October 13, 2003

 

                                                           WHY WAR? (Part II)

 

                                                                       Yahweh

 

Wars are God= Will: Yahweh of the Old Testament sometimes requires that enemies of his chosen people be displaced and slain (Elshtain).

 

                                                     Thucydides (c.460-c.400 B.C.)

 

War is Natural: The Greek general and historian, Thucydides chronicled the Peloponnesian War from 431 to 411.  He was the first to see events determined by the general nature of man and his behavior rather than by forces outside of him. 

 

Most academics credit Thucydides as having initiated the Arealist@ school of thought about war, a tradition they say is continued by Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), George Kennan (published in 1952), Hans Morgenthau (published 1946-1964) and others.  The Arealist@ perspective has culminated in today=s recognition of Ainternational relations@ as a sub-discipline of political science and has, according to Elshtain, Awon the war@ over all other theories of AWhy War?@ (Elshtain).  

 

The story of politics and war in the Western tradition is a tale of arms and men.  Indeed, early on, politics was war.  For the Greeks, war was a natural state and the basis of society.  The Greek city-state, reports Arlene Saxonhouse, was a community of warriors:

A[In ancient Greece], political leaders were military leaders.  Political life entailed the preservation of the city through war@(Elshtain, Saxonhouse, Encyclopedia).

 

                                                                  Jesus (0 A.D.)

 

Thou shalt not kill: The New Testament Jesus, AThe Prince of Peace,@ deconstructs the powerful metaphor of the warrior which was central to the Old Testament narrative.  He enjoins Peter to sheathe his sword and de-virilizes the image of manhood.  He tells his followers to go as sheep among wolves B offering their lives, if need be, but never taking the lives of others in violence.  AYou have learned how it was said to our ancestors, >You must not kill,= and if anyone does kill, he must answer for it before the court.@

 

Although Jesus did not offer rounded-out views on war fighting, he refused to countenance military force to achieve his aims and usher in on earth the peace of the kingdom of God.

 

Aiming to liberate human beings from the need both to have others as victims and sacralize their own victims, Jesus assaulted the edifice of the Afalse transcendence@ of violence B that is, structures of experience which require the setting up of scapegoats as enemies and the slaying of them (Elshtain, Matthews).

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                Early Christians

 

Martyrdom better than Murder

Bainton reports:

APrior to the advent of Christianity, there is no record of anyone put to death for refusing military service@ (Bainton).

 

Brock reports:

ABefore the Christian era, there is no known instance of either conscientious objection to participation in war or the advocacy of such an objection@ (Brock).

 

Early Christians courted martyrdom by refusing to worship the Roman emperor as a divinity.   Once they gained a toehold, Christians extirpated the barbarism of the Roman arena, forbade infanticide and the abandonment of infants, and stripped the warrior of his honored status. 

 

Christian writers in the first several centuries A.D., tended to conflate wartime killing with murder and labeled war itself iniquitous and mad.  The model for Christian love, agape, was the mother=s unconditional love for her child (Elshtain).                               

 

                                                    Saint Augustine (354-430 A.D.)

 

War is a lesser Evil: Father of just-war theorists, St. Augustine took as his starting point not the state but human existence as experienced since the Fall. 

AConsider the scale of [the empire=s] wars, with all that slaughter of human beings, all the human blood that was shed!@

 

Man needs peace and order but lives in a world of divided will, lust to dominate and possess, and insoluble estrangements, perils and shortcoming.  There is a collective Other, and war is a lesser evil.  It is the best of a bad deal. 

AThe wise man... will wage [only] just wars,@ even as he laments the fact that, given the Ainjustice of the opposing side,@ [such wars sometimes must be waged].   

 

The aim of war should never be anything other than peace B never power, civic libertas, sovereignty or national interest.  Peace is the ultimate aim of violent conflict (Elshtain).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                       Pope Urban II (1042-1099)

 

War is Holy: At the Council of Clermont, in 1095, Pope Urban II inaugurated the Crusades by proclaiming:

            AChrist commands [that] this vile race [be exterminated] from the lands of our brethren.  Oh, what a disgrace if a race so despised, degenerate, and slave of the demons, should thus conquer a people fortified with faith in omnipotent God and resplendent with the name of Christ!...  Let those who have hitherto been robbers now become soldiers of Christ!  God wills it@ (Elshtain). 

 

                                                  Desiderius Erasmus (1466?-1536)

 

War is Repugnant: Desiderius Erasmus, a Dutch humanist monk, deplored war pointing to the rancor, intolerance and cultural decline it induces (Elshtain and Encyclopedia).

