WARS, WARS, WARS, AND
NO END IN SIGHT
WORLD
MILITARY EXPENDITURE:
STATISTICS
PROPHETIC
VOICES OF THE PAST:
KARL
KRAUS,
GEORGE ORWELL,
OTHER VISIONARY THINKERS
Wars, Wars,
Wars, and No End in Sight
In 2000 years there were more than 5000
wars. How many more wars do we need in order to learn to live in
peace?
***
In
the new millennium, some governments, organizations, and people
continue to regard violence and wars as possible and
acceptable means of solving major problems and conflicts.
***
The argument that a war is the last possible option when diplomacy
fails has not prevented governments and people from giving up far
too easily on the
search for peaceful solutions.
***
The
twentieth century was stigmatized by
genocides from the extermination of the Herrero people and the
Armenians to the
Shoah, from the Pol Pot genocide to the mass murders in Rwanda.
But political developments seem to confirm Hegel's dictum:
governments and humankind only learn from history that they never
learned anything from history.
Today, in appeals across countries and continents, we read:
“Every
day, the 2.5 million people chased from their homes in Darfur face
the threat of starvation, disease, and rape, while the few lucky
enough to remain in their homes risk displacement, torture and
murder.” In spite of this, the genocide in Darfur continues. Can such
madness not be stopped in the twenty-first century?
***
“Our
talk of justice is empty until the largest battleship has
foundered on the forehead of a drowned man.”
Paul
Celan, “Backlight”(Gegenlicht), in Gesammelte Werke
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), vol. 3. Rosmarie
Waldrop’s translation.
***
As the twentieth century came to a close, hopes
for a more peaceful millennium awakened. But the phantoms of
the past cast their dark shadow on the present. After two World
Wars, the Cold War, and numerous genocides, hatred, violence, and
wars still overshadow life in contemporary societies.
Since the start of 2003, the attention of the
media and the broad public focused on the war in Irak, while victims of other wars were forgotten: among them are the people of
Chechnya, Congo, Algeria, and of several other countries. Also forgotten were
the victims of numerous violent conflicts not only
in dictatorships, but in democracies as well. In light of so many wars,
Kant’s concept of eternal peace remains utopia.
Wars were used as an argument to
legitimate investment in armaments and the
strengthening of a country’s defence system; in some cases the military
build-up helped prevent a war; in other cases it made the launching of
war possible. As statistics document, military
spending at the end of the twentieth century reached an
unprecedented peak. If
a percentage of the funding invested in wars and armaments were diverted to peace education in all countries, contemporary
societies might manage to make a few more steps on the long road
towards Kant’s ideal of peace.
Just imagine the investment
of the world’s entire military expenditure in peace education
and in a search for solutions to the most pertinent economic, social,
ecological and cultural problems of contemporary societies!
World Military Expenditure:
Some Figures
Since
2001, when the subsequent statistics were published, the figures
increased considerably world-wide.
2001
The Stockholm International Peace Research
Institute (SIPRI), in the 33rd edition of its
yearbook, estimates world military expenditure in 2001 at $839
billion. (Reuters cites these figures as well).
http://www.globalpolicy.org/wtc/analysis/2002/0613military.htm
The subsequent table prepared by Center for
Defense Information includes figures for military expenditure
of different countries in 2001. Sources: The International
Institute for Strategic Studies, Department of Defense.
Selected Countries Military Budget in 2001
United States $396.1 Billion
Russia* $60.0
China* $42.0
Japan $40.4
United Kingdom $34.0
Saudi Arabia $27.2
France $25.3
Germany $21.0
Brazil* $17.9
India $15.6
Italy $15.5
South Korea $11.8
Iran
$9.1
Israel $9.0
Taiwan $8.2
Canada $7.7
Spain $6.9
Australia $6.6
Netherlands $5.6
Turkey $5.1
Singapore $4.3
Sweden $4.2
United Arab Emirates*
$3.9
Poland $3.7
Greece $3.3
Argentina* $3.1
Pakistan $2.6
Norway $2.8
Kuwait $2.6
Denmark $2.4
Belgium $2.2
Colombia $2.1
Egypt $2.1
Vietnam $1.8
Iraq $1.4
North Korea $1.3
Portugal $1.3
Libya $1.2
Czech Republic $1.1
Philippines $1.1
Luxembourg $0.9
Hungary $0.8
Syria $0.8
Cuba $0.7
Sudan $0.6
Yugoslavia $0.5
With regards to military expenditures in the
United States, Admiral Eugene Carroll, Jr., U.S. Navy (Ret.),
Deputy Director, Center for Defense Information, argues:
"For 45 years of the Cold War we were in an
arms race with the Soviet Union. Now it appears we're in an arms
race with ourselves."
