The world is a fine place and worth
fighting for - Ernest Hemingway
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I
Cannot See The Dignity Dilip
D'Souza In
the '80s, the young man was with the IPKF in Sri Lanka. He tells a story of when
he was on patrol, walking through a forest north of Jaffna. Suddenly, he was
face-to-face with two even younger LTTE soldiers. "What did you do?"
we asked. "What could I do?" he said simply. "I shot them before
they could shoot me." Something
about hearing these matter-of-fact words -- in the confines of a comfortable
Bombay flat, surrounded by the car horns and random shouts of city life -- was
utterly chilling. In another time, another place, the three actors in this
little drama might have rubbed shoulders at a showing of Arzoo,
might have watched the World Cup together. As your own children, your brothers
and sisters, might have done. But
this was war in Sri Lanka. So a fresh-faced young man killed two barely
adolescent girls before they could kill him. That's
war, they say. No place for hesitation, for sentiment. No place, may I add, for
dignity. For where is the dignity when a not-yet-man must shoot two
not-quite-women? What is this but inhumanity? The
profoundest truth about war is surely that it so dehumanizes us. It turns
everything we know and cherish about ourselves, our notions of civility and
civilization, into so much blood-spattered tripe. Certainly there are Hitlers to
be defeated. But the nitty-gritty of war, the
minute-by-minute drudgery soldiers endure, the devastation it brings to
our lives -- these make war the greatest negation of humanity we have ever
devised. This is why the most compelling war reporting is, and will remain,
about the suffering it causes: it forces us to look at the beast within. Real
dignity is in ending war altogether. We may never get there, but in that ideal
lies true humanity. Self-styled
realists, the hawks, will scoff at this. War is too often a necessity, they
bluster. Because they see it that way, they must wrap the conduct of war in more
bluster: the honour of battle, the glory of fighting for flag and country. We
need such rhetoric, for otherwise the sheer bloody reality of war would keep
every sane young man from becoming a soldier. And even with those stirring
phrases, other incentives are necessary. The Canadian journalist Gwynne Dyer's
book War reproduces a painting of dozens of soldiers hanging from a tree.
He comments: "[P]ublic mass executions ... were used to terrorize the
soldier into accepting the brutality, boredom and misery of life in the
army." No,
I cannot see the dignity in "terrorizing" already frightened young men
into "brutality, boredom and misery." When their own possible
execution is used to whip them into battle, and this is for glory of country,
something is horribly skewed. This is not glory, this is shame. There
is more shame in how we consider civilians during war. We worry that today's
wars increasingly target those who do not fight. But war has always gone after
civilians: from Kosovo refugees in 1999, to the massacre of villagers by
American GIs in My-Lai in 1968, all the way back to the 2nd Century BC, when
Rome ploughed salt into Carthage's soil to starve its people for their enmity
during the Punic Wars. It
makes sense, too. Those who wage war look for efficient ways to win. What's more
efficient than pounding the softest, the most vulnerable sections of the enemy?
"Rape, massacre ... were not regrettable byproducts of the fighting,"
Mark Danner reports from Kosovo in the New
York Review of Books, "but actions intrinsic to achieving the Serbs'
territorial objectives." Indeed, the ugly side of every war is that women
are raped, children butchered. And
why should it not be so? It is a perverse code of conduct that says only men who
volunteer -- too often, boys who are rounded up -- can be in the firing line.
When nations make war, each population learns to hate the other: we make no
distinction between soldier and civilian, man and woman. Why must it be
different on the frontline? When
we willingly accept the obscenity of war itself, why the squeamishness about
civilians being assaulted? I
cannot see the dignity in pretending that civilians must somehow not be harmed
in times of war. When we wage war, let us at least acknowledge that its inhuman
logic consumes us all. Let that recognition guide the stories the media tells
about war. Perhaps we will then comprehend the horror of it; perhaps we will
then work to put an end to it. In
the famous Vietnam photograph, a child runs down a road, mouth open in a scream
of terror that you can almost hear. She is fleeing from a US napalm attack on
her village, buried under an ominous black cloud in the background. She is
naked. When
I first saw this photograph, I was a teenager, grown up on the romance of war. I
treasured my book about Japan's magnificent Zero fighter, my copy of Cornelius
Ryan's The Last Battle. I remember well how this one image turned romance
sour. I remember thinking: this girl is not nude, she is naked. The difference
matters. The horror that had stripped her of her clothes also stripped war of
every pretension I had imbued it with. This was war, naked to the world. Naked
to this one teenager. And
clear as every sad crease on that skinny girl was, the truth about war was
clearer still: it is a brutal, voracious monster. In
A Rumour of War, the Vietnam correspondent Philip Caputo describes hordes
of miserable refugees trying to escape "the sounds of bombs and shellfire,
the guttural rumbling of the beast, war, devouring its victims." It is that
rumbling you sense behind the naked girl, and you know: there is no dignity
here. The rhetoric is designed to hide this truth: there is no dignity in war.
There may be right and wrong, and war may even be essential to the human
experience. But
when we give it dignity, we pretend. |