I wrote this almost twenty years ago for a course on representations of war when I was a junior in college. It touches on some issues raised in the comments section of Alex Buchet’s recent post on war comics, so I thought I’d resurrect it. I think I still agree with the main points, though the prose would probably be a trifle less earnest if I wrote it now. But, for better or worse, here it is.
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“All children, except one, grow up,” writes J.M. Barrie at the beginning of Peter Pan. In many ways, the fictional constructions of war created by Tennyson, Kipling, Remarque, and Zola, appear to be attempting to deny this insight; appear to be attempting to suggest that war provides a return to an idyllic youth and innocence which allows the men who participate in it to escape from the mores and constrictions of adult society and return to an idealized childhood in which manners and restraint are cast away and replaced by simplicity and exuberant enthusiasm. War, for these authors, is an arena in which adventures can occur; in which heroism and enthusiasm triumph over the stodgy grind of day to day life. One can almost hear the cavalry in Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” declaring, with Peter Pan, “I’m youth, I’m joy” as they thunder towards the artillery guns, can almost hear Peter’s cocky self-assurance in Kipling’s breezy assumption that “of course” the British forces broke the “Fuzzy-Wuzzies”. The soldiers of which Kipling, Tennyson, Remarque and Zola speak have no fear, they have no doubts. They live, like children, in their own world with their own rules, in their own “NeverNeverland” separated entirely and forcibly from the reach and understanding of adult society.
Yet, despite this separation, the soldier is not ostracized, not attacked or unaccepted by the society which he seemingly rejects. He is not, in fact, a threat to civilized society, but is rather a delightful dream, an idea with great appeal both to the emotions and to the imaginations of people of the time, as the popularity of Charles Gordon demonstrates. Thus Kipling’s “Tommy” is a man (or, perhaps more correctly, a boy) who should be admired and loved even though he does not really fit the mores and norms of society, even though, as Kipling puts it, his “conduck isn’t all your fancy paints”. It is, in fact, Tommy’s separation from fine society which make him an attractive figure; his very simplicity, the very fact that he does not want luxuries but only wishes to be treated “rational”, composes his glamour. Tommy does not want “better food”, but only to be accepted by society without having to conform to its rules. He wants (and appears to receive from Kipling) to be given the freedom not to conform and to be admired for his very possession of that freedom; wants, like Peter Pan, to receive unconditional affection and yet to never have his mind cleaned.
It should, of course, be impossible to be at one and the same time independent and dependent, impossible to be heroic for the sake of the sympathy and admiration which that heroism brings. Only if one is capable of a total lack of self-reflection and self-awareness is this contradiction resolvable; it is only through his total naivety that Peter Pan is able to both expect admiration and receive it. Through war, Kipling, Tennyson, Zola and Remarque appear to suggest, through becoming a soldier, this simplicity can be (re)gained, this idealized childhood can be (re)found. Soldiers, like children, are, for these authors, not concerned with whether what they do is correct or incorrect, they do not agonize–they simply are. The soldiers whom Zola describes are “Like children and savages, their only instinct…to eat and sleep in this rush towards the unknown with no tomorrow”, Remarque’s Paul notes that “The national feeling of the tommy resolves itself into this–here he is.” The soldier is unthinking; in fact, thought is his enemy, his destroyer. The self-reflection which connotes adulthood, the loss of innocence and unselfconsciousness, results, in these fictions, in age and death. When the soldier begins to think, as Lapoulle does after killing Pache, he is destroyed. As Remarque’s Paul says, “we [the soldiers] are in a good humour because otherwise we should go to pieces.”
Remarque, of course, is contending that it is the horror of war, not of adulthood, which makes this jollity necessary; that to think about war would cause madness, insanity. But in many ways Remarque’s novel makes a statement not that war is too awful to think about, but that it is, in fact, aging which is the greatest horror. It is for this reason that the older men in the War are not as tragic as the men of Paul’s generation, for the older men have no youth to lose. For Remarque, the tragedy of the war is a loss of childhood, is the fact that through the war, Paul discovers death and sexual initiation (“the curse of a soldier” as Kipling writes), fear and vulnerability. Yet all of these discoveries are, in fact, not unique to wartime; as Paul himself realizes, they are instead the necessary adjuncts of adult life, the manifestations of a superficial society which delivers coffins punctually before a battle and places you under the arbitrary control of a postmaster. The war is the extension of civilian societies cruelties and artificialities, stupidities and absurdities. But even as it is so, the war also provides a means of escape, a strategy of resistance, a means whereby youth can be retained through “the finest thing that arose out of the war-comradeship.” Through this camaraderie, the trappings and foolishness of civilization, the unnecessary clutter of the school room, can be shrugged off and subsumed in the contentment of a good meal tasted among good friends. Paul relishes the experience of sitting with his comrades on their makeshift toilets not in spite of the primitiveness of the facilities, but because of it. Remarque views culture and civilization with suspicion, and finds in war a way to sidestep them, to return to the idyllic childhood which Zola describes the young intellectual Maurice finding in the arms of the simple peasant Jean when “Maurice
…let himself be carried away like a child. No woman’s arms had ever held him as close and warm as this…Was this not the brotherhood of the earliest days of the world, friendship before there was any culture or class, the friendship of two men united and become as one in their common need of help in the face of the threat of hostile nature?
Through his relationship with Jean, Maurice regains infancy; he is tended too, sheltered, cared for. War in The Debacle provides Maurice with a way to return to simplicity, with a means of becoming both noble and tragic. He becomes one of the “poor boys, poor boys” to whom his sister refers; he becomes innocent. In its creation of an arena in which life becomes more simple and true, war also, then, absolves of guilt even as it confers naivete. The soldier makes a sacrifice for crimes he did not commit. Like the men of the Charge of the Light Brigade, he goes unquestioningly to his death, following orders to the last. The betrayal of the soldier by civilians and generals is made all the more poignant because the soldier has done nothing wrong; has, in fact, placed his whole trust and hope upon civilian assurances of glory and easy victory. The betrayal is, in fact, like the betrayal which Peter Pan experiences at Hook’s treachery on the rock in the lagoon, the betrayal of a child’s total trust by a parent’s unfairness, after which, Barrie writes the child “will never afterwards be quite the same boy.”
It is this betrayal which Paul feels has robbed him of his youth when he says that, “I am young, I am twenty years old yet I…see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. [italics mine]” Remarque claims, then, both that the soldiers have lost their innocence, and that they retain it. Remarque says that their parents have failed them, and yet he still conceptualizes them as children. They have discovered that the world is unfair, and yet Remarque, through Paul, still perceives them as innocent. Paul repeats over and over that his generation is lost, it is useless, it is old and destroyed, but he never once decides to stop fighting, and even pushes Himmelstoss forward when the former drill master falters. Self-consciously martyred, Paul cannot solve, but can only revel in his troubles, just as Mr. Darling revels in his sojourn in the kennel.