1997
UNICEF: “Worldwide, if just $3 billion to $6
billion of the estimated $680 billion currently spent on the
military per year could be diverted to education, most experts
believe that every child would have a place in a decent school.”
See: http://www.unicef.org/pon97/edu1.htm
PROPHETIC
VOICES OF THE PAST
At
the start of World War I, Europeans were dancing in the streets.
Euphoria had taken over rational thinking, nourishing people's
insane idea that battle was the only means of rejuvenating a
degenerate society. Optimists predicted the war would last few
days; realists were convinced that it would last a few weeks; and
pessimists thought it would take a few months. In the end, the war
shattered all illusions.
Although
the beginning of the last century displays some similarities with
the start of the new millennium, comparisons of historical periods
often yield deceptive results. The current political situation
differs fundamentally from developments around 1900. In the
twenty-first century thousand of people took to the streets to
protest war and call for peaceful resolutions of major conflicts,
including the disarmament of a fierce dictator and his troops.
Although a large majority of US citizens gave full support to the
US troops precisely because they were in combat, many people did
not glorify war; some perceived it as a last resort, while others
rejected war as a means to solve the Iraq crisis.
There
are other major differences between 1900 and 2000. World War I did
not break out in order to bring about the downfall of a
dictatorship. By contrast, the defenders of the present war
derive their legitimacy from the illegitimate nature of Saddam
Hussein’s dictatorship which violated human rights, murdered
thousands of citizens, and endangered the country’s neighbours.
Whether for or against the war, a majority of people in both
Europe and North America have no doubts about the fact that Saddam
Hussein's rule is an atrocious dictatorship. By contrast, in the
Muslim world Saddam Hussein has not only enemies, but also
admirers.
In
spite of these and any other differences between the time periods,
authors living at the beginning of the twentieth century who wrote
about wars and dictatorships give answers to questions of our
time.
KARL
KRAUS:
The
Viennese critic Karl Kraus was one of the few intellectuals who
opposed World War I from the very start. In his polemics against
the New Free Press, Kraus was able to prove how both
journalists and politicians misused language to obscure their
dubious maneuvers, cover up hypocrisy, and misrepresent the
consequences of war. He showed how they contributed to the
escalation of violence, by exaggerating insignificant conflicts in
order to print sensationalist news, which triggered in turn an
increase of brutal crimes, prompting journalists to write more
reports. Kraus condemned such misuse of rhetoric and fought not
only against manipulative journalists, but also against all
corrupt public figures of Austrian society, demanding time and
again that they satisfy high standards of moral integrity.
In
his mammoth play Die Letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days
of Mankind), subtitled A Nightmare, Kraus uncovers the
causes and consequences of the war, details atrocities, and
reveals the misuse of language. The drama of 800 pages and
209 scenes begins with the voice of the street vendor announcing a
political event that set the world on fire, the assassination of
the Austro-Hungarian Emperor's heir by a radical in Sarajevo. In
the subsequent scenes, the action takes place on the streets of
Vienna and Berlin, in the coffee houses and brothels, offices and
churches, barracks and trenches. 500 characters from children to
soldiers, professors to churchmen, from businessmen to politicians
reveal what made Austria "the testing ground for world
destruction." The drama, which shows how violence breeds
violence, ends with the voice of 'God: "I did not want
that." When scenes from The Last Days of Mankind were
broadcasted on Swiss radio after World War II, people thought the
play had been written during that war.
Karl
Kraus’s prophetic voice as recorded in his drama and in his
journal Die Fackel (The Torch) could help bring
light into the darkness of our time.
Karl
Kraus: Reflections on War and
Its Consequences
"Nein, der Seele bleibt keine
Narbe zurück. Der Menschheit wird die Kugel bei einem Ohr hinein
und beim anderen herausgegangen sein." (Die Fackel,
18. Januar 1917, p. 3)
(No,
the soul will not remain scarred. The bullet will go through
humanity: in through one of its ears; out through
the other ear.)
