We are War

I was born in 1979 – when I was young the idea of global thermonuclear war was one that regularly crossed my mind. Besides the apocalyptic tension simmering in the background, there were conflicts like the 15 year civil war in Lebanon, the 8 year Iran-Iraq War or the 9 year Soviet-Afghan War. There were multiple African conflicts spanning years and decades, such as the 26 year Angolan Civil War. Then the Cold War ended and there was the first Gulf War or the Nagorno-Karabakh War between Armenia and Azerbaijan. There were, of course, the Balkan Wars. There was the 7 year, first Liberian Civil War, the 11 year civil war in Sierra Leone. There was the genocide in Rwanda and the two Chechen Wars. An honorable mention should also go out to the era-spanning 26-year Sri Lankan Civil War and the 52-year Colombian Civil War. There were plenty more uprisings, movements, massacres and other conflicts throughout the world during this time, and this was all before 9/11 and the ensuing chaos that we live with today. When has there been a time in the world without conflict, for whatever reason? This is who we are…We are forever in a flux between war, chaos, peace and some sort of order. The dream of the last centuries was to find some way of balancing out our impulses so as to guarantee a kind of conciliation, but we seem to be gladly doing away with that idea recently. If we took the time to admit who we actually are, what our default behavior is and how destructive the means at our disposal are, we could maybe direct ourselves along a path where a certain balance and respect of one another might guarantee a little more stability. This would, however, require self-reflection, something that is not really our strong suit – especially not at the moment.

When dealing with our present problem, history can be an immeasurably valuable guide. Just google “Siege of Aleppo”, with the most recent crisis in mind, and you will be confronted with eight different entries in Wikipedia. Dating back 1500 years, these different sieges, battles and massacres of Aleppo bare witness not only to Aleppo’s strategic importance, or the region’s volatility, but to the horrors that many generations before have had to deal with. Any given larger city in Europe, Asia or the Middle East will have similar histories stretching back thousands of years. Germany became Europe's Syria almost exactly 400 years ago during the Thirty Years' War. Sometimes referred to as the first real world war, all kinds of nations, kings, nobility and their mercenary armies piled on in what was said to be a war between Catholics and Protestants, but was really a proxy war between Bourbon France and the Habsburgs. That conflict racked up 8 million casualties, this in the 17th century, with entire cities and landscapes being leveled with widespread plague, famine and cannibalism thrown in for good measure. The shock of this conflict was so deep that it was still a vivid point of reference for Friedrich Engels some two hundred years later. The Thirty Years War ended with the Peace of Westphalia which also brought the Eighty Year War between the Netherlands and Spain to an end, guaranteeing Dutch independence and generally putting a stop to the religious wars that had raged in Europe for nearly two hundred years. This peace was also the first to set the precedent of ending conflicts through a diplomatic process and created the basis for national self-determination as we know it today. Each horrific historical tragedy seems to inspire us to build structures with the hope of avoiding any such experiences in the future. But we usually refuse to learn our lessons or we don’t want to fully understand what war means and why we have always sought it out. Maybe it’s because we feel that these were not our mistakes, but those of others, that these are just parallels. However, these events are more than just analogous and shouldn’t be dismissed because the technologies and societal structures were somewhat different. They can, or should, be seen as our own deeds, because they show us who we are and how we act under duress. This is what we do. It is our burden to carry as human beings, we are responsible for all the things that we have done, no matter how we feel about them personally.

In that way, both historically and behaviorally, China is also an extremely valuable source of knowledge and information, as a kind of microcosm for gauging the tides of this human inclination to swing between order and chaos. While the rest of the world has seen empires come and go, nations arise, colonies become nations, China’s history for thousands of years has been a long list of shifting dynasties, rulers and fluctuating borders. It has experienced multiple conflicts with death tolls in the millions, had its cities destroyed again and again, and yet it has also experienced many different cultural renaissances and has, with the exception of the last couple hundred years, always been culturally and technologically ahead of the rest of the world. Due to its sheer size, China’s population had already surpassed the 200 million mark in the 1700s, it had to face structural and cultural challenges and innovate much sooner than other regions. Its history is an encapsulation of global human society, our instincts and structures, and helps illustrate how large societies may function as well as how they collapse and dissolve. This history, combined with those of all the other conflicts, should be enough to learn our lesson a million times over: the horrific first-person accounts describing the downfall of the different dynasties, the miscalculation of rulers or usurpers, the millions who died or starved to death because of them are there for all to read. You don’t even need to go back that far – the reports of the effects of mass starvation during the “Great Leap Forward” should be enough to caution any leader to mistrust their inner voice when making grand plans. If we can look at China or Europe’s past and recognize them as our own familial path, we could maybe make a step to growing beyond the pendulum.