Mr. Darling is, of course, not really comparable to Paul. He is not as young, nor in as much distress; he was not in the trenches of the First World War. Yet, in a deeper sense, Mr. Darling is very much like Paul, very much like Maurice, very much, for that matter, like Charles Gordon. He is a man who wishes more than anything to be admired, as Paul and Maurice did when they joined their respective armies, but who, through that very wishing, has condemned himself to an unadmirable existence. He is a conceited fool, a whining incompetent, a desperately contemptible figure when placed beside the apogee of unconscious grace and youthful innocence which is Peter Pan. And yet, while no one would want to be Mr. Darling, no one can wish to be Peter Pan either, because the very wishing dooms the attempt. One either has “good form” or does not have it. To have good form is to be young, unconscious, free. But “All children, except one, grow up.” And that one, as Barrie surely knew better than anyone else, was not real.
This is, I think, Barrie’s central insight, is the reason that Peter Pan , if it does not really oppose war, offers a way to oppose war that none of the other pieces of literature we have studied manage to suggest. For if, in fact, childhood is unattainable, if simplicity is gone, then the attempt to recapture that simplicity and childhood through war is not only misguided, but is actually dangerous, futile, and pitiful. Barrie loved children, he loved childhood. But he knew that he was not a child, and that he could not become one by travelling to some foreign field with a rifle and a battalion of comrades. Childhood games played by adults are not touching or cute; they are pitiful and even terrible. When Mr. Darling pours the medicine into Nanna’s bowl, he does not appeal to the reader in the same way that Peter does when he plays the game of question and answer with the pirates. Similarly, Peter’s comment that “to die will be an awfully big adventure” is charming and witty only when uttered by Peter’s naive voice. Kipling’s effort to capture what appears to be a similar sentiment sounds incredibly cold-hearted and callous, advising as it does that a soldier wounded on the field of battle and facing imminent mutilation ought to “Jest roll to your rifle an’ blow out your brains.” On the other hand, the French mutineer’s letter telling his sweetheart that, “I love you, and I don’t want to die”, is touchingly painful, and would be just as out of place in Peter Pan as would Kipling’s injunction. Real horror (though apparently Kipling, whose brain may itself be scrambled in some anomalous fashion, does not know it is real horror), and real fear are not part of the world which Barrie describes.
This is, of course, because Barrie’s world is not real. NeverNeverland is named so for the obvious reason. Tennyson, Zola, Kipling, and Remarque, in attempting to locate it within the context of reality, in attempting to suggest that NeverNeverland is obtainable within a historical rather than an imaginary framework, trap themselves within the very mundane existence that they wish to escape. In trying to escape adulthood, in trying to leave behind their responsibilities, they succeed only in making Mr. Darlings of themselves, only in placing themselves in a continuum where they refuse to face their problems because they wish so badly to transcend them. Tennyson cannot feel outrage or shock at the death of the Light Brigade, Zola can create only shallow caricatures in the place of real characters, Remarque can not move past self-pity and gruesome imagery to register any deep and meaningful moral objection to the carnage he witnessed, and Kipling appears to have buried any decent human compassion at all beneath a glut of imperialist fervor. Each is left romanticizing stupidity and horror in the hope that in doing so they can rediscover the childhood that they have lost.
Barrie offers no alternative to this quest. He, too, cannot turn from childhood, cannot stop seeking Peter Pan. But he knows, as Tennyson, Kipling, Zola, and even Remarque do not seem to, that the quest is futile, knows that Wendy and John and Michael and the Lost Boys must grow up eventually, must take up a mundane existence no matter how boring or dull it appears. And once it is recognized that war is not a return to some idealized NeverNeverland of childhood, then perhaps a convincing opposition to it can begin to be formulated.
Like most anti-war/anti-military tomes, the author (in this case, you) generally argues that soldiers are soldiers because they are ignorant, brainwashed or irrational; and that war is somehow the result of the military mind’s propensity to blithely “follow orders.”
Anti-war authors also tend to lump soldiers of different cultures and historical periods together, as if there is one over-arching group-think to this “universal soldier.” I once had a heated discussion with a writer who argued that there was basically no difference between the U.S. military and the army of Nazi Germany during World War II. Since the discussion was comic book-related, I told him he should, at his own peril, repeat such an absurdity to Jewish World War II veterans like Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, Stan Lee and many others who were all part of the U.S. military during the war against the Nazi Wehrmacht.
The fact is, there is no “universal soldier” mentality – at least not in the U.S. military of the 20th and 21st Centuries. The personalities, political affiliations, and intelligence levels I’ve encountered while in the military, or amongst veterans I’ve met who served in other eras, are quite varied and diverse.
In a related discussion with Gary Groth on “The Comics Journal” message board a while back, I put it this way:
“You appear to harbor many of the same military stereotypes common in popular culture: That military service fosters mindless group-think; that it strips away a person’s individuality; that it stifles the creative mind; etc. But if you look at the list of military veteran comic book industry creators I compiled and posted here last November for Veterans Day, it should be crystal clear that the above assumptions must be significantly flawed. They’d have to be, otherwise, the people on my list would generally have the same political views, artistic styles, and there would be not a creative bone in their bodies. And that simply is not the case. The creators on my list are as varied as a group of people could possibly be. As a matter of fact, they are some of the most creative people born in the U.S. in the last century, and their politics are all over the map. The fact is, the military is not the soul-sucking, brain-frying, robot-building leviathan popular culture frequently depicts it as – at least not for most of the people I have had the privilege of knowing and working with in the Air Force over the years.”
Yes, there are certain characteristics and structures common to a given military of any historical period. But I would also argue that there are historically basic characteristics and structures to any government, yet all governments throughout history are obviously not the same.
To another poster on a different thread on “The Comics Journal” message board, I summed up my view about the stereotype of the U.S. soldier as some sort of war-monger:
“In general, the average military person is the last person who ever wants to go to war. Your assumption that most American military people like war (and thus inferring they like killing) is similar to assuming a surgeon likes performing surgery because he/she likes cutting people and inflicting pain. In reality, a war, like surgery, is a means to an end.”
More accurately for the United States, war should be a means of last resort to a necessary end. If it’s not, it’s the fault of our civilian leadership, who call the shots under our political system.
Hey Russ. The problem with your dismissal is that the essay isn’t actually about soldier mentality. Many of the authors I’m discussing weren’t soldiers.
I’m talking about ideological arguments for going to war; reasons that going to war is considered okay, or good. Those reasons include ideas about what it means to be a soldier, or why war is useful or noble. But I don’t think those ideas are any more prevalent among soldiers than among anyone else (I don’t necessarily think they’re less prevalent either, but that’s a different argument maybe.) I’m not sure where you’ve gotten the idea that I”m talking about soldiers in particular, or condemning sodldier’s ideas especially. If anything, I”m arguing that the romanticization of a universal experience of soldiering is actually a real problem, and results in going to war for stupid reasons.
