Wars

After noting that the USA suffered comparatively few causalities in the great conflicts of the 20th century Tony Judt says,

As a consequence, the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown today. Politicians in the US and otherwise comparable countries, which accounts for their dissimilar responses to international challenges today. Indeed, the complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand—in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies —seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well. Most Americans have been fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance of its true significance. surround themselves with the symbols and trappings of armed prowess; even in 2008 American commentators excoriate allies that hesitate to engage in armed conflict. I believe it is this contrasting recollection of war and its impact, rather than any structural difference between the US and otherwise comparable countries, which accounts for their dissimilar responses to international challenges today. Indeed, the complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand—in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies —seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well. Most Americans have been fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance of its true significance.

I think he exaggerates a bit in that glorification and exaltation of the military are not unknown phenomena in France and the UK, to take just two examples. My main gripe about his argument is different though. What he seems to be saying is that recent experience of catastrophic suffering and mass casualties on the national territory tend to make countries, or advanced democracies at any rate, wary of militarism and reluctant to go to war.

If this is the case you’d expect it to also hold true with respect to previous wars in the modern period that have caused mass causalities. The United States, for example, fought an enormously bloody civil war from 1861 to 1865, a war which laid waste to large parts of the country and caused a great deal of suffering to civilians.

Far from being chastened by the experience the end of the civil war saw the United States expand westward with redoubled energy, exterminating any Native Americans who stood in the way and plenty that didn’t. Furthermore, only thirty five years after the civil war ended - a much shorter period of time than that which separates today’s advanced democracies from their mass casualty experiences, the United States chose to go to war against the Spanish Empire and make a colony of the Philippines. It’s true that few US casualties were caused thereby but that doesn’t weaken my argument as the butcher’s bill for military adventures can’t be known with certainty in advance.

And even when the US entered WWI in 1917 – again, a war it could easily have kept out of - it was still closer in time to the horror of the Civil War than Judt’s supposedly peace-loving advanced democracies are now.

Update: Norm has a go at  Judt here.

Imbéciles

Qué clase de imbéciles mandamos a representarnos en Francia que no
sabían esto?

Otro funcionario que aportó sorpresas sobre su pasado fue el canciller Bernard Kourchner: contó que no es diplomático ni abogado especializado en asuntos externos, sino médico. Además, fue uno de los fundadores de Médicos Sin Fronteras

False Equivalences

In this story in today’s La Nación President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is reported as having said the following during her visit to Paris:

We ask the government of Colombia, all the institutions, and the FARC to free Ingrid [Betancourt].

As far as I know Ingrid Betancourt has been a captive of the FARC these last six years and not the Colombian government. Asking the Colombian government to free her would be like asking Tirofijo to release FARC prisoners in Colombian government jails; it’s something beyond his power to do.

So why say this? Well, if your closest international ally and lender of last resort is Hugo Chávez, that might be a reason. The Venezuelan leader is very keen on the FARC and when the Colombian government recently infringed Ecuadorian sovereignty to kill one of their senior leaders he couldn’t have got more agitated had it been Venezuelan national territory that had been intruded upon. Calling on the FARC alone to release the unfortunate Franco-Colombian hostage might not, therefore, have been to Chávez’s liking and it might have lessened the possibility of him shelling out for Argentine bonds the next time the government wants to raise money.

President Fernández de Kirchner didn’t stop there. She went to say that,

…it is necessary to emphasise that the greatest force for the freeing up of these obstacles [to the freeing of Betancourt] must be made precisely by those who have the responsibility of leading democratic institutions.

So it’s not even a case of moral equivalence, it’s the democratically elected government of a friendly state that has a greater responsibility to ensure the safe release of the hostage than the illegal armed group with pretensions to belligerent status that is actually holding her.

If a democratically elected Argentine president has ever made more morally squalid public remarks then I’d sure like to know what they were.

And one more thing, supposing that Betancourt gets released, will there still be marches in Paris, Buenos Aires or anywhere else calling for the release of the dozens (hundreds?) more ordinary Colombians being held captive by the FARC?

Wars Of Independence

I saw The Battle of Algiers for the first time in many years today and it remains a very impressive film. Though his sympathies plainly lay with the FLN Pontecorvo’s gaze spares no one, neither the French who torture nor the FLN who have no hesitation in slaughtering innocent people with bombs in bars. I can’t think of anything comparable in cinema to the scene where the camera pans around the Milk Bar that is about to be ripped apart by a bomb, taking in and personalizing for the viewer the faces of many of those who are about to be exterminated. Perhaps someone should tell Eoghan Harris that this is the sort of thing that many countries, not just Ireland and Algeria, had to stoop to in their fight for independence.

All that said though, judged by the standards of contemporary cinema and even those of TV, the effects of violence on bodies are soft-pedaled quite a bit, we see bloodied bodies but not dismembered ones, those shot at close range fall theatrically without any spray of blood or matter and the focus is more on the moral effects of torture on the victim - his becoming less than a person, a plaything of his captors – rather than the horror of the means necessary to achieve this. It’s interesting that the film doesn’t even hint at the torturers themselves suffering psychological damage as a result of their activities.

Looking at it now, the ending seems like the film’s weakest point. Algeria didn’t become independent until five years after the defeat of the FLN in the Algiers Casbah and the viewer innocent of history – apart from some scenes of subsequent street demonstrations – isn’t really given much of a clue how this occurred and is somewhat left hanging. Anyone who wants to know more about this or any other aspect of the Algerian War of Independence could do themselves a big favour by reading Alistair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace.

The Professor

For those interested in the life and more particularly the death of Walter Benjamín - the Elvis of the Frankfurt School; and I suppose that makes Horkheimer the Colonel Parker - there is an interesting piece in the LRB here. I reproduce a fragment below.

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But Birman’s ‘professor’ was not a believer. Early in life he’d got out of gold – turning away from the path indicated by his family’s wealth – and into a pure, non-remunerative form of work, perhaps best thought of as the investigation of modernity: a cornucopia of social production and, as he envisaged it, a nearly miraculous condition of the kind you might come to understand after long study of an infant prodigy capable of grand engineering schemes, precocious feats of reasoning, high poetic utterance, generosity of spirit and a cruelty that knew no bounds. The European culture that Benjamin loved had the infernal vigour of the child genius, even though, in his reflections on the Second Empire, he could also discern the outlines of the ageing hag. Living on modest means, he did as much in his century for the discursive essay as Montaigne had done in his, though he was better placed, historically, not just to think about the world, but to try to say how the world thought back. Unlike his father, an auctioneer, rentier and speculator, Benjamin at 48 had a universe to offer but very little to transact, in life or on the point of dying, and so on his last journey he took the cash he could muster and the few articles he rightly considered essential: an obscure manuscript, a pocket watch and enough morphine ‘to kill a horse’, as Koestler had described it after their meeting in Marseille. Gold was not part of this crude survival kit, which provided for dispatch rather more than salvation. Benjamin may have been devoted to memory and posterity, but he had very little intellectual or moral interest in the road ahead – his or anybody else’s. ‘We know,’ he wrote in the last of his aphorisms on ‘Messianic time’ in the Theses, ‘that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however.