I have never served in the military, and I am attempting to conceive of a reality that I have not ever directly experienced. I am also critiquing the ways I see most others conceive that reality. So from the onset, I recognize my insufficiency. However, the ways I often find our conversations about war framed, are unwittingly morally obscene and intellectually hollow. But they have grave implications for our fellow citizens and the rest of the world. I want to be clear. I am not just talking about obscene ideologues, I'm talking about state officials, "experts", experts, journalists, friends etc..., most of the people I talk to, including myself much of the time, are engaging this topic in a highly mistaken way.
I think, as a simple observer of this conversation, I may not be able to offer any secret information, or first hand perspective. I may not be able to fix our entire culture's perception of war. But I hope to offer a few humble, relevant thoughts, on the way we talk about war:
- Our widespread wars have resulted in alienating, destabilizing, and traumatizing entire generations and regions. They also have served to consolidate support for our enemies, and increase their ranks. Our justifications for recent wars rest on an emotional response to a perceived threat or a specific tragedy, in the case of Syria as of 9/5/13, a distinction drawn between mass butchering of men, women and children will bullets, machetes, bombs, fire, and missiles etc... and butchering them with chemical weapons.
-When we talk about war, we are talking about something very different than war. The word "war" no longer denotes or connotes what it did to everyone who has ever lived before us. This is because we do not see, or feel the effect of our wars. Our over exposure to the digital "reality" of war, the "war" that lives in the detached "facts" in headlines, the yammer of ideologues and stock photos, has become our reference point for a concept of war. Some who care to do deeper research often find only marginally better sources to ingest and discuss the reality of the wars going on around them. Our conversations between each other, often fail to escape the talking point level, since these are the frames we were presented with the information in the first place.
-This lack of linguistic tools to talk about war in a productive way, has led to a world in which American military action has destabilized both the US and the Middle East with the consent of the American people. The Syrian conflict is now a massively volatile international crisis. And we don't have the language to even begin a majority conversation about it.
Stanley Hauerwas gave a very insightful interview with "The Atlantic"that finally pushed me to write down these thoughts that have been buzzing through my head, especially since listening to John Kerry's recent speeches. His speech on August 30th revealed a horrific tragedy that is rightly admonished, but the reason for the speech was to justify military action. It appealed for a war that was not a war, a war of no consequences to Americans, but an action of eternal moral import. At best his argument for military intervention was based on a distinction between the mass slaughter of 100,000+ people and one truly heinous, and wildly horrific chemical attack killing roughly 1.5% of that number. Every human life is sacred, period. At worst this seems opportunistic, capitalizing on the truly unique horror and agony of the deaths of roughly 1,400 writhing human beings, in order to achieve an outcome that is not guaranteed, with assured collateral damage and which would be mostly symbolic.
Even beyond, bad reporting, the evolution of war in our current millennium has served to confuse and diffuse our response to it. The parameters of our "war on terror" have blurred the lines of what "peace" and "war" and "terror" actually look and feel like. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri discuss our society's perception of war, informed by the "war on terror", at length in their masterpiece "Multitude". Slavoj Zizek in "The Year of Dreaming Dangerously" also explores the effects of the perpetual "war on terror." Their works are worth reading. War has been ubiquitous in human history, but my generation has experienced perpetual war, without ever feeling the effects of a war, outside of 9/11. We may have experienced fear. Some lost loved ones in the attack. But we were not at war. Only a select few of our friends fought in wars. We feared for them, and prayed for them. Some did not return, and we mourned them. Others did return and we likely did not return the dedication they gave to us. Outside of these secondary experiences, we are totally insulated from the hellscape that we as taxpayers fund, and as voters and citizens are largely complicit.
We, in America, experience war as opinion havers, not as refugees, not as corpses, not as soldiers, not as rapists, not as the raped, the tortured, the orphaned, the widowed, the widower, not as medics, nurses, hospital custodians, or grave diggers. With a hollowed out notion of war, and a jargon of words thrown around so frequently they no longer codify their full meaning, it is our duty to do the mental and spiritual work of processing that reality as much as we authentically can, and act accordingly. Acting accordingly is another problem we have, but that's another conversation.
-Patrick Walsh
"there is nothing intelligent to say after a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead...everything is supposed to be very quiet...and it always is, except for the birds.” K.Vonnegut
Stanley Hauerwas gave a very insightful interview with "The Atlantic"that finally pushed me to write down these thoughts that have been buzzing through my head, especially since listening to John Kerry's recent speeches. His speech on August 30th revealed a horrific tragedy that is rightly admonished, but the reason for the speech was to justify military action. It appealed for a war that was not a war, a war of no consequences to Americans, but an action of eternal moral import. At best his argument for military intervention was based on a distinction between the mass slaughter of 100,000+ people and one truly heinous, and wildly horrific chemical attack killing roughly 1.5% of that number. Every human life is sacred, period. At worst this seems opportunistic, capitalizing on the truly unique horror and agony of the deaths of roughly 1,400 writhing human beings, in order to achieve an outcome that is not guaranteed, with assured collateral damage and which would be mostly symbolic.
Even beyond, bad reporting, the evolution of war in our current millennium has served to confuse and diffuse our response to it. The parameters of our "war on terror" have blurred the lines of what "peace" and "war" and "terror" actually look and feel like. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri discuss our society's perception of war, informed by the "war on terror", at length in their masterpiece "Multitude". Slavoj Zizek in "The Year of Dreaming Dangerously" also explores the effects of the perpetual "war on terror." Their works are worth reading. War has been ubiquitous in human history, but my generation has experienced perpetual war, without ever feeling the effects of a war, outside of 9/11. We may have experienced fear. Some lost loved ones in the attack. But we were not at war. Only a select few of our friends fought in wars. We feared for them, and prayed for them. Some did not return, and we mourned them. Others did return and we likely did not return the dedication they gave to us. Outside of these secondary experiences, we are totally insulated from the hellscape that we as taxpayers fund, and as voters and citizens are largely complicit.
We, in America, experience war as opinion havers, not as refugees, not as corpses, not as soldiers, not as rapists, not as the raped, the tortured, the orphaned, the widowed, the widower, not as medics, nurses, hospital custodians, or grave diggers. With a hollowed out notion of war, and a jargon of words thrown around so frequently they no longer codify their full meaning, it is our duty to do the mental and spiritual work of processing that reality as much as we authentically can, and act accordingly. Acting accordingly is another problem we have, but that's another conversation.
-Patrick Walsh
"there is nothing intelligent to say after a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead...everything is supposed to be very quiet...and it always is, except for the birds.” K.Vonnegut