"Im Krieg gesundet die
Menschheit? Wenn sie nicht den Krieg ansteckt." (Die
Fackel, 5. Oktober 1915, XVII, p. 126.)
(Humanity
recovers through war? If it is not infecting it).
"Krieg ist zunächst die
Hoffnung, daß es einem besser gehen wird, hierauf die Erwartung,
daß es dem anderen schlechter gehen wird, dann die Genugtuung, daß
es dem anderen auch nicht besser geht, und hernach die Überraschung,
daß es beiden schlechter geht." (Kraus, "Nachts," Beim
Wort genommen. München, Kösel Verlag, 1955, 445.)
(War
is first the hope that one will do better; thereafter the
expectation that the other will do worse; then the satisfaction
that the other is not doing better; and finally the realization
that both are doing worse.)
Kraus:
The Business of War
Time
and again Kraus was able to prove how tightly business and war
were intertwined, revealing that war was a profitable enterprise.
It was this insight that prompted Kraus to doubt the stability of
peace.
"Die Welt wird sich einmal
wundern, daß sie kein Geld mehr hat. So geht's jedem, der es
verpulvert." (Die Fackel, 18. Januar 1917, p. 3)
(The
world will be astonished to realize that it will have no money
left. This happens to those who use money like gunpowder.)
"Es handelt sich in diesem
Krieg-" "Jawohl, es handelt sich in diesem Krieg."
(Die Fackel, 5. Oktober 1915, p. 111.)
("The
war deals with --" O Yes, the war deals...")
"Den Weltmarkt erobern":
weil Händler so sprachen, mußten Krieger so handeln. Seitdem
wird erobert, wenngleich nicht der Weltmarkt. (Die Fackel,
18. Januar 1917, p. 3.)
("To
conquer the world market": because trade people talked that
way, worriers had to act that way. And they did conquer, but it
was not the world market.")
In
1914, Austria and Germany claimed to have started a defensive war
for moral and ethical reasons, and they believed to have God on
their side. Kraus
opinion on this topic is summed up in the subsequent aphorism:
"Kriege und Geschäftsführer werden mit Gott geführt."
("Nachts," Beim Wort genommen, 447).
Kraus’s
Words and Weapons:
A Critique of Language
The
motto of Kraus's journal The Torch was not "Was wir
bringen" (what we "bring," that is, print), but
"Was wir umbringen" (what we kill). "May the Torch
provide light for a land in which, unlike the Empire of Charles V,
the sun never rises." What Kraus was attempting to annihilate
was the corrupt language of those who misused rhetoric in order to
propagate ideas that allegedly benefited the people of Austria,
but actually only furthered their own careers. Kraus developed
sophisticated strategies of analyzing linguistic distortions in
order to uncover their deeper psychological, social and political
implications. Kraus's analysis of euphemisms and oxymora
proved how little respect those who manipulated language had for
human life. One of his methods of uncovering the falsity of
arguments and the hidden meaning of pompous phrases was to single
out citations and let the words themselves disclose what speakers
tried to hide. In this respect, Kraus "took language by its
words."
As
the prologue of Kraus’s mammoth play The Last Days of Mankind
explains, most characters are personified citations from
the New Free Press, from speeches given by politicians and
officers, and even from conversations in colloquial German
attributed to people on the streets. These citations reveal that
reality of World War I was ten times more improbable and atrocious
than any literary descriptions.
Among the targets of his
attacks was the journalist Schalek, who misused her position as
journalist in order to glorify violence and war rather than to
inform the public. In the subsequent passage from The Last Days
of Mankind, Kraus uncovers the dynamics of a war, which starts
with “good intentions” and “chivalry” and ends with the
unsentimental bombing of Venice.
Schalek:
... haben Sie schon einmal Venedig bombardiert? Wie, Sie tragen
Bedenken? Da werde ich Ihnen etwas sagen. Venedig als Problem ist
auch langen Grübelns wert. Voll von Sentimentalität sind wir in
diesen Kriege gegangen -
Der Freigattenleutnant:
Wer?
Schalek:
Wir. Mit Ritterlichkeit hatten wir ihn zu führen vorgehabt.
Langsam und nach schmerzhaftem Anschauungsunterricht haben wir uns
das abgewöhnt. Wer von uns hätte nicht vor Jahresfrist noch bei
dem Gedanken geschaudert, über Venedig könnten Bomben geworfen
werden! Jetzt? Konträr. Wenn aus Venedig auf unsere Soldaten
geschossen werden, ruhig, offen und ohne Empfindsamkeit...