 

Erasmus was repelled by war of any kind.  When one of his pupils was killed in battle, he wrote,             ATell me, what had you to do with Mars, the stupidest of all the poet=s gods, you who were consecrated to the Muses, nay to Christ?  Your youth, your beauty, your gentle nature, your honest mind B what had they to do with the flourishing of trumpets, the bombards, the swords?@

 

AThere is nothing more wicked, more disastrous, more widely destructive, more deeply tenacious, more loathsome [than war].@ 

 

For Erasmus, war was repugnant to nature:

AWhoever heard of a hundred thousand animals rushing together to butcher each other, as men do everywhere?@ 

 

Such an absolute aversion to war of any kind is outside the orthodoxy of even modern thinking (Zinn).

 

                                                   Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)

 

War is necessary to attain Power: Author of The Prince (1532), Machiavelli saw politics as a constant struggle for power B so that even peace was warlike.  He posits that the goal of life is victory, success, and the grabbing and holding on to power (Elshtain).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                     Sir Thomas More (1478-1535)

 

War is Inevitable: An English lawyer, statesman and humanist, More published, Utopia, in 1516, in which he describes an ideal state founded entirely on reason (Elshtain, Encyclopedia). 

 

More saw European society organized as a system of states in which B considering the absence of higher common jurisdiction B war was an inescapable process for the settlement of differences.  For better or worse, war was an institution which could not be eliminated from the international system.  All that could be done was to, so far as possible, codify its rationale and  civilize its means (Howard).  

 

                                                       Martin Luther (1483-1546)

 

War maintains Order: Luther=s just-war thinking favored officially legitimated rule.  The state, now unleashed from the authority of the pope, must have the power both to fight just wars, and suppress insurrections and disobedience.  Order must be maintained.  The aim of a just war is peace.  War is a last resort, a defense of a way of life against possible destruction (Elshtain).

 

                                                        Anabaptists (16th Century)

 

All Wars are Immoral: Anabaptists, most of whom were pacifists, were prominent in Europe during the 16th century.  One branch later became the Mennonites, which became, along with the Society of Friends and the Brethren, one of the three Apeace churches@ in Western societies (Elshtain, Encyclopedia).

 

                                                         John Donne (1572-1631)

 

Each Man=s Death diminishes Me: The English metaphysical poet John Donne, railed against the natural impulses of materialism and the elevation of things over people. 

 

Donne observed:

ANo man is an island, no man stands alone...  Each man=s death diminishes me, because I am involved with mankind...@ (Donne).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                      Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)

 

War is of All against All, All of the Time: Thomas Hobbes maintained that absolutely nothing exists outside of matter (Pepper).

 

For Hobbes, the world was made up of sovereign and suspicious states and he bequeathed a vision of a Awar of all against all= that today dominates the discourse of realism in international relations.   From this perspective, attempts at dominance in a system of international anarchy, is a state of nature for which no cure exists.  Life is a never-ending war (Elshtain).

 

                                      The Religious Society of Friends (17th Century)

 

All Wars are Immoral: The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) originated in England in the middle of the 17th century.  The Society opposed war and its adherents refused to bear arms (Elshtain, Encyclopedia).

 

                                               Charles de Montesquieu (1689-1755)

 

Wars are due to lack of Interdependence: Montesquieu maintained that the growth of international commerce and the subsequent rise in the interdependence of nations would trail peace in its wake as a side benefit. 

A[Nations that trade together become] mutually dependent, [hence] peace is a natural effect of commerce.@

 

Two other ideas took hold in the 17th and 18th centuries:

1.                  The idea that wars are due to the excesses of rulers.  This idea induced lawyers of this period to codify rules of war B in order at least to civilize war, if not eliminate it.

 

2.                  The idea that wars arise because of misunderstandings.  This idea gave the hope that if people just communicate, they will be able to adjudicate their differences amicably (Elshtain).

 

                                                      The Brethren (18th Century)

 

All Wars are Immoral The Brethren, a Baptist sect originating in Germany in 1708, opposed war (Elshtain, Encyclopedia).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)

 

Wars uphold our Civic Mother: Jean Jacques Rousseau finds the citizen who is unwilling to sacrifice himself for his civic mother, a wretch:

ATrue Christians are made to be slaves@ [and are ill-suited to citizenship].  AThe terms >Christian= and >republic,= are mutually exclusive.  Christianity preaches nothing but servitude and dependence.@ 

 

The polity must be as one.  The national will must not be divided.  Citizens must be prepared to defend civic autonomy through force of arms.  The body individual and the body politic must be driven by a single motor.   The citizen must give his all, must be prepared to fight.  Either a citizen or a Adebased slave@ B the choice is ours and the fault, if we are slaves, lies not in the stars but in ourselves.

