DUCKPOND

War is futile. It practitioners believe in its purgative and redemptive qualities and that it is a quick fix for problems and that domination of one set of human beings over another works. They have the benighted view that human nature is, in Herbert Spencer’s words “red in tooth and claw”. “Look at us”, – either Australia or the United States -”this is what violence creates and it works”. In truth the extent to which Australia and the United States work is despite their history of war and violence, which is not always visible, and would probably work better if that history was unreservedly repudiated. Structural violence and cultural violence, both suggestions of Johan Galtung, must be first exposed before it can be delegitimized. And we deal poorly, not least individually, with the repercussions of violence within ourselves and those harmed, a fundamental failure to take responsibility.

There is the warrior’s code of excellence and courage, exemplified by mighty Hector. Somewhere there is the image of his wife and children shrinking in awe of his prowess, his arete, and his courage, as he sets forth to fight the Greek heroes man to man. Kevin Crotty, observes in The Poetics of Supplication: Homer’s Iliad and Oddessey:

. . . the warrior’s life draws its value and importance from the security of the larger community. Yet the warriors themselves seem to resist such a notion. When Andromache for example presents Hector with the sensible plan to preserve his life and keep Troy safe, he rejects the idea as one sure to bring shame upon him. Far more important to the warrior than results is the conspicuousness of his fighting: Hector insists on being seen in the front ranks, whether or not that leads to his death and the downfall of Troy, because that is what the warrior code demands. The imperative to fight courageously and conspicuously works generally to ensure that a city will be well defended, but it requires death-defying behavior even in circumstances where such fighting is likely to prove ruinous.

Modern soldiers may not see the effects of their actions, which is especially true of those the get to bomb civilian targets. Still the soldiers on the front line among the civilian carnage in Iraq, for example, experience enough for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and naturally the powers that be do not want to know. Those that order wars have the distance and occlusion, wrapped in the flag of patriotism and the public good, have the distance of the bomber crew that flew over on those fateful days the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So much for that story and that ideal.

During the Middle Ages, the code was transmogrified into notions of chivalry, which may have been necessary, well and good for “the peace of god”, including the sanctity of church, not least monastic, property but its seems to be lost when the opponent was “the other”. The classic example was the massacre and capture of Jerusalem in 1099. Not for the first time in the story of such events the two sides, according to Frederick Heer, The Medieval World, had differing accounts of the casualties. The Christians said there were 10,000, while the Muslims counted 100,000 including women and children. The story travelled slowly but eventually echoed around the then Muslim World. Heer quotes the Arab poet, Mosaffer Allah Werdis, who in his pain and bitterness wrote and sang:

We have mingled our blood and our tears,
None of us remain who have strength enough to beat off these oppressors,
The sight of our weapons only brings sorrow to us who must weep while the swords of war spark off the all consuming flames,
Ah, sons of Muhammad, what battles still await you, how many heroic heads must lie under the horses feet?
Yet all our longing is for a old age lapped in safety and well-being, for a sweet, smiling life, like the flowers of the field,
Oh, that so much blood had to flow, that women were left with nothing save their bare hands to protect their modesty!
Amid the fearful clashing swords and horses, the faces of the children grow white with horror.

His words, with suitable but not substantial adjustment apply today. In particular, I am thinking of Iraq.

Despite the horrors of trench warfare and the industrialization of war evident in the First World War, the German military class, maintaining a distinction from the ubiquitous Gestapo, at least in the North African campaign with British and Commonwealth armies maintained the notion that war was between “gentlemen” who honored the code of war. I recall reading that New Zealand soldiers were punished by the Germans indignant at breaking the codes of war by being held in the North African sun throughout the day. The codes of gentlemen could so easily become torture, even before the September 11, 2001, when of course history began, or at least a new world was drawn.

While I did not find that reference in John McLeods, Myth and Reality, I did see this example of a telegram, the type that those that remained home feared:

Mr J A Westbrook 17 Haddon Rd, Balmoral

DEEPLY REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR SON LANCE CORPOREAL JOHN EGERTON JURY WESTBROOK HAS BEEN REPORTED KILLED IN ACTION FIRST DECEMBER (STOP) THE PRIME MINISTER ON BEHALF OF THE GOVERNMENT DESIRES ME TO CONVEY DEEPEST SYMPATHY ON YOUR LOSS

F JONES MINISTER OF DEFENCE.

