The War To Remind Us Of All Wars

 We have not been so intimate with war in a long time.  Ukraine is not so far away from America as other recent foreign wars (some of which are happening now unnoticed), and media coverage is more sustained and specific, with real people seen and heard in real time.

 The people involved are more familiar than, say, the people in Iraq or the Democratic Republic of Congo, or even Nicaragua, at least to the majority that defines itself as White.  Generations of Americans have Ukrainian or other Eastern European ancestors or relatives.  Those who do not may know those who do.  Ukraine defines itself as European, and it is only a few hours by plane from London, Paris and Berlin, Rome and Amsterdam, Oslo and Zurich.  And therefore, a few more hours from New York and Washington.

 In some ways our identification with Ukraine demonstrates our weak imaginations.  We expect we know what its cities are like, though we may not imagine Baghdad in the same way.  What we see convinces us that we understand the similarities of modern culture there.  And for Caucasians, it helps very much that their citizens appear Caucasian. 

 But in other ways, the identification is based on real bonds and resemblances.  We can see ourselves in those who are invaded, whose normal lives in apartment blocks and cafes are shattered by bombs and artillery fire.  Emotionally granting them their humanity, we are deeply shocked by what appears to be especially savage and brutal acts by Russian invaders: the murder of random civilians, the rapes, kidnapping, rendition and apparent targeting of hospitals and schools for explosive destruction.  And overlaying it all, the relentless pummeling of artillery shells and missile-borne bombs, seemingly with no other purpose than to utterly demolish entire cities and towns, taking basic aspects of civilization away from the survivors.  If we can’t have it, the Russian bombs say, nobody can. Russia seems set on ruling a smoldering wasteland.

 Apart from the geopolitical ramifications of this Russian invasion, the obvious brutality is said to be driving US and NATO sanctions and the open supply of armaments to Ukraine.  But is the key word here “obvious?”  Cell phone cameras spreading photos on the Internet and camera-laden drones are documenting atrocities, but are they more prevalent and systematic in this war than in others?

 Nobody really knows the full answer.  War and accurate information hardly ever mix.  One side always accuses the other of atrocities (usually baby-killing) that after the war often turn out not to have been true. Of course, the scale of other atrocities kept hidden may be revealed afterwards as well.  The Nazi Holocaust is a prime example, but hardly the only one.

 Sometimes we don’t know also because we don’t want to know.  The Commission of Inquiry for the International War Crimes Tribunal calculated the effects of American bombing of Iraq in the first (George H.W. Bush) Gulf War in the early 1991.  Summarizing a preliminary report, author Barbara Kingsolver wrote that the US bombed: “all the country’s major dams and most of its drinking water facilities; enough sewage containment facilities to contaminate the Tigris River with waterbourne killers; virtually all communications systems, leaving civilians unwarned of danger and unable to get help;…100 percent of irrigation systems; wheat and grain fields (with incendiary bombs); 28 civilian hospitals and 52 community health centers…[and] more than 600 schools.”

 Is this true?  Some specific instances are on the public record, as are many more in the G.W. Bush invasion of Iraq, in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Systematic torture and rendition by the US and allies after 9/11 are also well known.  Mass killing of civilians, destroying homes and schools etc., are also among the carnage and possible war crimes carried out by forces the U.S. opposed.  But the public usually finds out about them long after the war these acts were part of— if they ever do, or ever care.

 

More than a century ago, the young British author H.G. Wells saw in the gathering momentum of mechanical invention and energy production the coming of warfare technology capable of destroying civilization.  He wrote books—nonfiction and novels—predicting with great accuracy the ruinous armaments and resulting kinds of warfare that could soon envelope Europe.  His words were noticed but not heeded, and his fictions quickly became the Great War, later known as World War I. 

That war was scarcely over before Wells imagined and predicted huge aircraft bombing entire cities—something that had never been done in a systematic way—with highly destructive weapons including the atomic bomb.  He named the atomic bomb.  He wrote about this prospect in nonfiction and fiction.  He made a movie with scenes that now look like a documentary of the London Blitz, but filmed years before.  And then his fictions became World War II.

 In both cases, he warned that civilization itself was ultimately at stake.  He believed (as philosophical psychologist James Hillman did, and philosopher John Gray does) that war will always be with us. But unless humanity got a handle on the implications of ever more destructive technologies, Wells warned, it would destroy itself. That’s why Wells spent his long public life strongly advocating a single world government.  It perhaps wouldn’t end violent hostilities, but would very likely limit their frequency and destructiveness.

 Once both world wars started, British citizen Wells took sides, seeing that the victory of the other side would itself be catastrophic.  But he mostly promoted and organized a new order after the wars—first the League of Nations, and then the United Nations.  He spearheaded the writing of what would become the UN’s Declaration of Universal Human Rights.  But he wasn’t sanguine about the progress made.  Towards the end of his life (he died in 1946), he told friends that as his epitaph he wanted: “Goddamn it, I told you so.”

 Wells knew the horrible wisdom of Shakespeare’s words: “Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war.”  The metaphorical dogs of war can only be unleashed; they cannot really be controlled.  Whatever technology or tactic is available will be used, through strategy, anger, adrenaline and fear.  That’s what havoc is.

 For most of this past century, the greatest threat to human civilization was war. There were strong and principled peace movements for all the 20^th century. Not so much in the 21^st, it seems.

 Perhaps it’s partly because, for the past 30 years or so, war has seemed increasingly an intractable but local threat.  Now the true global threat is the climate crisis, and the global physical environment generally: nothing less basic to all life than air, land and water.

  But the nature of that climate crisis is that it lets loose the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and every form of catastrophe known to humanity—among them, famine, disease and tyranny.   Not the least of these are the dogs of war.  There are wars right at this moment being fought because of consequences of the climate crisis, and there have been for decades, even if largely unacknowledged.  

This war in Ukraine may itself be related to implications of the climate crisis, and probably to the politics and economics of fossil fuels and the future.  It certainly has to do with resources.  Just as Hitler’s supposedly inexplicable invasion of Russia was likely about resources Germany needed to defeat the might of America, Russia’s apparently inexplicable and crazy invasion of Ukraine may well be about wheat, fossil fuels and seaports.

 It is in fact one of those Four Horsemen: invasion, conquest.  This war is so deeply startling because it is a throwback to the most ancient wars, as well as a summary of the wars since, being fought with technologies and tactics from World War I on to previews of future warfare.  It turns civilization into savagery.  But all war does that, if not so dramatically and obviously to us.

 Like Wells, we take sides.  We side--I side-- with Ukraine, for all kinds of reasons. But war is only getting more monstrous. Bombing from the air in the 1940s may have been the original sin for self-destructive warfare, but there are other candidates for the normalizing of blanket brutality.  Having failed to address the dangers of war itself, if human civilization doesn’t concentrate on addressing the climate crisis, with full commitment to a decent degree of equity and justice around the world, the end of human civilization will be hastened by wars as well as dislocation, starvation and disease that also follow the havoc of wars. When global supply chains collapse, so does today’s civilization. (For one thing, no country on Earth has the Rare Earth elements sufficient to make its own electronic devices.) And all the guns in the closet won’t protect anyone.