 

Citizens who refuse to accept their civic duty must be executed:

AIf on any occasion whatsoever, a child were unnatural enough to lack respect for his mother B for her who carried him in her womb, who nursed him with her milk, who for years forgot herself in favor of caring for him alone B one should hasten to strangle this wretch as a monster unworthy of seeing the light of day.@ 

 

Similarly, the citizen in whom love of the fatherland as a civic mother does not beat steadily and true, is a monster, an unworthy wretch.  Just as treason to the mother warrants strangulation, treason to the state calls for execution (Italics in Elshtain; Elshtain).                                                                                    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                         Georg Hegel (1770-1831)

 

War heals the Nation: German philosopher, Georg Hegel, wrote:

AIn times of peace, civil life expands more and more, all the different spheres settle down, and in the long run, men sink into corruption, their particularities becoming more and more fixed and ossified.  But [the] health [of a nation] depends upon the unity of the body, and if the parts harden, death occurs@ (Friedrich, p. 322).

 

Hegel celebrated the triumph of the nation-state B  kriegstaat (Awarfare state@).  As a state-identified being, the self of the male citizen is fully unfolded, made complete.  War transcends material values.  The individual reaches for a common end.  War-constituted solidarity is immanent within the state form.  But the state, hence the nation, comes fully to life only with war.  Peace poses the specific danger of sanctioning the view that the atomized world of civil society is absolute.  Just as the individual emerges to self-conscious identity only through a struggle, so each state must struggle to attain recognition.  War is the means to attain recognition, to pass, in a sense, the definitive test of political manhood.  It is in war that the strength of the state is tested and only through that test can it be shown whether individuals can overcome selfishness and work for the whole, sacrificing themselves in the service of the inclusive good (Elshtain).

 

Hegel pondered:

AThe contempt for humanity displayed by the Negroes [of Africa] who allow themselves to be shot down by the thousands in war with Europeans [is amazing]...  [It must be that] for them, life has [no value or ] value only if it has something valuable as its object! [and this latter thought is surely beyond the grasp of these] mere things@ (Chomsky). 

 

                              Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895)

 

War is a Fact of Life: Both Marx and Engels accepted war as a fact of life.  Engels described the dialectical mission of peoples not destined for historic triumph B their task was Ato perish.@

 

Marx and Engels accepted as inevitable and even desirable, war as a weapon of historic transformation.  Although neither espoused a version of civic virtue, armed or disarmed, both did embrace visions of revolutionary virtue, the zeal to act collectively and, if need be, ferociously to make class warfare (Elshtain).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                         John Ruskin (1819-1900)

 

War is a manufactured Product: Primarily remembered as the leading art theorist of his age, Ruskin=s social commentary shocked and angered the 19th century British establishment.  He contended that criminals should be regarded by their society as any other manufactured product B products, which we turn out. 

 

Ruskin despised a world where the deification of money eclipses the intrinsic value of joyful human labor.  He saw the timeless beauty of all things on earth surrounding humanity establishing for all time an endless, lasting chain of brotherhood, linking one generation to another in a way that man=s ephemeral riches cold never sustain.

 

AA man never stood so tall as when he stooped to help a child@ (Pepper).                        

 

AAs the art of life is learned, it will be found at last that all lovely things are also necessary B a wildflower by the wayside, tended corn, wild birds, creatures of the forests and tended cattle, because man does not live by bread alone@ (Ruskin).

 

AHow is it possible to desire luxury and wealth, if the accompanying suffering is clearly seen existing side by side with affluence?  Only could the most ignorant and cruel man sit at such a feast of plenty, and even then, a blindfold would likely have to be in place@ (Pepper).

 

                                               Heinrich von Treitschke (1834-1896)

 

War heals the Nation: German historian Heinrich von Treitschke wrote:

AOne must say in the most decided manner: >War is the only remedy for ailing nations!=  The moment the State makes it known, >My existence is at stake!= social self-seeking must fall back and every [partisan hatred] be silent.  The individual must forget his own ego and feel himself a member of the whole.  In this very characteristic lies the loftiness of war B that the small man disappears entirely before the great thought of the State@ (Gowans).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                          Bishop of London, 1914

 

Wars save the World: By 20th century Europe, the Church had become an arm of the state.  The sovereign state was a secular imitation of God whose commandments must be obeyed and whose power to judge is absolute.  War is a total struggle between good and evil.

 

Indeed, in 1914, the Bishop of London exhorted his youthful countrymen:

AKill Germans B to kill them, not for the sake of killing, but to save the world B to kill the good as well as the bad, to kill the young as well as the old men, to kill those who have shown kindness to our wounded as well as those fiends who crucified the Canadian Sergeant...  As I have said a thousand times, I look upon it as a war for purity.  I look upon everyone who dies in it as a martyr@ (Elshtain).

 

                                                      Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

 

Wars recapitulate history: War serves to unleash aggressivity, said Sigmund Freud.  It gives permission for individuals who have not completed the task of internal renunciation and sublimation of aggressive drives, to regress and release their aggression.  They thus recapitulate the domination by brute violence which marked the beginning of human history (Elshtain).    

