There Is Nothing to Celebrate in a War
Vijay Prashad
A WAR zone is an ugly place. It is a place of noise and dust, the language of blood written on walls, a place of young men mostly who are afraid and allow that fear to produce the adrenaline necessary to kill or be killed; and if they cannot generate sufficient adrenaline, then they turn to captagon (a mixture of amphetamine and theophylline) or some other narcotic to dull their anxiety and their fear. Guns are not fired by the young working-class that is sent to war necessarily out of duty or patriotism; guns are mostly fired out of fear. But when a war becomes largely mechanical, with drones and missiles fired from a great distance, then the people who press the buttons develop a detached, scientific sensibility – engineers of the machine rather than machines of death. They look at television screens that do not show them people but heat signatures and target names, video games of danger that – at the other side – result in the noise, dust, and blood of a normal war zone.
Twenty-first century wars are no longer like the earlier wars, where the frontline was the main point of contact between the two or more armies. Now, even if there is a frontline – as there is between Ukraine and Russia – there are also rear actions through aerial bombardment, since missiles that are not detected and stopped can penetrate deep into the territory of the combatants. Old defensive technique, particularly if the war turns to a nuclear exchange, are no longer of value. The 1950s manuals from the United States that urged students to hide under their desks during a nuclear attack seemed absurd then and ridiculous now. There is no way to protect oneself from such ghastly attacks, not necessarily nuclear but even conventional – as has been seen over the past few years in Gaza. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have died as US-made 500lb bombs dropped from Israeli aircraft and flattened entire neighbourhoods. In Fallujah and Ramadi, in Iraq, the United States dropped not only huge bombs, but bombs tipped with depleted uranium, which makes the distinction between nuclear and conventional merely semantic for the children born with major birth defects years after the explosions.
War erodes cultures of conviviality and decency. That a government in the 21st century needs to enforce blackouts, when GPS systems and advanced radar can see past the cloak of darkness, says a lot about why the power is cut. It is not cut to keep the population safe, but it is cut to enforce a sense of being at war, the culture of fear induced into the hearts of civilians. This is war being brought to the home front, the mobilisation of populations into the culture of war and of hatred that it inculcates. The US-driven War on Terror was premised on this fear making. The entire population of the United States had to fear that they could be a target, the absurdity that al-Qaeda would strike a small town in Kansas notwithstanding. Did wars ever bring a people together, their sense of being beleaguered making them rely upon each other? Scholars of the home front in long wars show us that there was as much fierce competition for scarce goods and as much fear of neighbours as there was perhaps the development of a national camaraderie. That is the reason why there is so much propaganda during a war that speaks of a ‘national will’ or a ‘national sentiment’, as if these can be axiomatically read off the words of a well-paid television anchor. Who is to know what is the real ‘national mood’ during a conflict, when people are made to fear speaking their minds or when most people might not even know about the details of the conflict? In India, for instance, the maximum viewership for English news is a miniscule percentage of the population, so to take the mood of the anchors there is hardly an indicator of the ‘national mood’. It takes effort to undermine the cultures of conviviality and decency that define the life of most people. That is the work of propaganda. War propaganda is developed to generate hatred, as can be seen in the media work done by the two sides of the Sudan war or in the jingoism of the western media regarding Russia.
When I first went to Iraq, a veteran war correspondent told me something interesting. He said that there are only a few things to be learnt at the frontline these days. If a reporter gets to meet the fighters, which is not always the case since their commanders protect them from the media, then a reporter could gauge their morale. It is also possible, but not certain, that if a reporter is lucky, then the lies told by the political leaders about the battlefield could be unravelled. This was good advice. In the Sahel, it became clear to me by meeting some al-Qaeda fighters in the badlands between Niger and Libya that they were more cigarette and weapons smugglers than actual ideological terrorists. But I did not learn anything more than that about the conflicts that have been tearing apart this belt of Africa for at least a decade. Wisdom about a battle is best gleaned in the five-star hotels where arms deals are struck and in the high atmosphere of political conversations where elites talk across borders to settle matters in their own interest. Social media and news anchors of the capitalist press rattle their viewers with images and videos that circulate widely but cannot be confirmed by anyone. During the recent escalation between India and Pakistan, social media was aflame with rumours that excite emotions, and the capitalist anchors set about to report false stories to such an extent that even they had to apologise for their lies. Such exaggerations and falsehoods do nothing to inform the citizenry or to engage in a sober discussion about what is occurring, but they are designed to produce a culture of belligerence that does not easily lift after the firing ends. The impact of these falsehoods and exaggerations goes deep into the soul of a culture.
The US War on Terror playbook, now so easily opened by other governments, is all about the view that any terrorist attack can be dealt with by a refusal to investigate the attack, by a war against another state that ‘harbours terrorists’, by ‘precision strikes’ on ‘terror camps’, and by total disregard for international law. This playbook has now been used to destroy several states and societies from Central Asia to North Africa, from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Libya to Syria. The historical cost to these countries for the killing of the leaders of terrorist groups has been immense. And, despite their killing, the groups do not disappear but morph into other malignancies and the underlying reason why they emerge is smothered for now only to return later in an uglier form. Years ago, in Doha (Qatar), Khalid Meshal of Hamas said that if the west thought that Hamas was a dangerous force, they had no idea what was already inculcated beneath Hamas amongst young people who live with such frustration that a liberation war makes no sense to them. Under the rubble, bitterness grows and so does hatred. It sets in motion a cycle of violence that is impossible to erase. Nihilism grows when there is no political dialogue, which is precisely what one sees across the world now with these kinds of harsh terror attacks. Long-term political solutions are needed, not short-term bombardments.
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