Yet, in the last decades, our energies have gone more in the direction of sanitizing war, trying to give it a PR makeover and a better image. Modern democracies “intervene” with operations or missions, mostly limiting it to bombing so as not to risk pictures of wounded or dead soldiers. As a boy I remember watching press conferences during the first Gulf War and how the generals would present videos of how precise and “clean” these new high-tech bombs and bombers were. War without an excess of human lives lost. For this approach, history can be our guide too – we know that Nazi Germany could not bomb Britain into submission; the Allies could not bomb Nazi Germany into submission; the Americans were only able to get Japan to surrender after dropping two atomic bombs on them (all of the bombing before hadn't worked); NATO wasn't able to bomb North Korea into submission; the US could not bomb Vietnam into submission (even after dropping more bombs in one month than it ever did in all of WWII). There is hope that we have, in the last decades – with all the messes and countries on the verge of anarchy that bombing has created – been cured of this one delusion. War is always war. The sights, the sounds, the fear, the effects and the human toll are always the same. Wars are only really won when they are fought with full means. Even after they are won, the countries must have significant well-planned investments made into all areas of infrastructure and society and remain occupied by armies for years to guarantee stability. The US still has bases in Germany, Italy, Japan and Korea from the conflicts passed. The UK and France also keep their bases open where they can. Russia would still have bases throughout the world had the Soviet Union not collapsed, and is now moving to resolve this circumstance. This does not mean that occupation is good. It just means that it is a reality, as much of a reality as that we, as humans, have always waged wars. You have to first accept reality before you can function successfully within it, then one can make moves towards a life and world of improved well-being. Unfortunately, singing “Give peace a chance” will get you nowhere. Properly coming to terms with the permanent phenomenon of human war, and recognizing what it means and how it is done “successfully”, might enable the possibility of finding alternatives to it, or that when enacted, it does not create more chaos.

History shows us that we run on conflict and war, it seems to be the only way we can shake ourselves into moving forward in the hopes of building structures to avoid mass carnage sometime in the future. We forget the lessons and have bigger and bigger wars. The last huge conflicts cost the lives of tens of millions and the ghosts of these wars still haunt us and influence how we act. We shudder to think that they might happen again, but tend to stand by when the currents appear to shift in that direction, as shades of it have appeared regularly since. At the present moment, it seems as if we have had enough time grow forgetful, to let go of a resolution or two and maybe give the dice another roll to see what happens. Ironically, the countries that fought to put down the specter of totalitarian fascism seem the ones more willing to float in an autocratic direction. This doesn’t mean that we have to face an even bigger conflict soon, not global warfare, but maybe many regional conflicts that can or will fester for decades. This doesn’t seem like much consolation. While one can’t fully imagine the pain that such widespread conflict would bring, one can quite easily see how we could be derailing ourselves into a more chaotic period.

Our past is littered with examples of why not to unleash wars, but also in ways that living through the tragedy brought out the better angels of our nature. Just bombing a country won’t make a problem, dictator or totalitarian system go away. It may be time to take a look in the mirror and admit what we are so that we can maybe work towards a positive outcome without the cataclysms we usually need as inspiration. History is not something far away or even just a field of study, but more of a diary where we can recall our past actions and mistakes – not just to learn lessons, but to improve our behavior, to grow and move beyond our self-abusive past. Knowing ourselves fully and reasonably would hopefully make us understand why we regularly act on our more base instincts and then hopefully make us feel somewhat more accountable for these destructive impulses. This doesn’t mean that we’ll stop fighting wars, but we should try to first stop telling ourselves we are anything other than what we are. To try laying our more rigid conceptual frameworks aside for a moment (you can always pick them back up if you are so inclined) and take a look at humans and our behavior on their own: who are we as far as conflict is concerned and what does that really means for us? We may try to learn to face the facts that solving national, regional and global conflicts is as difficult as solving family conflicts. Meaning, if you want to push through your ideas or your impulses at the cost of others, without taking them into account, you should be prepared for conflicts, ones which will manifest themselves in a myriad of ways. A complete understanding of our nature and how it brings out the worst in us, and that the effects last for centuries, would hopefully make us think twice about our willingness to unleash this on those we love and generations to come. The negative long-term effects of these conflicts and violence are as immeasurable on a societal level as they are for any individual who lives through conflict. We need only turn on the news or take a look around any given city to see those effects happening in real time. Maybe more honest, critical self-reflection on an individual and societal level could move to diffuse some of the confusion and anger and help build a more constructive future. If we could find a way to genuinely, soberly understand our common past and move forward without destroying the lives of millions we would truly have achieved a milestone as humans.

Image credit: Protestor in Tehran, 2009 © AFP/Getty Images