 

                                                        Ruth Benedict (1887-1948)

 

Wars are rooted in Cognitive Confusion: American anthropologist Ruth Benedict wrote:

AIn >primitive= societies, human beings are merely one=s own little tribe.  The rest are nonhuman like the animals.  Killing animals is of course acclaimed and nonhuman bipeds of the neighboring tribe are equally objects of prey.  Their death proves my strength just as a successful hunt for a lion does@ (Benedict).

 

                                    Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) (Published in 1932)                       

 

Wars reflect the Paradox of Grace: American religious and social thinker, and author of Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), Reinhold Niebuhr believed that men are sinners, society  ruled by self-interest, and history characterized by irony rather than progress. 

Niebuhr wrote about what he called the Aparadox of grace:@

A... the paradox of grace B the inescapable taint of sin on all historical achievements, and the need [for leaders] to make conscious choices of evil for the sake of good when [facing] the responsibilities of power@ (Chomsky, Encyclopedia). 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                         George Kennan (1904-?) (Published in 1952)

 

War is a means to Power: Author of American Diplomacy, 1900-1950 (1952), George Kennan, in 1948, was head of the United States, Department of State, Policy Planning Staff.  In this capacity, he wrote Policy Planning Study #23, which states:

@We have about 50 percent of the world=s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population...  In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment.  Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security.  To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming, and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives.  Today, we need not deceive ourselves that we can afford the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction...  We should cease to talk about vague and... unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards and democratization.  The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.  The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better (FRUS 1948).

 

                                      Hans Morgenthau (Published in 1946 and 1964)

 

Wars are an Abuse of Reality: Hans Morgenthau, author of Scientific Man versus Power Politics (1946) and The Purpose of American Politics (1964), is a leading figure in the tough-minded, Arealistic@ school of the science of government.  Morgenthau recognized that the historical record was radically inconsistent with the noble Atranscendent purpose@ of the United States in the world.  But, he explained, the historical record is irrelevant to necessary truths: 

ATo adduce the facts is to confound reality with the abuse of reality, [thereby recapitulating] the error of atheism, which denies the validity of religion on similar grounds.  [Reality is the un-achieved] national purpose [revealed by] the evidence of history as our minds reflect it.  The actual historical record is merely the abuse of reality, [an insignificant artifact]@ (Morgenthau).

 

                                        Konrad Lorenz (1903- ?) (Published in 1966)

 

War is inherited: Austrian zoologist and ethologist, and 1973 Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz, asserted that aggressive impulses are to a degree innate:

ATo the humble seeker of biological truth, there cannot be the slightest doubt that human militant enthusiasm evolved out of a communal defense response of our pre-human ancestors@ (Lorenz, Encyclopedia).  

 

 

 

 

                                        Jean-Paul Sartre 1905-?) (Published in 1944)

 

War proves our Humanity: Jean-Paul Sartre rationalizes violence and relies on moral absolutism when considering movements for social change B thereby foreclosing any discursive space within which men and women might take on identities other than, or in addition to, those of either mobilized combatants or hapless AOthers@ who must be destroyed (Elshtain).

 

In his preface to Franz Fanon=s The Wretched of the Earth, Sartre writes:

AThe native has only one choice, that between servitude and supremacy...  First, the only violence is the settler=s [in Africa].  But soon [the natives] will make it their own...  By their ever-present desire to kill us,... they have become men...  Hatred, blind hatred... is their only wealth...  There is one duty to be done, one end to achieve B to thrust out colonialism by every means in their power...  This irrepressible violence... is man re-creating himself...  No gentleness can efface the marks of violence, only violence can destroy them.  [Violence] achieves... the emancipation of the rebel...  Once begun, it is a war that gives no quarter...   The rebel=s weapon is the proof of his humanity@ (Italics in the original; Fanon).

 

                                               Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)

 

War is Unnecessary: In his struggle for black civil rights, Martin Luther King adopted the satyagraha (Atruth-force@) of his mentor, Mohandas Gandhi.  He preached militant non-cooperation and peaceful struggle B fighting, yes, but only non-violent fighting (Elshtain).

 

King knew that people who experience an abundance of love in their lives rarely seek comfort and meaning in compulsive personal acquisitions.  His world view was to turn the global neighborhood made possible by technological advances in transportation and communication into a global brotherhood.  He urged his followers not to hate those who hate them.  He did not see violence as necessary in order to advance new concepts and bring forward a new man B one embracing the brotherhood of all.  He saw that we exist not for ourselves alone (Pepper).

