John Whitehead's Commentary
The Meaning of War
Lesley Stahl (concerning the toll on Iraqi children from the Persian Gulf War): "We have heard that half a million children have died. Is the price worth it?"
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think it is worth it."--60 Minutes Interview (May 12, 1996)
Historian Will Durant calculated that there have only been 29 years in all of human history during which a war was not underway somewhere. In fact, in the wars of the 20th century, some 62 million civilians have perished, nearly 20 million more than the 43 million military personnel killed--over 100 million total.
If we look at the 1990s alone, the human carnage is staggering: 2 million dead in Afghanistan; 1.5 million dead in the Sudan; some 800,000 butchered in 90 days in Rwanda; a quarter of a million dead in Bosnia; 200,000 dead in Guatemala; 150,000 dead in Liberia; a quarter of a million dead in Burundi; 75,000 dead in Algeria; and untold tens of thousands killed in the border conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the fighting in Colombia, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Chechnya, Sri Lanka, southeastern Turkey, Sierra Leone, Northern Ireland, Kosovo, the Persian Gulf War (where estimates are that 35,000 Iraqi civilians were killed) and so on.
The earth is, thus, literally soaked in blood. And the ominous threat of war is always in the air. It has become, in effect, our cultural wallpaper.
Indeed, I am nearing my sixth decade of existence, and I cannot remember a time when war or the threat of war was not hanging over our heads. I was born as World War II was ending and the mushroom clouds of nuclear holocaust had not yet cleared over Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Soon the U.S. was ushered into the Korean War, which faded into the Cold War. By the time I was a teenager and had entered college, my generation was being drafted to fight in the rice paddies of Vietnam.
Even as American resistance toward the Vietnam War began to fade, the Cold War was still hot. And by the early eighties, the U.S. was embroiled in a conflict in Grenada and later Panama. Next, the Gulf War inaugurated the nineties with American military might and the extravaganza of media warfare. Then came Bosnia and the tragedy of Mogadishu, Somalia, where American troops found stiff resistance (as portrayed in the 2001 film Black Hawk Down). During these skirmishes, the American bombings of Iraq continued up and until the latest invasion of Iraq by the U.S. military.
The obvious question is why human societies continually engage in war. There are various answers, two of which I will proffer here.
A gulf has opened up in our culture between the visibility of evil and the intellectual resources available for coping with it. "The repertoire of evil has never been richer," writes professor Andrew Delbanco in his book The Death of Satan (1995). "Yet never have our responses been so weak. We have no language for connecting our inner lives with the horrors that pass before our eyes in the outer world." This, as Delbanco recognizes, is a reminder of the hollowness of modern human beings and "of what it must have been to have a coherent view of the world as a moral order reflecting God's purposes and physically sensitive to the moral conduct of human beings."
We have, so to speak, forgotten our Judeo-Christian past, and we can no longer draw from it to explain our world. For example, war could have once been explained as a magnification of what the great Christian thinkers of the past, such as Augustine, referred to as the sin nature--that is, the innate urge to do evil that is present in all people.
As "we have lost touch with the idea of evil," Delbanco notes, "we seem to need more and more vivid representations of it--as if it were a drug whose potency diminishes with each use." But, unlike prior generations, we fail to see evil in moral or spiritual terms and localize it in perceived human villains such as Saddam Hussein or North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il or whoever happens to be the current bad guy of the month. As George Orwell once put it, the enemy of the moment always represents "absolute evil."
This brings me to my second point. If we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that we yearn for a world in which our lives have meaning and in which our choices and the actions we take have meaning. And, tragically, in the modern world, war is sometimes the most powerful way human society achieves meaning. "Many of us, restless and unfulfilled," writes foreign correspondent Chris Hedges in his book War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), "see no supreme worth in our lives. We want more out of life. And war, at least, gives a sense that we can rise above our smallness and divisiveness." In a time of malaise and desperation, war, as the politicians recognize, is a potent distraction from the troubles and problems of the day.
Perhaps war also makes a world that seems insane understandable. In the words of Hedges, "a black and white tableau of them and us. It suspends thought, especially self-critical thought. All bow before the supreme effort. We are one."