Der Freigattenleutnant:
Wem sagen sie das? Seien Sie beruhigt, ich habe Venedig
bombardiert.
Schalek:
Brav.
Der Freigattenleutnant: In
Friedenszeiten pflegte ich alle Augenblicke nach Venedig zu
fahren, ich liebte es sehr. Aber als ich es von oben bombardierte
-- nein, kein Funken von falscher Sentimentalität verspürte ich
dabei in mir. Und dann fuhren wir alle vergnügt nach Hause. Das
wart ein Ehrentag -- unser Tag!
Schalek:
Das genügt mir. Jetzt erwartet mich Ihr Kamerad im Unterseeboot.
Hoffentlich hält der sich auch so wacker wie Sie!
(Schalek:
have you already bombed Venice? What, you have second thoughts
about it? I will tell you something. Venice as a problem is worth
pondering about. Full of sentimentality we did march into this
war...
Lieutenant:
Who?
Schalek:
We. We wanted to lead the war with chivalry. Slowly, after painful
visual lessons we had to rid ourselves of this. Even at the
end of last year, who would not have shivered at the mere thought
that bombs might drop of Venice! Today? On the contrary! If our
soldiers are under fire from Venice, shot at quietly, openly, and
without sensibility...
Sargent:
Whom are you telling this? Be assured, I bombed Venice.
Schalek:
Brave.
Lieutenant:
In times of peace I used to travel to Venice momentarily; I loved
it; But when I bombed it from above -- no, I did not sense false
sentimentality, not a single sparkle of it. And then we drove
back home cheering. It was our day of honour! -- our day!
Schalek:
That's it. Now a comrade of yours is waiting for me in a
submarine. Hopefully he is as brave as you are.)
By
letting language speak, Kraus hoped to uncover the speaker’s
actual motivation. He taught his readers how to become aware of
the “bewitchment by means of words (Wittgenstein) by carefully
listening to the words of the other. As Kraus pointed out,
euphemisms were an effective means of bewitching people’s mind.
Among them were: "cleaning up the trenches,"
"cleansing a country," and "surgical strikes." These
euphemisms stood for mass bombardment resulting in the killing of
thousands of soldiers.
George
Orwell:
In his well-known essay, “Politics and the
English Language,” Orwell mounted a fierce attack against those
who abused language. He examined dying metaphors, pretentious
diction, meaningless words, and euphemisms, showing how they
distort language, ultimately corrupting people’s mode of
thinking. Similar to his Viennese counterpart, George Orwell was
well aware of the negative impact of corrupt speech upon human
thoughts and a person’s moral integrity. He revealed how
language and thought mutually interact, influencing one another.
“But if thoughts corrupt language, language
can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and
imitation, even among people who should know better.”
The English critic exposed corrupt minds by
analysing their use of words. Time and again he showed how
linguistic “swindles and perversions” of crucial political
concepts came into play whenever there was a discrepancy between
the speaker’s real and declared aims.
According to Orwell, not only journalists and
politicians, but also intellectuals and scholars employed
euphemisms and trite images in order to misrepresent dangerous
political actions and their consequences.
“In our time, political speech and writing are
largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the
continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and
deportations, the dropping of atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be
defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most
people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of
political parties. Thus political language has to consist of
euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.” (Politics
and the English Language, 166).
As this passage suggests, the prime intention of
such a style is to anesthetize human imagination. The basic
assumption underlying Orwell’s argument is that people would not
support the decisions of politicians if they were aware of the
brutality involved. Hence the politician’s need to
obscure the actual consequences of their actions and use a
rhetoric marked by vagueness and lack of clarity. Orwell attempted
to reverse the process. He singled out citations from speeches and
writings of scholars, journalists, and politicians, translated
these citations into a concise English, and made the actual
meaning of euphemisms imaginatively available.
“Defenceless villages are bombarded from the
air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle
machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this
is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their
farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they
carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of
frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot
in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber
camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such
phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling
up mental pictures of them.” (Politics and the English
Language, 28).
By undoing the phraseology, Orwell named things in
such a way that they called up the mental picture, challenged the
readers’ basic assumption, and prompted them to rethink what
they read in daily newspapers. Orwell’s translation from one
English style of writing into another proved the gist of his
arguments, making readers aware of the fact that journalists and
politicians often misused the elusiveness of language in order to
propagate policies that led to mass murder and destruction.