 

                                            Howard Zinn (1922-) (Published in 1990)

 

Wars are due to Ignorance: American historian and professor emeritus of political science at Boston University, Howard Zinn, says:

AThe truth is beginning to come through to more and more people...  When people learn what is going on, they respond...  When the truth gets out, a power is created that is greater than the power of guns and money the government possesses...  That is what social change is about@ (Zinn).

 

 

 

 

 

                                                    Robin Fox (Published in 1992)

 

War is a Reaction to our Differences: Writing in AThe National Interest,@ Robin Fox observes:

AThe occasions for each particular war will vary perhaps, but ultimately, >we= fight >them= because they are different, and their difference threatens us because of its challenge to the validity of our ideas@ (Fox).

 

                                         Michael More (Oscar Prize Winner in 2003)

 

Wars are due to Ignorance: Film maker, author and television producer, Michael More explains:

AOnce you give the American public the information, once you give them the facts, they will respond in the right way.  They are just being lied to on a daily basis, so we have to get [the information] out there.  People do want to find out the truth and when they find out the truth, they=ll behave in a good way.  I believe that.  The problem is lack of information and a whole bunch of misinformation that is put out there@ (More).

 

                                                        Rachel Cory (1983?-2003)

 

Wars reflect a Lack of Solidarity: A young American woman born in Olympia, Washington, Rachel Cory was killed on March 16, 2003, in Rafah, Gaza, by Israeli soldiers using as their weapon, a United States-built 60-ton bulldozer, designed by the American company, Caterpillar, for the sole purpose of destroying homes.  Rachel was part of the International Solidarity Movement and at the time, while well in view of the driver of the bulldozer, was attempting to protect a Palestinian home from demolition. 

 

Rachel had gone to Gaza to stand with the suffering of human beings with whom she had never been in contact before.  Her letters home reveal that her solidarity was with the Palestinians as a national community and not merely as a collection of deprived refugees (Said).   

 

 

 

 

 

                                            Barbara Ehrenreich (Published in 1997)

 

In Blood Rites B Origins and History of the Passions of War (1997), Barbara Ehrenreich summarizes her conclusions:

3.                  War is the Expression of our Phylogeny

It recapitulates the Hominid Experience of being Prey

AIt is my contention that our peculiar and ambivalent relationship to violence is rooted in a primordial experience that we have managed, as a species, to almost entirely repress.  And this is the experience, not of hunting, but of being preyed on by animals that were initially far more skillful hunters than ourselves.@

 

It is Sacred because the Experience of being Prey is Recent

 AThe sacralization of war is not the project of a self-confident predator... but that of a creature which as learned only >recently,= in the last thousand or so generations, not to cower at ever sound in the night.@

 

Sacrifice re-enacts the Transition Prey to Predator

ARituals of blood sacrifice both celebrate and terrifyingly re-enact the human transition from prey to predator, and so... does war.  Nowhere is this more obvious than in the case of wars that are undertaken for the stated purpose of initiating young men into the male warrior-predator role B a not uncommon occurrence in traditional cultures.  But more important, the anxiety and ultimate thrill of the prey-to-predator role transition color the feelings we bring to all wars, and infuse them, at least for some of the participants some of the time, with feelings powerful and uplifting enough to be experienced as >religious.=@

 

The Transition took Courage

AThe great advance in human evolution, the transition from the status of prey to that of predator, must have been, as some level, an act of transgression B a rebellion against the predator beast.  It took enormous courage and defiance for our clawless, blunt-toothed, hominid ancestors to challenge in any way the beast=s dominion.@ 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

e.                   War was self-re-enforcing

AThe >necessity= of revenge may well be another legacy of our animal-fighting, pre-historic past.  Revenge has a pedagogical purpose, whether the enemy is animal or human B it teaches the intruder to stay away.  Conversely, the creature that does not fight back marks itself a prey.@

 

f.                   Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny

AAnimals which are secure in their predator status, know nothing of revenge.  But humans are hardly secure; our triumph over the other species occurred not that long ago, and childhood, for each of us, recapitulates the helplessness of prey.  For purely emotional reasons then, human antagonists readily find themselves caught up in the well-known >cycle of violence,= taking turns as prey and predator, matching injury with injury B bound together as powerfully as lovers in their bed.@

 

2.                  War can be an Expression of Love

AAt the level of the individual, the symmetry of war may even be expressed as a kind of love.  Enemies by definition >hate= each other, but between habitual and well-matched enemies, an entirely different feeling may arise.  Sometimes this love is reserved for the trophies created from the bodies of dead enemies...  Or the dead enemy may be incorporated by his killer=s tribe as a kind of honorary kinsman.  The practice of naming a child after a particularly valiant enemy was once widespread....  There have been, in some instances, ritual occasions for the face-to-face expression of love between enemy combatants.@

 