Pretty much all the authors I talk about are 19th/early 20th century European. There’s obviously differences you can look at in how different countries discuss war, but I don’t think there’s such a wide range here that looking for commonalities is out of the question.
I don’t know. It seems like you’re trying to fit me into an argument you’ve had with Gary and others and not really responding much at all to what I’ve said. You don’t point to anything in particular I’ve stated in the essay for example; you could have written this without even reading it, as far as I can tell. Which is okay…I’m actually sympathetic to many of your points. But if you want to convince me I’ve made an error, or convince me that you actually disagree with me in any substantive way, you’re going to have to maybe try again.
Funny how Lost Girls dovetails with your argument…since Peter Pan and the loss of innocence plays such a central role there–with sex as an initial culprit–but overshadowed by war in the “lost innocence” blame game.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Pretty much all the authors I talk about are 19th/early 20th century European.
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Which actually accounts enormously for the idealization of war and soldiering to be found in their work.
The pre-WW I zeitgeist was laden with the idea of war as a cleansing, beneficiary force. Which would sweep away cobwebbed old societies; restore manly virtues to spoiled, decadent youth.
Intellectuals – as fitting for sheltered ivory-tower types – were particularly enamored of this; calling for their countries to go to war; extolling martial virtues.
Even after the obscene, mindless slaughters of trench warfare in WW I, there were still people maintaining…
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Result of War Will Be Beneficial to Literature; New Europe to be Clean and Strong and a Fertile Soil for the Growth of Works of Art, According to Sir Herbert Tree
April 29, 1917
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The whole in a PDF, at http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=950DE0DC1031E03ABC4151DFB266838C609EDE
…And before WW II, there were again intellectuals – particularly in Italy – calling for war, to restore their country’s virtue…
Yeah; I think the essay probably doesn’t make clear that the memes in play are pre-WWI. I think they do have some resonance outside that milieu, but it’s not an easy one-to-one transfer the way I imply it is.
Your goddam captchas are getting seriously on my tit. I spent half an hour on commenting your post, correctly entered the captcha, and was informed ther was an error in the captcha cookies, whatever the Hell that means.Pschhttt, 300 words down the spout.
Damn it, sign in first! There aren’t any captchas if you sign in…
Alex, you aren’t the only one. I’ve had it happen twice so far. I’ve since vowed to compose my posts in Word and then do a cut-and-paste. But misery loves company and all of that.
Sigh. I’m really sorry guys. I wish there were some way to both avoid the spam and not have this happen. Maybe I’ll talk to the tech folks again and see if there are options….
In the meantime…I’d urge folks to get an account and sign in before posting. It’s easy, it’s quick, it will save frustration later, etc. etc.
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Alex Buchet says:
…I spent half an hour on commenting your post, correctly entered the captcha, and was informed ther was an error in the captcha cookies, whatever the Hell that means.Pschhttt, 300 words down the spout.
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I feel your pain! As suggested on another HU thread…
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Tho’ having had troubles with Captcha (resolved once Noah kindly explained including a lot of links makes it block the post), I’ve not lost any posts ’cause I write ’em “off to the side” in TextEdit* prior to pasting them in the “Leave a Reply” window…
* Which has the added bonus of being able to look at my horse-choking chunks of prose – and shuffle paragraphs around and such – in a bigger space that that lil’ window.
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R. Maheras says:
Alex, you aren’t the only one. I’ve had it happen twice so far. I’ve since vowed to compose my posts in Word and then do a cut-and-paste…
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“Word”? A PC-Head! I should’a known…
But, seriously…
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R. Maheras says:
…Anti-war authors also tend to lump soldiers of different cultures and historical periods together, as if there is one over-arching group-think to this “universal soldier.” I once had a heated discussion with a writer who argued that there was basically no difference between the U.S. military and the army of Nazi Germany during World War II….
The fact is, there is no “universal soldier” mentality – at least not in the U.S. military of the 20th and 21st Centuries. The personalities, political affiliations, and intelligence levels I’ve encountered while in the military, or amongst veterans I’ve met who served in other eras, are quite varied and diverse…
The fact is, the military is not the soul-sucking, brain-frying, robot-building leviathan popular culture frequently depicts it as…
Yes, there are certain characteristics and structures common to a given military of any historical period…
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Certainly, individual personality is not totally erased in Basic Training, yet it’s not for lack of trying. Personal possessions are taken away; lookalike buzz-cuts administered; varied clothing replaced by “uniforms”; everyone is trained to react in the same fashion as a group, follow orders unquestioningly.
This can be seen as sinister, but also is a perfectly defensible part of the shaping of an effective, responsive fighting force. Instead of a chaotic group of “do your own thing” individuals.
And while it’s a mistake to imagine soldiers as utterly brainwashed robots, neither are they – while in uniform, under the extreme circumstances of war – as wholly “individualistic” in their behavior and thinking as they would have been as civilians.
For instance, would the average civilian worker, if ordered to by his boss, charge headlong into a hail of gunfire from a machine-gun nest? Put up with sitting for days in rain-soaked foxholes? Be ready to kill other human beings without hesitation when told to?
Just as war is not simply a continuation of civilian life, neither are soldiers – for the duration of their service, anyway – the exact same people they were as civilians. (And adjustment to “peacetime” mores and behavior can be difficult.)
Why, look at what those Hippocratic-Oath affirming doctors can be capable of, while working for the CIA:
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The current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association carries an important new study…probing more deeply into the role that physicians working for the CIA played in torturing and abusing prisoners. The evidence that CIA doctors were engaged in the torture process was marshaled in a prior report by Physicians for Human Rights. Evidence subsequently emerged suggesting that they had criminally experimented on human subjects, as they sought to calibrate torture sessions to the guidelines established by Jay Bybee, John Yoo, and Stephen Bradbury–guidelines since rescinded and acknowledged by the Justice Department to constitute torture practices….a document released (PDF) by the Obama Administration…shows that the CIA’s Office of Medical Services (“OMS”) provided guidance that facilitated torture and mistreatment…Exercising these functions violated the ethical standard that physicians may never use their medical skills to facilitate torture or be present when torture is taking place….
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More, in an August 4th entry at http://harpers.org/
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Damn it, sign in first! There aren’t any captchas if you sign in…
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Have I missed a step? I’d “Sign[ed] Up!” a while back, but still need to type in a CAPTCHA code. And how do you “get an account”?
Noah: You could let users get accounts (accounts with the lowest privelege level which is basically the ability to make comments. Then they could avoid the captcha. That would work for the regulars. You can also set the comments to force someone to approve any comments by new users (ie emails that haven’t commented before). Then maybe you could just turn off the captcha.
Mike and everyone; anyone can get an account by just creating an account at the upper right. If you do that (and you’re signed in) the re should be no captcha when you type comments.
