Thursday, January 15, 2004

Dead Bodies Tipping the Scale



“I cease not to advocate peace; even though unjust, it is better than the most just war.”

—CICERO, Epistolae ad Atticum, bk. VII, epistle 14



M. and I were talking about the war in Iraq—and good thing we were very, very good friends because we were at opposite poles with regards where our sympathies lie. He thinks it’s a good thing George W. Bush is doing his cowboy drill in Iraq, but I, on the other hand, am fairly well-known for my anti-war views. My weblog, for one thing, is chock-full of commentaries deriding the invasion of Mesopotamia as well as knick-knacks ridiculing the totally caricaturish Junior Bush. But finally we came to a deadlock, then a compromise. This is what we both thought:



It is easy enough to conclude, by virtue of the emotional, that war is unjust. Suffering and devastation, after all, can never be right in anyone’s estimation of the order of things. And every day, our lives are cued in to the relentless flood of televised images of unjust wars here and everywhere. It is already a part of our vocabulary to digest and hurl and choke on the realities of the horror of the European Holocaust during World War II, for example, or the shame of Korea and Vietnam, the carnage of Rwanda and Yugoslavia, the shock of 9/11, and the ire of Iraq. What we see in all of these are images of houses and buildings burning, people dying, and destitute children going about the devastation as bags of skin and bones—all of our sense of humanity askew, as if hell itself has opened and unleashed its dark forces to shake whatever it is we think of human order.



War is the sight of the World Trade Center going down in rubble. It is the sight of a Jewish-American journalist being beheaded on-camera by Muslim extremists for primetime news. It is the sight of the instance of a bullet from an army man’s outstretched gun shattering a Vietnamese man’s brains, or a naked little girl crying and running down a village dirt road burning from napalm, in two of the most horrifying photographs to come out of the Vietnam War. It is the knowledge of the human rights victims of Marcos’s martial law, the Disappeared of Argentina, the black man of South Africa, the religious ghettos of the Middle East, the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.



In the book Nagasaki, August 9, 1945, Michaito Ichimaru talks about the effacement that war truly brings, and distills the very reality of war beyond the concept when he talks about the day the atomic bomb was dropped over his city: “The air dose of radiation was more than 7,000 rads at this distance but I could not complete my journey because there were fires everywhere. I met many people coming back from Urakami. Their clothes were in rags, and shreds of skin were hanging from their bodies. They looked like ghosts with vacant stares. The next day, I was able to enter Urakami on foot, and all that I knew had disappeared. Only the concrete and iron skeletons of the buildings remained. There were dead bodies everywhere. On each street corner we had tubs of water used for putting out fires after the air raids. In one of these small tubs, scarcely large enough for one person, was the body of a desperate man who sought cool water. There was foam coming from his mouth, but he was not alive.”



Knowing all these, I come to a difficult fork in this essay, because I am convinced by this: that while war’s horror is something that is evil, beyond any just man’s comprehension, and is ideally purged from a world that should only know peace—war is also something that cannot be avoided, as long as human beings dominate this world.



To talk about whether war can ever be justified is really to pursue a strange notion that may be beyond our expectations of what it is really to be human: because, if one really thinks about it, the history of man is essentially a history of war. Our history books are simply compilations of stories of skirmishes big and small, and what we know as Civilization is actually the result of who wins a strategic war. If the Moors, for example, had their run of Europe and were not vanquished by Christian soldiers and kings, Europe would have been a Muslim enclave, and the subsequent history would have been vastly different from what we know and breathe today. Imagine this: today we eat in McDonalds, we know Santa Claus, and we watch Hollywood movies—all these became possible because of Christians won one strategic war in Italy. What if the Moors won? Will McDonalds even exist?



I am saying, thus, that war and our capacity to hold it is something that is innate in all of us—it is the necessary yang to hold in place our yearnings for the good ying. It is what makes us stay true to our idealism of good humanity.



Let me explain this strange notion further by employing two schools of thought: one, what is known in Structuralism as the principle of binary opposition, and two, the principle of Darwin’s natural selection, or what we all know as the theory of evolution. I will explain briefly.



Binary opposition talks about ascertaining the identity of something by something that which it is not. For example, we know there is White because there is Black. There is Light because there is Darkness. There is Long because there is Short. There is Woman because there is Man. How do we know that something is Good? By knowing that there is Evil. Running down this breadth of logic… How can we truly know and pine for Peace? By knowing the horrors of War. One needs the other to exist. There can be no true peace if there is no true war.



Is war justifiable then? Emotionally, no. But can we live without war? The answer is sadly, and truthfully, also no.



We can’t live without it because it is in our genetic make-up. It is in our history. It is said that the moment man became aware of his right to possess something, war was the subsequent result. We forge wars over ownership really: of lives, land, and belief systems that possess the keys to our very identities. We forge wars as well to have the basic fact of living. We fight to live. This is the Darwinian notion. That which is more fit, survives. The strongest and fastest sperm, for example, fertilizes the egg. The more aggressive species set the pace for the biologic make-up of the world. Animals and plants fight to fit in their environments to ensure their own survival. That’s why we have protective coloration among insects and other animals. That’s why the king of the lions kills the cubs of his predecessor to ensure only the survival of his own seed. That’s why we climb corporate ladders and indulge in what we know as the “rat race” to manage our own work lives.



That’s why we fight. Because the winner gets to write the rules. Because the winner sets the pace for what we will know as history.



War is our very soul.


[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

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