3.                  War enables Individuals to find Everlasting Fame

AIn war, [the warrior] finds adventure, camaraderie, searing extremes of emotion, proof of manhood, possibly new territory and loot, and always the chance of a >glorious death,= meaning not death at all but everlasting fame.@

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4.                  War may be a Living Thing 

It could be a Meme: AIt is the autonomy of war as an institution that we have to confront and explain.  Is war something which really does have >a life of its own=?  War is >contagious,=... spreading readily from one culture to the next... each injury [demanding]... revenge.  War is.. a self-replicating pattern of behavior, possessed of a dynamism not unlike that of living things...  [According to] biologist Richard Dawkins,... a >meme=... is a self-replicating >unit of culture= analogous to genes, [and] culture, like biology, may be subject to evolutionary laws of its own...  Considered as a self-reproducing cultural entity or meme, war appears to be far more robust than any particular religion, perhaps more robust than religion in general.@  (Italics in the original).

 

b.         It could be Analogous to a Computer Virus: AAnother possible way of thinking about war as a self-replicating activity comes from computer science...  Computer scientists are generating new >life forms= that have no material substance at all.  They are programs, [such as] computer >viruses,= that have been designed to reproduce themselves and, in some cases, even undergo spontaneous >mutations.=  These self-reproducing programs demand a definition of a living being as > pattern in space/time... rather than a specific material object.=  Such a being must be able not only to reproduce itself, but also undergo mutations and hence evolve over the course of generations.  If technological changes in weaponry, transportation and so on, are understood as the relevant >mutations,= then war, in some rough sense, may fit this kind of expanded definition.@    

 

                                           Jean Bethke Elshtain (Published in 1987)

 

Author of Women and War (1987), Jean Elshtain describes the discourse about war in which we all are embedded:

1.                  The ARealists@ have won

 ARealist thinkers and partisans, exude the confidence of those whose point of view long ago won the war.  Realism=s hegemony means that alternatives are evaluated from the standpoint of realism B hence, the bin labeled >idealism= which for the realist is more or less synonymous with dangerous, if well-intentioned innocence concerning the world=s ways@ (Italics in the original).

 

2.                  ARealism@ lacks Morality

ARealism... promises to spring politics free from the constrains of moral judgment and limitation.  In a system of international anarchy (the realists= fons et origo), wars will occur because there is nothing to prevent them.  Force is the course of last resort, and no state can reasonably or responsibly entertain the hope that through the actions it takes or refrains from taking, it can transform the wider context.  Modern academics call this Asystems dominance.=@  

 

3.                  ARealism@ falsely proclaims itself Scientific

ACharacteristic of modern professional discourse in its most recent incarnations... is a proclamation of scientific knowledge, a presumption that politics can be reduced to questions of security, conflict management, and damage control B  a patina of >aseptic, ahistorical and anodyne terminology,=such as, >window of vulnerability,= >collateral damage,= >crisis management= or >escalation dominance.=  This is accompanied by a pronounced insouciance concerning the will to power, an insouciance which includes the promise of control over events B a promise embedded in the concepts and tropes that comprise the discourse in the first place.@

 

4.                  The Discourse of the ARealists@ is dissociated

AI have no better word for this professionalized war discourse than >dissociation,= for although the international relations specialist as a constructor of abstract scenarios cloaked in the legitimating mantle of >scientific study,= presents himself as one who describes the world as it is, he is living out a perilous fantasy B the delusion that we have control over events when, in fact, we do not...   The scientific pretensions of the >rationalist realist= eclipse the strengths of the classical tradition, such as awareness of the intractability of events and  recognition that relations between states are necessarily alienated, more or less estranged.@

 

5.         The Reigning Ethos is Force

AThe reigning ethos and its instrumentalities are force, violence and fear.@

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                    Conclusions

 

Probability of a Cataclysm

The arc of history towards a more humane society can be discerned. 

 

However, in democratic societies today, and the United States in particular, the psychoclass from which leaders are chosen, is an earlier one (and, therefore, more violent) than that of a large proportion of the population.

 

At the same time, the power and efficiency of methods of destruction abroad, and methods of propaganda and repression at home, are increasing exponentially.

 

Therefore, it is questionable whether a cataclysm involving the whole planet can be avoided.

 

Little Interest yet in a Theory of Why War

None of the books quoted have a reference to Lloyd deMause B even though his History of Childhood was published in 1974, Foundations of Psychohistory in 1982, Reagan=s America in 1984 (and The Emotional Life of Nations in 2003).  The Journal of Psychohistory has been published continuously, on a quarterly basis, since 1978.

 

Pronouncements and declarations, even by leaders of today=s peace movement, lack a foundation in theory.

 

Lloyd deMause=s is the only broad and powerfully explanatory theory available today on the subject of why people kill each other wholesale.