Most victims of war were simply anonymous, lost in the numbers. Every war, and every battle in drawn out wars, it seems will be over in weeks. So it was when Hitler launched his campaign against Russia and when the Japanese sought to conquer Manchuria and China that lead in the standard escalation of violence to the Massacre of Nanking. “Shock and Awe”, will work superbly in the short term. Speilgel Online reports:

This week saw the 70th anniversary of the massacre of Nanjing, then called Nanking. It was one of the bloody peaks of the Japanese invasion of China which finally ended with the defeat of Tokyo in World War II, after the Americans dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

In Nanjing alone, the Japanese killed at least 100,000 Chinese civilians; China talks of up to three times that number of victims. The Asian neighbors still disagree today on the exact figure and sometimes on whether the slaughter even took place. Many Japanese nationalists deny the massacre — often referred to as the Rape of Nanking — ever happened.

In this case, and it is now typical, civilians and population areas were part of the battlefield, compounding the manifold horrors and barbarities wrought, not least on individuals in the civilian populations. Speigel Online notes, for example:

. . . Xia Shuqin was eight years old. “Suddenly, the soldiers burst into the house. They gunned down my father without a word,” he recalls. Then they raped and killed the women of the household, leaving only Xia and his young sister alive.

But strange as it may seem, Xia was saved by a Nazi. Speigel Online provides the story:

In Nanjing, the past is omnipresent. Almost every spot is politically symbolic, including the house that belonged to John Rabe, the “Good Nazi” of Nanjing, who protected thousands of civilians from their Japanese tormentors. The Siemens employee, and Nazi Party official, established a safety zone for around 250,000 inhabitants together with other Western foreigners. There, acting to all intents and purposes as mayor, police chief and judge, he defied the Japanese. The Chinese revere the German as a “living Buddha.” Two of those he took in were the young Xia and his sister, who has referred to him as a “saint” since then. Rabe’s journals remain of inestimable value to the Chinese: The former Siemens employee is an important foreign voice lending credence to the Chinese position in the debate surrounding Japanese wartime atrocities.

But there is also Japanese collaboration for the atrocities:

Sho Mitani was 18 at the time, 10 years older than Xia Shuqin. He was serving in a gunner team on the Japanese warship “Umikaze.” When he arrived in Nanjing, the killing was already underway. “There were bodies heaped everywhere, in parks, on tennis courts,” describes the old man from his home in Osaka. Day after day, the army brought whole truckloads of Chinese to the banks of the Yangtze and mowed down the defenseless prisoners with machine guns.

Sometimes symbols can save lives, in this case a flag:

Rabe’s former villa was renovated with the help of money from Siemens and the German government; the garden is adorned with a bust of the Hamburg businessman, who was a fervent supporter of Hitler. The statue stands on the spot where Rabe had a shelter dug to protect his neighbors. It was covered with a swastika flag — the Japanese respected the Nazi symbol, having entered into a pact with the Third Reich against the Soviet Union in 1936. Nanjing was the exception — where the insignia of Hitler’s Reich actually prevented Axis fighters from furthering their World War II orgy of violence and terror.

The significance to me is that despite our stories, and cultures of war and violence, in the commission of brutality we remain human beings. So much the better then to rediscover our better possibilities, even if the dominant modalities demanded by the dominant paradigms and practice require analytic thought, even for physicists would might understand through mathematics the mysteries of quantum mechanics but who on a daily basis deal with the statistics of the world of billiard balls. This search for our better possibilities unravels the apparent paradox that the new paradigm we need, and need urgently in a world afflicted by climate change, is contained in significant measure in the old paradigm of religious text (religion in the sense of binding back into the Cosmos), which for example for Gandhi was the Bhagavad Gita, or in the wisdom of indigenous people.

The cultural machine, working I am told principally through television and advertising, must in conformity to the requirements of the Culture serve to suppress our humanity. Soldiers must be dehumanized to kill, in ways that Hector never was subjected. Our culture and its stories intentionally or otherwise suppress the modality of compassion for other human beings and other creatures. Compassion as much as analytical thought is human capacity or modality that can be educated, or drawn out.

Nonviolence, Gandhi said is “not an inanity”, nor for that matter is its opposite that is so pervasive in human history as to be mostly invisible in our daily lives.