powles, New York: Chas. A. Eron, 1914