War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning Read Online Free PDF Page A

peace he is accused by the Israelis of using words to conceal his intention to wipe out Israel. The Palestinians react in the same manner to statements by most Israeli leaders. It does not matter what they say, just as it did not matter what the Serb or Croat nationalists said to each other; the intentions of the other were predetermined by nationalist myth.
    We often become as deaf and dumb as those we condemn. We too have our terrorists. The Contras in Nicaragua carried out, with funding from Washington, some of the most egregious human rights violations in Central America, yet were lauded as “freedom fighters.” Jonas Savimbi, the rebel leader the United States backed in Angola’s civil war, murdered and tortured with a barbarity that far outstripped the Taliban. The rebellion Savimbi began in 1975 resulted in more than 500,000 dead. President Ronald Reagan called Savimbi the Abraham Lincoln of Angola, although he littered the country with land mines, once bombed a Red Cross–run factory making artificial legs for victims of those mines, and pummeled a rival’s wife andchildren to death. The mayhem and blood-letting we backed in Angola were copied in many parts of Africa, including Zaire and Liberia.
    The myth of war sells and legitimizes the drug of war. Once we begin to take war’s heady narcotic, it creates an addiction that slowly lowers us to the moral depravity of all addicts. War’s utter depravity was captured in Shakespeare’s play Troilus and Cressida , a work that as far as is known was never performed in Shakespeare’s lifetime, perhaps due to its savage indictment of war and human society. Nearly every figure in the play, including Ulysses, lies to and tries to manipulate those around him: that is the trait of most leaders, no matter what political agenda they espouse. Here, unlike Henry V , Shakespeare excoriates the established order; the play is one that debunks national myth. There are only three characters who speak about war with any sanity or truth: Pandarus, who is a lecher and a coward; Cassandra, who is deranged; and Thersites, as described by Shakespeare, “a deformed and scurrilous Greek.” 3 Yet Thersites’ bleak view of human nature and human folly is borne out by the play’s end. We are left with the realization that characters who are, by the standards of civil society, the most retrograde stand above the baseness of those who prosecute war, if only because they speak the truth.
    â€œLechery, lechery, still wars and lechery, nothing else holds fashion,” Thersites rails. 4
    War can be the natural outcome of brutal repression; witness Kosovo or El Salvador. Or it can be manufactured by warlords intent on enrichment, as in Bosnia. It can also, although less and less, be the result of vying interests between nation-states, such as the Gulf War, fought over control of the oil fields in Kuwait. War, at times inevitable and unavoidable, is part of humansociety. It has been since the dawn of time—and probably will be until we are snuffed out by our own foolishness.
    â€œWe believed we were there for a high moral purpose,” wrote Philip Caputo in his book on Vietnam, Rumor of War . “But somehow our idealism was lost, our morals corrupted, and the purpose forgotten.” 5
    The employment of organized violence means one must, in fact, abandon fixed and established values. This is a truth made apparent in Troilus and Cressida . It is a truth Henry V ignores. Once war, and especially the total war that marked both the ancient and the modern way of battle, erupts, all is sacrificed before it. The myth of war is essential to justify the horrible sacrifices required in war, the destruction and the death of innocents. It can be formed only by denying the reality of war, by turning the lies, the manipulation, the inhumanness of war into the heroic ideal. Homer did this for the Greeks, Virgil for the Augustan age, and Shakespeare for the