As Derik says, the account in that case is just for making comments; nothing else happens with it. So I’d urge folks who are having that difficulty to please sign in….
Derik, I’d prefer not to have to approve new users…but maybe that is the way to go…I’ll think about it.
To be precise– Kipling celebrated the Fuzzy-Wuzzy (Sudanese warriors) for being the first to break a British infantry square:
‘E rushes at the smoke when we let drive,
An’, before we know, ‘e’s ‘ackin’ at our ‘ead;
‘E’s all ‘ot sand an’ ginger when alive,
An’ ‘e’s generally shammin’ when ‘e’s dead.
‘E’s a daisy, ‘e’s a ducky, ‘e’s a lamb!
‘E’s a injia-rubber idiot on the spree,
‘E’s the on’y thing that doesn’t give a damn
For a Regiment o’ British Infantree!
So ‘ere’s ~to~ you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your ‘ome in the Soudan;
You’re a pore benighted ‘eathen but a first-class fightin’ man;
An’ ‘ere’s ~to~ you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, with your ‘ayrick ‘ead of ‘air —
You big black boundin’ beggar — for you broke a British square!
A tribute to the Hadendowah, who were the first to breach and break through to the center of a square. (A defensive formation used by the infantry, each side of the square would contain two lines of troops. The first would kneel with bayonets raised, the second would stand and fire.) This formation had never been broken until the Fuzzy-Wuzzies (black Dervish warriors) did in the battle of Abu Klea.
In Kipling’s worldview, the soldier is anything but idolised by the public at large:
Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap;
An’ hustlin’ drunken soldiers when they’re goin’ large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin’ in full kit.
Then it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Tommy, ‘ow’s yer soul?’
But it’s ‘Thin red line of ‘eroes’ when the drums begin to roll –
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
Oh, it’s ‘Thin red line of ‘eroes when the drums begin to roll.
We aren’t no thin red ‘eroes, nor we aren’t no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An’ if sometimes our conduck isn’t all your fancy paints,
Why, single men in barricks don’t grow into plaster saints;
While it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that , an’ ‘Tommy, fall be’ind,’
But it’s ‘Please to walk in front, sir,’ when there’s trouble in the wind –
There’s trouble in the wind, my boys, there’s trouble in the wind,
Oh, it’s ‘Please to walk in front, sir,’ when there’s trouble in the wind.
You talk o’ better food for us, an’ schools, an’ fires, an’ all:
We’ll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational.
Don’t mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face
The Widow’s Uniform is not the soldier-man’s disgrace.
For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Chuck him out, the brute!’
But it’s ‘Saviour of ‘is country’ when the guns begin to shoot;
An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please;
An’ Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool – you bet that Tommy sees!
True, there’s the occasional militaristic glory-hounding as in ‘The Light that Failed’ or ‘Stalky and Co’, but it’s the exception.
As for Remarque…I wonder if we read the same book? Paul is a conscript, he feels fear and bordom and remorse.The Front is no Never-Never Land.
I did my military service, and can attest that there’s an initial phase of basic training that is infantilising; you don’t have to make any decision yourself, you are surrounded by tough father figures, you are fed and put to bed at regular times. But in war, you must balance group loyalty with autonomy. One effect war has on soldiers is to make them GROW UP pretty damn QUICK.
This is underscored when Paul goes home on leave. The civilians he left behind strike him as obtuse and immature.
You’re right on about Tennyson. It amuses me the way he said “someone had blundered”…the way under Kruschev the Soviets acknowledged that “mistakes were made”!
The ability of outward circumstances to drastically alter behavior – no matter what the personalities of the individuals involved – was powerfully shown in the Stanford Prison Experiment. Where college students participating were chosen at random to be either prisoners or prison guards. The study deteriorated so swiftly, with guards coming up with ways to torture the prisoners in ways not explicitly forbidden, that the study had to be cut short.
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…Social psychologists are concerned with social influence, the way in which people and social institutions influence the behavior of individuals.
…award-winning journalist Ted Conover wanted to know what happened to prison guards. So he went undercover and got a job as a guard in New York’s infamous Sing Sing Prison….
The first thing he confronted was constant fear and anxiety for his life. He realized that being a prison guard was among the most dangerous jobs in the world, second only, perhaps, to the cops on the street…
Conover discovered that every day on the job was filled with stress. Part of the stress arose from most days being monotonous, punctuated by the occasional violence…
Conover found how hard it was to see the prisoners as human beings and to stay true to his humanistic roots. He understood how guards could adopt a stance of beating and bullying prisoners. Often guards felt that they were the ones being held hostage by prisoner’s threats and taunts.
…He learned that the public lacks respect for people who do this job that requires generally only a high-school diploma and pays barely above minimum wage. Stress on the job spills over into the home. Conover was shocked to find how often he came home sullen and angry. He was unable to get outside of his “role” as a guard…
In 1971, Stanford psychologists Philip Zimbardo and Craig Haney conducted their famous “Stanford Prison Experiment.” They recruited psychology graduate students to play “guards” and “inmates.”…Students participating in the experiment talked about how having a uniform and a badge encouraged them to treating the “prisoners” like their inferiors…
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http://college.cengage.com/psychology/resources/students/shelves/shelves_20021218.html
No, I’m not arguing we should abolish prisons; and in a world when even the Dalai Lama, after the total failure of decades of nonviolence to get Red China to so much as lessen the pressure of the boot it’s kept on the neck of Tibet, has come to realize, sometimes it’s necessary to fight, war can be necessary as well…
I also hope awareness of how these studies prove that “there, but for the grace of God/external circumstances, go I,” will help at least in understanding why cops and soldiers can engage in abusive behavior…
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Mike and everyone; anyone can get an account by just creating an account at the upper right. If you do that (and you’re signed in) the re should be no captcha when you type comments…
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Um, “anyone can get an account by just creating an account”? Helpful. Well, I’d signed up, have a password, typed in my email address. When I go to HU threads this stuff shows up, there’s a window with my name and email address waiting to take my comments. But I still gotta type in the CAPTCHA code…
Kipling is claiming that soliers aren’t glorified — but he’s doing it by glorifying them! The sentimental “no one understands” etc. is absolutely part of romanticizing the experience of soldiering. (For Remarque too; the disconnect between what soldiers *really* know and what civilians don’t understand is a way of emphasizing both the greater knowledge of soldiers and (contradictorily) their greater innocence.)
Again, though, I’m not saying that being a soldier actually *makes* you more innocent. I’m saying that a lot of writers (soldiers and otherwise) imagined that it did, and that that was used as an excuse and a justification for war.
Mike, I suspect you’re signing up on the main site. That won’t work; HU has a separate sign in. You’ve got to sign in using the button at the upper right of this page.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Kipling is claiming that soldiers aren’t glorified — but he’s doing it by glorifying them!..