In some passages of his essay, Orwell reversed
this technique of “translation,” expanding a short, direct
statement, which justified mass murder, into a seemingly
sophisticated utterance written in convoluted sentences. Through
such mimicry of a sophisticated style used by British
intellectuals as a means of rationalizing their infatuation with
Stalinism, Orwell illustrated their lack of humaneness as well as
their hypocrisy.
“Consider for instance some comfortable English
professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say
outright, “I believe in killing off your opponents when you can
get good results by doing so.” Probably, therefore, he will say
something like this:
While freely conceding that the Soviet regime
exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined
to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of
the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of
transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian
people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified
in the sphere of concrete achievement.
The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism.
A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow,
blurring the outlines and covering up all details. The great enemy
of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between
one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were
instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a
cuttlefish squirting out ink.”
The imaginary professor stands here for all those
who enjoy privileges of a comfortable life in a democracy, but
justify genocides and purges if they serve an alleged “higher
cause.” Such persons do not seem to be aware of the fact that
they are promoting an ideology, which would put an end to their
own endeavours and possibly life. In Stalin’s dictatorship,
nobody could have uttered disapproval of the ruling power without
being imprisoned and possibly killed.
In his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell
unmasked totalitarianism and its impact on people via the
distortion of language. Orwell developed a new idiom, called
NEWSPEAK, which illustrates the deliberate manipulation of words
in a dictatorship and prevents people from having thoughts that
had not been approved by the Party. Newspeak is the ultimate means
of insuring that people live in conformity with the system and remain slaves.
It exposes the deeper implications of Fascist and Stalinist modes
of manipulating language as a means of subjugating people, thus
stabilizing the power of the dictator.
As George Steiner put it, “Orwell’s fight for
meaningful speech is a fight for moral and political life.”
(George Steiner: True To Life, in George Orwell: The
Critical Heritage, ed. Jeffrey Meyers (London: Routledge,
1988), 369.
Other
Prophetic Voices:
Just
a few examples
Nobert Wiener: Kybernetik
„Wenn
wir eine Maschine programmieren, um einen Krieg zu gewinnen, müssen
wir gut nachdenken, was wir mit ‚gewinnen’ meinen.“ (If
we program a machine to win a war, we need to think what we mean
by „winning.“)
Albert Einstein: Für einen militanten Pazifismus
„Was
für eine Welt könnten wir bauen, wenn wir die Kräfte, die einen
Krieg entfesselt, für den Aufbau einsetzten. Ein Zehntel der
Energien, die die kriegführenden Nationen im Weltkrieg
verbrauchen, ein Bruchteil des Geldes, das sie mit Handgranaten
und Giftgasen verpulvert haben, wäre hinreichend, um den Menschen
aller Länder zu einem menschenwürdigen Leben zu verhelfen sowie
die Katastrophe der Arbeitslosigkeit in der Welt zu verhindern.
Wir müssen uns stellen, für die Sache des Friedens die gleichen
Opfer zu bringen, die wir widerstandslos für die Sache des
Krieges gebracht haben. Es gibt nichts, das mir wichtiger ist und
mir sehr am Herzen liegt.“ (What
a world we could build if we would use the forces that triggered
war for reconstruction. A tenth of the energies used by nations at
war, a fraction of the money spent on hand grenades and poisonous
gas are enough to help people in all countries lead a life in
dignity and to fight the disaster of unemployment in the world. We
need to make the same sacrifices for peace as we did for war.
There is nothing more important to me and closer to my heart.)
Aischylos/Aishylos:
Tragödien/Tragedies
“Im
Krieg ist die Wahrheit das erste Opfer.“/"Truth is a war’s
first victim."
Marcus
Tullius Cicero: Von den Pflichten
(About Duties)
„Krieg
darf nur unter der Bedingung unternommen werden, daß man dabei
offenbar nichts anderes als die Sicherung des Friedens im Auge
hat.“ (War should be led only on the condition that one
has nothing else but the safeguarding of peace in mind).
Elias
Canetti: Provinz des Menschen
„Der
Krieg spielt sich immer so ab, als wäre die Menschheit auf den
Begriff der Gerechtigkeit noch überhaupt nie gekommen.“ (War
has always taken place in a way, which makes believe that human
kind never came across the notion of justice).
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