 

 

 

 

                                                                   Bibliography

 

Yahweh

Elshtain, Jean, Women and War (University of Chicago, Chicago, IL), 1987, p. 121.

 

Thucydides

Elshtain, Jean, Women and War (University of Chicago, Chicago, IL), 1987, pp. 47 and 87.

 

Saxonhouse, Arlene, AMen, Women, War and Politics: Family and Polis in Aristophanes and Euripedes,@ Political Theory 8: 1. February 1980, pp. 65-81, quotation on p. 66; cited in Elshtain, Jean, Women and War (University of Chicago, Chicago, IL), 1987, p. 47.

 

The New Columbia Encyclopedia (Columbia University, New York. N.Y.), 1975.

 

Jesus

Elshtain, Jean, Women and War (University of Chicago, Chicago, IL), 1987, pp. 122-125.

 

Matthew 5:21; cited in Elshtain, Jean, Women and War (University of Chicago, Chicago, IL), 1987, p. 122.

 

Early Christians

Bainton, Christian Attitudes, p. 53; cited in cited in Elshtain, Jean, Women and War (University of Chicago, Chicago, IL), 1987, p. 123.

 

Brock, Peter, Pacifism in Europe to 1914 (Princeton University, Princeton, N.J.), 1972, p. 3; cited in Elshtain, Jean, Women and War (University of Chicago, Chicago, IL), 1987, p. 123. 

 

Elshtain, Jean, Women and War (University of Chicago, Chicago, IL), 1987, pp. 124-126.

 

Saint Augustine

Elshtain, Jean, Women and War (University of Chicago, Chicago, IL), 1987, pp 128-131.

 

Pope Urban II

Elshtain, Jean, Women and War (University of Chicago, Chicago, IL), 1987, p 134.

 

 

 

 

 

Desiderius Erasmus

Elshtain, Jean, Women and War (University of Chicago, Chicago, IL), 1987, p. 227.

 

The New Columbia Encyclopedia (Columbia University, New York. N.Y.), 1975.

 

Zinn, Howard, Declarations of Independence B Cross-Examining American Ideology (Harper Perennial), 1990, pp. 68-69.

 

Niccolo Machiavelli

Elshtain, Jean, Women and War (University of Chicago, Chicago, IL), 1987, p. 56.

 

Sir Thomas More

Elshtain, Jean, Women and War (University of Chicago, Chicago, IL), 1987, p. 227.

 

Howard, Michael, Series of Lectures, Oxford University, 1970's; cited in Howard Zinn,  Declarations of Independence B Cross-Examining American Ideology (Harper Perennial), 1990, p. 69.

 

The New Columbia Encyclopedia (Columbia University, New York. N.Y.), 1975.

 

Martin Luther

Elshtain, Jean, Women and War (University of Chicago, Chicago, IL), 1987, pp. 135-136.

 

Anabaptists

Elshtain, Jean, Women and War (University of Chicago, Chicago, IL), 1987, p. 139.

 

The New Columbia Encyclopedia (Columbia University, New York. N.Y.), 1975.

 

John Donne

Donne, John, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, 1624; cited in Pepper, William, An Act of State B The Execution of Martin Luther King (Verso, New York, N.Y.), 2003, p. 167.

 

Thomas Hobbes

Elshtain, Jean, Women and War (University of Chicago, Chicago, IL), 1987, pp. 84 and 88.

 

Pepper, William, An Act of State B The Execution of Martin Luther King (Verso, New York, N.Y.), 2003, p. 165.

 

 

 

 

 

Religious Society of Friends

Elshtain, Jean, Women and War (University of Chicago, Chicago, IL), 1987, p. 139.

 

The New Columbia Encyclopedia (Columbia University, New York. N.Y.), 1975. 

 

Charles de Montesquieu

Elshtain, Jean, Women and War (University of Chicago, Chicago, IL), 1987, pp. 227-228.

 

Brethren

Elshtain, Jean, Women and War (University of Chicago, Chicago, IL), 1987, p. 139.

 

The New Columbia Encyclopedia (Columbia University, New York. N.Y.), 1975. 

 

Jean Jacques Rousseau

Elshtain, Jean, Women and War (University of Chicago, Chicago, IL), 1987, pp. 60 and 69.

 

Georg Hegel

Chomsky, Noam, Year 501 B The Conquest Continues (South End), 1993, pp. 119-120.

 

Elshtain, Jean, Women and War (University of Chicago, Chicago, IL), 1987, pp. 73-75. 

 

Friedrich, Carl, The Philosophy of Hegel, (Modern Library, New York, N.Y.), 1953, p. 322; cited in Ehrenreich, Barbara, Blood Rites B Origins and History of the Passions of War (Owl/Henry Holt, New York, N.Y.), 1997, p. 202.