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He’s saying (pretty damn clearly to me, but then I’m just a high-school grad) that they aren’t glorified by society; indeed, unless it’s wartime, they’re treated like scum.
Looking back at an earlier Kipling-quoting post, I see the same point was made:
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Alex Buchet says:
…In Kipling’s worldview, the soldier is anything but idolised by the public at large…
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(Emphasis added)
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Mike, I suspect you’re signing up on the main site. That won’t work; HU has a separate sign in. You’ve got to sign in using the button at the upper right of this page.
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No, I signed up on the main site and then signed up to post on HU threads. (As hinted at when I said earlier, “I’d ‘Sign[ed] Up!’ a while back”; referring to the “New here, Sign Up!” message on that upper right page.)
Anyhoo, my posts are going through OK, and typing in CAPTCHA is no big hassle, so no prob. Thanks for the suggestions.
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Alex Buchet says:
You’re right on about Tennyson. It amuses me the way he said “someone had blundered”…
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Hey, it rhymes with “thundered”! And, I love Tennyson!
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“The Kraken” (1830)
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge sea-worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
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What a contrast to the insipid, wussified mush of most modern poetry!
Was Lovecraft’s huge, sleeping sea-god inspired by “The Kraken”? Surely so… (Analysis at http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/kraken.html )
Kipling is saying that soldiers are despised by society — but Kipling *is part of society*. He was an incredibly popular writer, with both literary credibility and great popular acclaim. If he was romanticizing soldiers, and J.M. Barrie was romanticizing soldiers, and Zola was romanticizing soldiers, then soldiers were being romanticized by some of the most influential and popular writers of the day.
Tennyson’s great. So is Kipling. That doesn’t mean they didn’t say stupid shit sometimes, though.
Oh, re signing in:you might want to try again. We may have lost some accounts in the technical mess we had a while back?
Kipling was much more of an outsider in society than you may believe.
And when he or Remarque states that “no-one understands”– well, for Jesus H. Christ’s sake, Noah, did it never strike you that NO-ONE DOES UNDERSTAND ?!?
BTW, when I said: “As for Remarque…I wonder if we read the same book?”, that was NOT an invitation for Caro to chime in, if she happens to read this. (Baudrillard? Shoot me now.)
However, it now strikes me that in a very literal sense Noah and I did NOT read the same book. It was written in German. I read it in a French translation, and I presume Noah read it Englished.
Perhaps the English version is more “sentimentalised”? Take the title.
English: “All Quiet on the Western Front”.
German: “Am Westen nichts neues”– literally, “nothing new in the West.” (The french title exactly translates the German one, ‘A l’Ouest rien de nouveau’.)
Note the bitterness and irony in the German title, and the elegiac emotion in the English one.
It would be fascinating to compare the different versions. Alas, my German is enough to order coffee and struggle through Die Zeit, but no more…
PS The site is refusing to let me register. Plus, it’s arbitrarily sending me over to the Fantagraphics ‘flog’ blog.
What? Alex, you’re already registered! You post here! You just need to make sure you’re signed in.
“Noah, did it never strike you that NO-ONE DOES UNDERSTAND ?!?”
You can argue that all experiences are uncommunicable. Obviously, World War I was really horrible (to put it mildly.) However, the emphasis on the disconnect (especially, for example, from women and older men) serves particular literary and imaginative functions. Similarly, the decision to set a scene in a graveyard with corpses exploding everywhere is a decision to use gothic tropes even if (as is possible) Remarque actually experienced, or knew somebody who experienced such a thing.
It’s possible to write war stories that don’t emphasize this kind of romantic disconnect. As I said, Tobias Wolff’s memoir is mostly about boredom and how being at war made him desperately watch television. Robert Graves’ is about the massive incompetence of everyone; its mode is humor and irony. Remarque chose to tell the story in a specific way. Claiming that that way is somehow uniquely truthful ignores the fact that other folks chose to speak about their experiences in different ways. It also obscures the fact that as a writer he’s a writer; he shapes his experiences in certain ways for certain effects, just as a writer about (say) gardening would.
Are you claiming that Remarque is not telling the truth?
Hey, Noah. I plan on responding to your points — it’s just that I have to sit down and cobble it all together again. I did read the essay prior to my earlier post, by the way.
In a nutshell, I guess my response was more my perception of your perception of war as a young man, rather than to your youthful perception of the four classical writers’ perception of war — if that makes any sense.
By the way, what happens with the CAPTCHA code is that occasionally when one hits the “submit comment” button, an error code pops up. And when you then hit the “previous” arrow to get back to the previous page, it does go back, but the comment block is then blank.
He’s writing a novel. It says “fiction” on the tin, yes? As just the most obvious point — unlike his main character, Remarque didn’t die in the war. He went on to write about it.
The issue isn’t whether he’s being truthful or not (which would, again, be a weird standard for an avowed work of fiction.) The issue is how he’s presenting his experiences and what that means. If this was anything other than a war novel, that wouldn’t even be controversial. The fact that books about war are supposed to be real in a special, uncontestable way suggests that the viewpoints I discuss in my essay are still quite potent.
For the folks having CAPTCHA problems: the Chrome browser saves those posts so that they’re still there when you hit the back button. Or at least it does for me.
I also just routinely hit Select All-Copy before I submit, so the comment is on my clipboard if something really goes awry.
I got lost in the bitching about the capcha system, so I didn’t read carefully and don’t know if this is mentioned anywhere, but…
In the original German, All Quiet On The Western Front is a black comedy, more akin to Catch-22 than to The Charge Of The Light Brigade. It’s mainly English translations, not recognizing (or perhaps not wishing to recognize) the gallows humor of the thing, that transformed it from a “funny” anti-war novel to a serious war novel.
Or so I’m told by German friends. Being unable to read German, I have no way to verify it for myself. But I thought I should mention…
No, that didn’t get mentioned. Interesting point though…not sure if we have any German readers about. Matthias?
Kipling was ambiguous about the military. His point was that if you have an army, then you should treat it right, and that if you really must have an empire you must be prepared to fight to keep it.
He seemed mainly taken by the cool, competent individual (which in a civilian setting is expressed by his admiration for engineers) who gets the job done in spite of an indifferent public and a stifling bureaucracy…yes, for the Imperial squaddie, to paraphrase Hobbes: life was nasty, brutish, and in shorts.
Let me start my discussion about your essay again.
You argue that the four classic authors cited depict soldiers as having no fear or doubts, who “live, like children, in their own world with their own rules, in their own ‘NeverNeverland’ separated entirely and forcibly from the reach and understanding of adult society.”
In a nutshell, this is your thesis, is it not?
If it is, I’m saying it is fundamentally an anti-military thesis, written by an individual who, at that point in time, was decidedly anti-war. You make this clear by your arguments, and the way your tone chides the four authors for “glamorizing” war by allegedly framing it as a way to escape “reality,” ala Peter Pan.
