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It's Their War, why aren't they fighting it? Operation Yellow Elephant
Does God Bless America?
I've had a very strange experience recently. In the shop I have managed to tune a couple of TVs into UK History, to give my brain a break from Christina, Kelly Osbourne and the other mind-rot.
The effect of seeing black and white images of the Boer war, Vietnam, World War I, World War II, the American Civil War, Indian wars, wars in India and the campaigns of wartime resistance merging into anti-Communist campaigns and then to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan all being played out on one TV while others show present day Iraq has been quite alarming. I've suddenly seen that virtually all wars are nasty, bloody and fought for very selfish reasons of which the majority of combatants and civilians were only very hazily aware.
Seeing any one war at once gives the wrong impression. Seeing them like this, out of sequence, with repetition and interspersed with contemporary concerns shows the real picture. The similarity between the Zulu wars and the wars against the American Indians suddenly chime, and then before I know it I'm watching the same thing happening again and yet this time instead of arrogant cavalry in blue it is the British fighting against a fast moving well armed indigenous people, who happen to be Boers... So the British herd the Boer women and children into camps and then British soldiers, who are just like the people walking around me, liberate emaciated Jews from a different camp, and fill pits with corpses. And then it is evil terrorists planting bombs, and the bridge collapses blocking the train carrying supplies to Rommel, who is attacking with a massed movement of tanks somewhere across the steppes, a plane flies over and strafes the tank, on the video screen we see the Iraqi bridge collapse into the Rhine, down which the Vikings sail...
What were they fighting for? The blood, gore and human suffering is obvious. The causes are not. The juxta-positioning and the fast edit (by being distracted by customers at vital parts in the narrative) broke down all my defences. I couldn't see US and THEM, modern and primitive. I was seeing Roman swords stabbing people one moment, then Wellington's men charging through the breech in a castle wall in Spain, then Zulu spears, then bayonets at Flodden, then again at Goose Green. Death was a constant. But where was the reason? Most of the causes of wars seemed to slip away and be seen in their true light, greed of political leaders for glory and wealth. Sometimes there was a clear aggressor and there was glory in repulsing evil but usually there was not. The defenders were often defending their rights to be behave badly in their own way.
Most of the programs were not designed to shock people into hating war, many were obviously made for the sad individuals who like to recreate war with model soldiers, there were lots of diagrams of troop formations and comments on how brilliant or stupid the generals were. But even these programs merely added to the impression that war was a ghastly business, great business if you were far enough back from the front line but for the men at the sharp end it was hideously real and far removed from the tales of gallantry that boys have been fed for generations.
Perhaps I could devise some kind of aversion therapy to war with the help of 100 TV screens laid out in wet trenches with horses and men drowning in mud, children being napalmed and our soldiers raping and murdering after fighting through the breech and losing their comrades to a cannon ball fired at close range?
I'm not saying that war is never right but I am very clear that it is often very wrong.
The “Great Powers” were fighting for possession and control of foreign lands, often using foreign troops to do their dirty work. The soldiers didn't ask why they should march off to risk death, they accepted the idea that they were on the right side simply because it was the side they were on. Has it ever been any other way? Yes, actually it has been different before. Before the rise of great tribal nations small societies did not engage in great bloody wars with great loss of life. They fought more often, much more often, but on a much smaller scale. Warfare for hunter-gatherer people is about raiding parties and small massacres, perhaps grabbing some cattle and a few women, never pitched battles with a strong chance of the aggressors being killed. Major wars and genocidal attacks have only become possible with the rise of tribalism and nationalism. We know how wars are started, we know the forces that make them possible, it is time we addressed ways to make wars less likely, to dissolve the units that wars are fought for: big tribes, nations and religions.
Wars are good for nations. Are separate nations good for people?
War can be the right thing to oppose tyranny. There is no utility or value in living in squalor, fear, deprivation and peace. Bullies are not cowed by non-violent resistance, only gentlemen can be defeated by the tactics of Gandhi. You cannot shame a Pol Pot, Stalin, Nero, Saddam Hussein or a Hitler by passive resistance. Sometimes war is the only answer. But it should always be the last resort, never the preferred mode of diplomacy.
“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.”
- John Stuart Mill
“Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship ...Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.”