Finally, we must realize that war is a god, as the ancient Greeks and Romans knew. Its worship demands sacrifice. And that sacrifice requires reducing people to corpses.
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think it is worth it."--60 Minutes Interview (May 12, 1996)
Historian Will Durant calculated that there have only been 29 years in all of human history during which a war was not underway somewhere. In fact, in the wars of the 20th century, some 62 million civilians have perished, nearly 20 million more than the 43 million military personnel killed--over 100 million total.
If we look at the 1990s alone, the human carnage is staggering: 2 million dead in Afghanistan; 1.5 million dead in the Sudan; some 800,000 butchered in 90 days in Rwanda; a quarter of a million dead in Bosnia; 200,000 dead in Guatemala; 150,000 dead in Liberia; a quarter of a million dead in Burundi; 75,000 dead in Algeria; and untold tens of thousands killed in the border conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the fighting in Colombia, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Chechnya, Sri Lanka, southeastern Turkey, Sierra Leone, Northern Ireland, Kosovo, the Persian Gulf War (where estimates are that 35,000 Iraqi civilians were killed) and so on.
The earth is, thus, literally soaked in blood. And the ominous threat of war is always in the air. It has become, in effect, our cultural wallpaper.
Indeed, I am nearing my sixth decade of existence, and I cannot remember a time when war or the threat of war was not hanging over our heads. I was born as World War II was ending and the mushroom clouds of nuclear holocaust had not yet cleared over Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Soon the U.S. was ushered into the Korean War, which faded into the Cold War. By the time I was a teenager and had entered college, my generation was being drafted to fight in the rice paddies of Vietnam.
Even as American resistance toward the Vietnam War began to fade, the Cold War was still hot. And by the early eighties, the U.S. was embroiled in a conflict in Grenada and later Panama. Next, the Gulf War inaugurated the nineties with American military might and the extravaganza of media warfare. Then came Bosnia and the tragedy of Mogadishu, Somalia, where American troops found stiff resistance (as portrayed in the 2001 film Black Hawk Down). During these skirmishes, the American bombings of Iraq continued up and until the latest invasion of Iraq by the U.S. military.
The obvious question is why human societies continually engage in war. There are various answers, two of which I will proffer here.
A gulf has opened up in our culture between the visibility of evil and the intellectual resources available for coping with it. "The repertoire of evil has never been richer," writes professor Andrew Delbanco in his book The Death of Satan (1995). "Yet never have our responses been so weak. We have no language for connecting our inner lives with the horrors that pass before our eyes in the outer world." This, as Delbanco recognizes, is a reminder of the hollowness of modern human beings and "of what it must have been to have a coherent view of the world as a moral order reflecting God's purposes and physically sensitive to the moral conduct of human beings."
We have, so to speak, forgotten our Judeo-Christian past, and we can no longer draw from it to explain our world. For example, war could have once been explained as a magnification of what the great Christian thinkers of the past, such as Augustine, referred to as the sin nature--that is, the innate urge to do evil that is present in all people.
As "we have lost touch with the idea of evil," Delbanco notes, "we seem to need more and more vivid representations of it--as if it were a drug whose potency diminishes with each use." But, unlike prior generations, we fail to see evil in moral or spiritual terms and localize it in perceived human villains such as Saddam Hussein or North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il or whoever happens to be the current bad guy of the month. As George Orwell once put it, the enemy of the moment always represents "absolute evil."
This brings me to my second point. If we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that we yearn for a world in which our lives have meaning and in which our choices and the actions we take have meaning. And, tragically, in the modern world, war is sometimes the most powerful way human society achieves meaning. "Many of us, restless and unfulfilled," writes foreign correspondent Chris Hedges in his book War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), "see no supreme worth in our lives. We want more out of life. And war, at least, gives a sense that we can rise above our smallness and divisiveness." In a time of malaise and desperation, war, as the politicians recognize, is a potent distraction from the troubles and problems of the day.
Perhaps war also makes a world that seems insane understandable. In the words of Hedges, "a black and white tableau of them and us. It suspends thought, especially self-critical thought. All bow before the supreme effort. We are one."
Finally, we must realize that war is a god, as the ancient Greeks and Romans knew. Its worship demands sacrifice. And that sacrifice requires reducing people to corpses.
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.
ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
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