Your essay assumes a couple of things I disagree with.
First, and foremost, it assumes that war is not necessary, and that it is stupid and absurd. While it is true, especially historically, that some wars have been fought for reasons that were stupid even in the context of the historical period in which they occurred, and that war has gone through long periods of history where it was romanticized by contemporary writers, the fact is that most wars are a logical extension of Darwin’s theory of evolution. In most cases, countries, city states or tribes fight so their people and way of life can survive. They fight to obtain, or to protect, critical resources such as food, land, harbors, minerals, wealth, etc. And as long as this jockeying for resources is necessary, so will it be necessary to fight wars. For anyone to think otherwise is, in reality, what is stupid and absurd.
Second, whether you realize it or not, your essay makes the assumption that the soldier-like qualities addressed by the four authors are based on naïve, escapist and flawed logic, and as such are childlike. I would argue that most military people – particularly contemporary soldiers – instinctively or consciously understand reality far better than staunch anti-war intellectuals. So their attitude, which the intellectual may view at times as fatalistic, cold-hearted and/or callous, is, in fact, much more realistic than that of their critics.
As I write this, I’m on my lunch break, sitting on a bench under a tree at the Pierce Brothers Memorial Park in Los Angeles. My perch is about halfway between the graves of Bettie Page and Marilyn Monroe, but more to the topic, it’s about 50 paces from the graves of two not-at-all famous men whose headstones, I noticed, share a commonality that seriously question the assumptions behind your NeverNeverland thesis.
Your essay, like other anti-war-driven tomes, assumes that most soldiers become soldiers out of a childlike naivety, and that if they were older and wiser in the ways of the world, they’d probably not get caught up in the “absurdities” of war.
But the headstones of these two men (and there may be many more like them in this particular cemetery – I just haven’t looked), make the naivety argument seem, well, naive.
One of the men, Carl Golliher, was 79 years old when he died, and the only thing I know about his entire life is that he was in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II. Heber Hogan Jr. was 81 when he died, and his headstone is just as succinct. All it states is that he was a private during World War II.
So here are two men who, despite the fact they lived long, full lives, appear to have opted to have themselves remembered for eternity for their brief military service decades before they died. They had plenty of time to reflect on life, their choices, accomplishments, and everything else, yet when the Grim Reaper came a-calling, they distilled the import of their lives into one thing: their military service.
Golliher and Hogan got it, in my opinion. They weren’t at all naïve. In fact, they were the smart ones. The anti-war intellectuals… well, not so much.
Is war absurd? Yes and no:
There’s a reason why most wars are fought: poor people die to protect rich people’s wealth. That’s what happens in a nutshell. Why do poor people accept this state of affairs, then? Because they’ve been taught, since they were children, to believe in fantasies: the main one being completely absurd: that countries do exist. They prefer to be exploited by someone talking their own language or, in a civil war, defending this narrative instead of that narrative. War as a sense from up to bottom, but it is completely absurd in the reverse order.
Countries are nothing more than a large-scale version of a tribe, and they do, in fact, actually exist. Multi-national corporations and things like the European Union have diminished the importance of boundry-lines to some extent, but the fact is, when the shit hits the fan, the Norwegian government’s first priority is the well-being of Norwegians; the French government’s first priority will be the French; etc.
And there are even cases, such as the fall of the Soviet Union, where the trend has been away from country consolidation.
Hey Russ. That’s somewhat clarifying; thanks for taking the time to explain yourself more fully.
I’m a little pressed for time unfortunately. I am (and was) largely anti-war. I think there’s a fairly big difference between WWI (which was, I firmly believe, a stupid, pointless, horrible waste of life) and WW II (which was all those things too, but which, at least on the Allied side, obviously looks much more justified.)
I think your evolutionary argument about war is both wrong and poisonous. You’re actually talking about Malthus not Darwin, I think (Darwin’s about different species, for one thing), but you’re trying to get the benefit of biological theories to back up a half-assed social determinism. This sort of crap is the way that pro-war intellectuals (of which there are many) justify all sorts of crap that is without justification and simply, in my view, evil. (Which isn’t to say you’re evil, but I really can’t express my disapprobation for this line of thinking strongly enough.)
People are people, not animals and not deterministic molecules. They go to war because they want to, not because they’re brainless beasts tied to some law of tooth and claw. There can be good reasons or bad reasons, and you can argue about whether any of the good reasons are good enough. But human beings are morally responsible for their shit. That’s a thoroughly conservative position, by the by, as opposed to your reckless, morally adrift radical progressivism.
When you say:
“Your essay, like other anti-war-driven tomes, assumes that most soldiers become soldiers out of a childlike naivety, and that if they were older and wiser in the ways of the world, they’d probably not get caught up in the “absurdities” of war.”
That really isn’t exactly what I was saying, or at least, not what I was trying to say. I do think for WWI, at least, a lot, lot, lot of people didn’t know what they were getting into at all. However, I don’t think this was just, or even most importantly, soldiers. It’s not soldiers who declare wars. Romanticism on the part of leaders (i.e., George Bush thinking Iraqis would love us forever if we just got rid of Saddam Hussein) seems to me much more important than the romanticism of soldiers in terms of causing wars.
In terms of my essay, the mythology of war as a neverneverland probably influenced some soldiers — but I think it certainly influenced the folks who got Europe into WWI (folks who were more likely to be aware of intellectual justifications for war in any case.)
There was a time in which the Nation-State didn’t exist. Globalization and right wing economical policies are seriously damaging the importance of the Nation-State. But that’s not what I meant. what I meant is that countries are a construct. Something invented by the enlightenment to replace the old Medieval order. Countries are an abstraction, but people tend to die for abstractions like “freedom,” “democracy” or “religion” while not giving a damn about concrete things like being exploited. That and soldiers follow orders from the rich guy in command. I find it funny that people around here talk a lot about art elitists. About how defending this artist instead of that other one is the sign of someone imposing a set of values. How about big corporations deciding when and why you are going to die? How about that?… We live in plutocracies, not democracies.
George Bush was no romantic. All wars are declared to solve a geopolitical problem. The war in Iraq was not different.
Noah, I think both you and Domingos are really, really off target. Most people– and by people I mean individuals– go off to soldier in war for a sense of obligation, even if that obligation is misplaced, not for an opportunity for ‘an awfully big adventure'(Barries).
By the way, Russ is a twenty-year Air Force veteran. He knows the military as flesh-and-blood people.
I, myself, served my year in the French army as a conscript, and can say much the same.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
I know Russ is a veteran. So was Remarque. As I said, I don’t actually think privileging the ideas of veterans on war is especially helpful. On the contrary, the idea that veterans gain wisdom/authenticity through service is one of the ways that war gets justified as authentic. I think less reverence for veterans might lead to fewer wars, and therefore fewer soldiers getting killed.