 

Karl Marx and Friederich Engels

Elshtain, Jean, Women and War (University of Chicago, Chicago, IL), 1987, p. 81.

 

John Ruskin

Pepper, William, An Act of State B The Execution of Martin Luther King (Verso, New York, N.Y.), 2003, pp. 173-174.

 

Ruskin, John, Unto This Last and other writings (Penguin Books, London), 1985, p. 226; cited in Pepper, William, An Act of State B The Execution of Martin Luther King (Verso, New York, N.Y.), 2003, p. 173.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Heinrich von Treitschke

Gowans, Adam, Translator and Editor,  Selections from Treitschke=s Lectures on Politics, (Frederick Stokes Co., New York, N.Y.), 1914, pp. 23-24; cited in Ehrenreich, Barbara, Blood Rites B Origins and History of the Passions of War (Owl/Henry Holt, New York, N.Y.), 1997, p. 202.

 

Bishop of London, 1914

Elshtain, Jean, Women and War (University of Chicago, Chicago, IL), 1987, pp. 136-137.

 

Sigmund Freud

Elshtain, Jean, Women and War (University of Chicago, Chicago, IL), 1987, p. 200.

 

Ruth Benedict

Benedict, Ruth, AThe Natural History of War,= in An Anthropologist at Work: The Writings of Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Editor (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, MA), 1959; cited in Ehrenreich, Barbara, Blood Rites B Origins and History of the Passions of War (Owl/Henry Holt, New York, N.Y.), 1997, p. 135.

 

Reinhold Niebuhr

Chomsky, Noam, Year 501 B The Conquest Continues (South End), 1993, p. 232.

 

The New Columbia Encyclopedia (Columbia University, New York. N.Y.), 1975. 

 

George Kennan

United States Government, Policy Planning Study (PPS) 23, February 24, 1948, FRUS 1948, I (part 2); cited in Noam Chomsky, Turning the Tide B S. Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace (South End), 1985, p. 48.

 

Hans Morgenthau                            

Morgenthau, Hans, The Purpose of American Politics (Vintage), 1964; cited by Noam Chomsky in his books, World Orders, Old and New B With an Update on the Palestinian Predicament (Colombia), 1994, p. 28; Year 501 B The Conquest Continues (South End), 1993, pp. 120-121; and Deterring Democracy (Hill and Wang), 1991, p. 19.

 

Konrad Lorenz

Lorenz, Konrad, On Aggression (Bantam, New York, N.Y.), 1966, p. 261; quoted in Ehrenreich, Barbara, Blood Rites B Origins and History of the Passions of War (Owl/Henry Holt, New York, N.Y.), 1997, p. 77.

 

The New Columbia Encyclopedia (Columbia University Press, New York, N.Y.), 1975.

 

Jean-Paul Sartre

Elshtain, Jean, Women and War (University of Chicago, Chicago, IL), 1987, p. 85.

 

Fanon. Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth (Grove, New York, N.Y.), 1963, pp. 12-22.

 

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Elshtain, Jean, Women and War (University of Chicago, Chicago, IL), 1987, p. 32.

 

Pepper, William, An Act of State B The Execution of Martin Luther King (Verso, New York, N.Y.), 2003, pp. 163-172.

 

Howard Zinn

Zinn, Howard, AThe War against Iraq,@ Speech, Provincetown, Cape Cod, MA, August 2003, broadcast by WBAI, ADemocracy Now,@ October 13, 2003.                               

 

Robin Fox

Fox, Robin, AFatal Attraction: War and Human Nature,@ The National Interest, Winter 1992-93: 11-20; cited in Ehrenreich, Barbara, Blood Rites B Origins and History of the Passions of War (Owl/Henry Holt, New York, N.Y.), 1997, p. 135. 

 

Michael More

More, Michael, Interview with Amy Goodman, WBAI,ADemocracy Now,@ October 15, 2003.

 

Rachel Cory

Said, Edward, AOn Dignity and Solidarity,@ Speech, at the Annual Meeting of the American-Arab Anti-discrimination Committee, Washington, D.C. June 15, 2003; broadcast by WBAI, ADemocracy Now,@ October 20, 2003.  Rachel=s letters home were published subsequently by the Guardian of London.

 

Barbara Ehrenreich

Ehrenreich, Barbara, Blood Rites B Origins and History of the Passions of War (Owl/Henry Holt, New York, N.Y.), 1997, pp. 22, 77, 138, 139, 140, 150 and 232-235.

 

Jean Bethke Elshtain

Elshtain, Jean, Women and War (University of Chicago, Chicago, IL), 1987, pp. 87-90 and 122.

 

Klein, Bradley, AStrategic Discourse and its Alternatives,@ unpublished manuscript, 1986.  The words in quotes under item 3.  were drawn by Elshtain from this paper.

 

 

                                                                           ***