I don’t really agree with Domingos’ old school Marxism myself (though I think there are aspects of it that are correct; power politics certainly has as much to do with why nations go to war as necessity.)
People go off to war for all sorts of reasons. In the current U.S. military, I think career and educational opportunities tend to be very important. In WWI, the idea of war as a exciting adventure was very strong.
But again, the point isn’t that much why soldiers do what they do. It’s why the people in charge think war is a good idea. Unlike Domingos, I think romantic narratives promulgated by pro, and even anti, war intellectuals had a lot to do with why leaders felt that war was a good idea.
That given, I don’t accept that “All Quiet” was in any way a romantic narrative. It’s about as clear-cut an antiwar narrative as you can possibly write; (BTW, Steven Grant, who claimed it was a riotous comedy ala Catch 22, is so full of shit I’m surprised he doesn’t explode; I checked with several of my German colleagues at my school. Their consensus: he is nuts.)
” I know Russ is a veteran. So was Remarque. As I said, I don’t actually think privileging the ideas of veterans on war is especially helpful.”
Helpful for what?
For shoring up your thesis?
Facts too inconvenient?
Noah, look, I know this is a bullying thing to say, but in that article you were just wrong. Simply wrong.
As I think I said, I don’t think it’s helpful in terms of either (a) being true, or (b) in terms of preventing people from getting killed needlessly, which sort of seems like the overall point.
I mean, obviously veterans accounts of war are valuable in many ways. (I’m reading the Naked and the Dead, which isn’t a great book, but is certainly a depressing account of the war. It’s interesting too in that it pretty much entirely denies camaraderie as an important or worthwhile force, which is very different from most of the WWI memoirs I’ve read.) But, as I said, suggesting that war teaches something vital and especially important just often ends up being an excuse to justify war.
You’re not being bullying. You’re just expressing your opinion. I think you’re wrong too!
Let’s go to war over it!
Seriously, though, my point isn’t that Russ or any other vet necessarily has a “better” take on war. It’s that I think that, for generational reasons, you have a lesser familiarity with the military than either Russ or I (both born in 1954.)
I reached 18 at a time when there was still a draft (lucky me, got a good lottery number.) There was very widespread opposition to war in Vietnam…at the same time, national service was viewed as something unpleasant but necessary, like paying taxes. I doubt many young men entertained Peter-Pan type fantasies!
Yeah, I think Vietnam was very, very different from WWI in terms of how soldiers felt about it. As I said above, I think the essay’s universalization of the WWI experience isn’t right.
Noah:
Are you seriously claiming that wars are fought without any serious local or international geopolitical reasons behind them? Are you saying that all politicians are simply nuts?
I think that all soldiers are wrong, but I also gave a few reasons why they go to war. Education (all the myths behind patriotism) is the main reason, methinks.
I also firmly believe that the “interests of the Nation” coincide in a “strange” way with the interests of the rich. That’s what I call: geopolitical reasons. It doesn’t really matter if we’re talking about international geopolitical reasons (USA) or local geopolitical reasons (some warlord in Africa).
The paranoid, conspirationist view of war is seductive but fatally flawed.
Big business is always indicted for warmongering; but in fact, big business dislikes war because it is a source of uncertainty and instability. Of course, that won’t stop big business from profiteering once the war is underway.
There’s a pop consensus, for example, that the war in Iraq was launched by oil companies who want to get their hands on Iraqi oil.
But this ignores nearly a century of history. Traditionally, Big Oil has conspired to keep Iraqi oil OFF the market. If Iraq produced anything near the output of Saudi Arabia or Russia, it would destroy the market by flooding it.
“…all soldiers are wrong” ? So, for instance, a Polish or french or Russian soldier who fought the Nazi onslaught was wrong?
What an oddly skewed point of view.
I think business interests are important, but not always determinative. I think Alex is right that for the most part business didn’t really want to invade Iraq. I think that Bush’s predilection for invading was shaped in part by his sympathy for very particular business interests…and also by his messianic ideas and by his genuine belief that democracy would sweep all before it. You could sum all that up by “imperialism”…but imperialism isn’t exactly capitalism (which is why communist nations were often quite imperialist, for example.)
Alex:
““…all soldiers are wrong” ? So, for instance, a Polish or french or Russian soldier who fought the Nazi onslaught was wrong?”
Of course they were: did they defeat Stalin, did they support workers during May 68?
Noah:
I never bought that Iraq / oil connection. I never even talked about oil in my posts. What I mentioned was a geopolitical problem, remember? Which was: king Fahd was dying (he died in 2005); people in Saudy Arabia were more and more dissatisfied with the American military presence in their holy country (something like having to endure Muslim military presence in the Vatican), so the US needed another country to establish their strategic military presence in the region.
What all this has to do with rich people and capitalism (communists had rich people too, by the way)? Do you think that the American military presence is needed there to prevent Arab workers from being exploited?
What I find funny, here: http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2003/030430-psab01.htm is that Rumsfeld sez, “[US troops are moving because The Persian Gulf] is now a safer region because of the change in Iraq.” He he: the US troops are moving to Iraq because they had to move out of Saudy Arabia is more like it.
Ooops! Did I say “Arab?” What a blunder!…
Even before May 68, were French soldiers right when they killed and tortured in Vietnam and Algeria?
You are choosing selective examples to establish a general case.
They were certainly right to fight the Nazis.
You remind me of a remark that Orwell once made: the freedom of speech of British pacifists was protected by the guns of the Royal Navy.
I don’t think that there’s any freedom of speech. That’s another myth: I may say whatever I want in a self-published pamphlet because almost no one will read it. The mass media are owned by very rich people who don’t let you say the same things in their air waves and publications.
Are you saying that Stalin was better than Hitler?
To tell you the truth I don’t even think that the USA are better than Hitler (they’re just more sophisticated and rape you in the name of freedom). It’s that kind of pop Manicheism that infests children’s comics and explains part of the stupid comics canon that we have to suffer.
“Are you saying that Stalin was better than Hitler?”
This is one of the weirdest examples I’ve met of putting a non-sequitur into another’s mouth.
As for your views on freedom of speech– cheap cynicism. What are you exercising now?
Your comparing the USA to Hitler is foolish and self-refuting.
Domingos, I think you’ve gone through cynicism here and come out in naivete, which isn’t an infrequent progression.
Bush was an idiot. He was a really incompetent imperialist. Among other things, that means he didn’t do everything he did for good reasons. He made mistakes; many of them, one of which was invading Iraq. You don’t really have room in your worldview to consider the possibility that the people in charge may not know what they’re doing.
Also…the U.S. really isn’t as bad as Hitler.
It does make sense with your aesthetics, though. You’re a purist. If something isn’t perfect, you just damn it entirely. As such, it’s pretty entertaining that you’re accusing others of Manicheism.
The Hitler/Stalin question is a genuinely depressing one, though. I think Hitler was potentially worse at least…there’s a horrifying alternate history Philip K. Dick novel (The Man in the High Castle) where the Nazis win WW II and go on to just systematically kill everyone in Africa — which is not nearly as outlandish a scenario as one would like it to be. On the other hand…Stalin was obviously pretty bad as far as mass murderers go.
That’s the beauty of it: democracies do everything that dictatorships did and do, but they do it in the name of freedom and one of the hollowest words ever coined: democracy.
Russian soldiers attacked German troops, but don’t forget that they did it in Stalin’s name. The same soldiers who defeated Hitler oppressed their own people killing millions. You said that Russian soldiers were right, not I.
As for the US: Hiroshima and Nagasaki destroyed; 1 million Phillipine communists dead; hundreds of thousands of people killed in South America and the Far East. The Third World exploited with millions of incredibly poor people barely (or not) surviving. A planet being destroyed little by little. All this in the name of 25 of the 50 richest families in the world: http://www.visualeconomics.com/50-wealthiest-people-in-the-world/
Who’s being naive?
Russian soldiers attacked German troops because the Germans were killing their families.
The Soviets used police, not troops, to kill and oppress their own people. Your grasp of history is shaky.
Also: who cares what we’re doing here? Democracies know that they don’t need to stop the so-called “freedom of speech.” No one cares, no one listens. Besides controlling the mass media they know that the Internet is Babel… babbling…
Noah:
You sincerely believe that a pr, a hollowgram, decides anything?
Oops again: “Do you.”
I’m not discussing history here. I said that soldiers are always wrong and Russian soldiers surely were wrong when they didn’t attack Stalin after or even during the war. Or is it an attack on Russian families when the German did it and not the same thing when Stalin did it?…
This is a typical US rationalization: there are good dictators and bad dictators.
Noah, this is the situation we discussed privately and that I want to avoid.
So, bye now, Domingos. Enjoy your solitude.
If you want to do that simply shut up. As it is you avoided nothing.
On the other hand everybody believes in fairy tales, but I’m all right, I enjoy not being deluded…
Hey Domingos. I do think the president has real power, yes. I think there is some point in making distinctions between dictators also. Basically, I think all political choices or political actors are corrupt, so you’re always choosing between different shades of evil.
I think the absolutism you’re arguing for is naive, the same way I think conspiracy theories are naive. Politics and life are messy — sometimes horribly messy. Drawing lines in the sand makes things appear neater, but it isn’t all that useful otherwise…
Except when it is, is the thing. People who see things in black and white can do a lot of harm. They can also do a lot of good in the right circumstances. Sometimes it’s really important to have someone say, “this is evil,” even if, you know, George Bush doing it didn’t turn out so well.
Basically I’m parroting Niebuhr’s take on pacifism in a slightly different context. Niebuhr’s generally remembered for saying that pacifists were naive egotists…but he also argued strongly that the pacifist witness was vital. I guess that’s where I come down more or less — though I have more sympathy for pacifism than he does in general.
Noah:
I find nothing to disagree with in your post (I especially agree with that part about politicians and corruption unfortunately). I also think that presidents have some power, but they’re seriously limited by the economy and real politik. Real politik is virtual politik is my motto.
That messy part of life you talk about is also very limited by what Spinoza called the spiritual automaton: events are like an unstoppable rollercoaster with a logic of their own. The free market, the US military world strategy, etc…
When I say that all soldiers are wrong I mean that they always have served the wrong masters (fully believing that they were “the good guys,” I’m sure). Not only did their masters not care one bit for their fate, but they were serving the wrong class (aristocracy or bourgeoisie). I’m not really a pacifist, I just think that the only war worth fighting is the class struggle. I’m also a pessimist who thinks that Guido Buzzelli was absolutely right. After winning some of the “racchi” (ugly people) would immediately become tyrants. Power has horror vacui… and power, as we know, corrupts…
Yeah…I don’t agree that false consciousness is as overarching as is the case in standard Marxist theory. As Russ says above, there were very good reasons for American Jews to want to fight Hitler…or for the blacks who fought for the North in the Civil War to do that. And if there were good reasons of self-interest for those groups to fight, there were good reasons for others who had ideological commitments to equality to fight as well. And, of course, people have good reason to fight when their land or families are threatened (as was the case in WW II).
I think ideological motivations are really important in why people and countries go to war. Sometimes those ideological motivations are dumb (as in the romanticization of warfare pre-WWI). Sometimes they’re not so dumb (as in the belief that a Nazi victory would be really, really bad.) And sometimes people are deceived (as many people were by Bush’s claim that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.) In general, there’s a mix of good and bad, deceived and clear-eyed reasons. I think a critical attitude which tries to sort out one from the other is better, in various ways, than a position which says all wars/soldiers are wrong/stupid, or one which says that soldiers/countries generally go to war for rational/justifiable reasons.
But, you know, that just makes me wishy/washy; which has its own problems.
Just to clarify: I don’t think that all soldiers are stupid. These are ideological processes that are hard to escape. When you’re in a bath it’s difficult to remain dry. I admire those who manage to do it and refuse to fight.
My problem with what you say is that I question myself: why was an Hitler putative victory so bad and it wasn’t that bad that Stalin won the war engulfing half of Europe? Why would black people fight in a white people’s war if Jim Crow was waiting for them? As for the American Jews they had more than enough reasons to fight the Nazis, but why go running to oppress another people immediately after the war? Plus: what bothers me about the Nazis is that they are the perfect scape-goat. You mention them and everything is justifiable: even a war crime like the bombing of Dresden.
The truth is that nobody’s innocent.
Oh and it is telling that I forgot the USA (it’s that bath thing: popaganda is highly efective): why was it so great that the US won the war if they have been an incredibly destructive empire?
Because the Nazis would’ve been worse. Isn’t that kind of obvious?
No, no…of course nobody’s innocent. And you can’t actually tell whether things would have been worse overall if the Nazi’s had won, because nobody can tell what would have happened. The point is that you have a bunch of imperfect choices and you do the best you have with them — or sometimes not quite the best you can with them. Most people figure things would have been worse if the Nazi’s had won. That doesn’t excuse allied war crimes at all…or it shouldn’t, anyway.
You continue your wishy-washy tactics Noah: it’s the best way to kill a discussion! Who can discuss with such a reasonable person?
Charles: if I’ve learned something in all these years is that nothing is obvious, ever… That and I can’t imagine anything worst than Stalin. I can’t also imagine anything worst than living in some country in Africa in which the Western powers fill the pockets of a very corrupt elite (to explore the natural resources) while the people is starving (hence: trying to reach Fortress Europe).
The death camps were a worst nightmare than all that? I don’t agree: what shocks us intellectuals (or a pseudo like myself) is the sheer will power and rationality of it all. The GULAG was no picnic, starving to death is ahem… no picnic either.