=Book recently read: War and The Iliad=

"At the outset, at the embarkation, hearts are light as hearts always are if you have a large force on your side and nothing but space to oppose you. Their weapons are in their hands; the enemy is absent. Unless your spirit has been conquered in advance by the reputation of your enemy, you always feel yourself to be much stronger than anybody who is not there. An absent man doest not impose the yoke of necessity." —Simone Weil


Who doesn't hear in Weil's words an echo of the mood in the United States after 9/11, the "we're going to kick the asses of those camel-fucking towel heads" mentality that  prevailed in one jingoistic form or other from neighborhood bars to the halls of Congress. As always, the reality has proved to be far more complicated, far less feel-good than unthinking patriotic sloganizing and motivational propagandizing led many to believe. And now for all too many, it's too late to turn back, too late to admit a mistake, because for all-too-many people, even in the most inconsequential of things, it's better to be dead than dead wrong.

What's wrong with war? That's the question Simone Weil tries to answer in her famous essay, The Iliad, or the Poem of Force published in the book War and the Iliad, along with an almost equally famous essay on the Iliad by Rachel Bespaloff, to which is appended an essay on Rachel Bespaloff by Hermann Broch. All three essays are introduced by Christopher Benfey and the whole book is only 121 pages in length.

So what's wrong with war, aside from everything about it? First and foremost, according to Weil, is that it turns people into objects. Not only the victims, but the victors as well. Both lose their humanity. Both lose their sense of being anything but either engines of violence or the matter upon which those engines exercise their force.

"A moderate use of force, which would alone enable man to escape from being enmeshed in its machinery, would require superhuman virtue, which is as rare as dignity in weakness," writes Weil.

And so it shouldn't come as a surprise when "war-crimes" come to light or that those in the business of conducting war, just like those in the business of operating the slaughterhouses, do their best to keep the public in the dark, to hide the grim realities lest the public lose it's appetite for it. It's vitally important to keep the real business of war shrouded in the secrecy of so-called "national security interests," veiled in patriotic platitudes, and bolstered by high-minded abstractions (like freedom and democracy).  When the ugly truth comes to light, as it does from time to time, they feign astonishment and outrage, as if such things were an aberration, as if war were normally a cultivated and cultured endeavor.  That any deviation must be an act committed by a misguided, improperly supervised few. What those in the business really know is that all war is a crime, that war and criminality cannot exist without each other.

Weil continues: "Moreover moderation itself is not without its perils, since prestige, from which force derives at least three-quarters of its strength, rests principally upon that marvelous indifference that the strong feel toward the weak, an indifference so contagious that it infects the very people who are the objects of it."

So it is that people of even relatively good conscience will dismiss the "unfortunate excesses" and "mistakes" and even outright "crimes" of war as incidental to a larger nobler purpose. After all, we're bringing freedom to "those peoples" lives. Why aren't they grateful? A home reduced to rubble, a baby killed, a niece raped in the wrong place at the wrong time by occupying soldiers, okay, mistakes are made, but now they have the right to vote. Why aren't they thanking us? Why do they resent us?

***(…free to do what we want to you.)

                    —Uncle Flamm

Perhaps the most terrible aspect of war is that once it has started, once one has become engaged in the fight, it becomes increasingly impossible to see how there can be any alternative to war.  "Those who use it and those who endure it are turned to stone," Weil writes, "[they] have dropped either to the level of inert matter, which is pure passivity, or to the level of blind force, which is pure momentum. The art of war is simply the art of producing such transformations, and its equipment, its processes, even the casualties it inflicts on the enemy, are only means directed towards this end."

The scariest thing of all, Weils says, is that "war effaces all conceptions of purpose or goal, including even its own 'war aims.' It effaces the very notion of war's being brought to an end. To be outside a situation so violent as this is to find it inconceivable, to be inside it is to be unable to conceive its end. Consequently, nobody does anything to bring this end about…Always in human life, whether war or slavery is in question, intolerable sufferings continue, as it were, by the force of their own specific gravity."

And so war goes on.  Even when, for the individual soldier, the war is "over." Once experienced, the solder can never, at least metaphorically, lay down his weapon. Death—a.k.a. the enemy—is never entirely vanquished. Death, in fact, is everywhere, all the time. The ex-soldier has experienced this truth first hand. How can he or she ever live a "normal" life again, where normality depends so much on the day to day denial of death?

And that is true more than ever today in the so-called "Age of Terror."

How can there be peace, Weil writes when "the soul enslaved to war cries out for deliverance, but deliverance itself appears to it in an extreme and tragic aspect, the aspect of destruction." After so many lives are lost in war, so many comrades, sons and daughters killed, any other solution but the total destruction of the enemy "more moderate, more reasonable in character, would expose the mind to suffering so naked, so violent that it could not be borne, even as memory. Terror, grief exhaustion, slaughter, the annihilation of comrades—is it credible that these things should not continually tear at the soul, if the intoxication of force had not intervened to drown them? The idea that an unlimited effort should bring in only a limited profit or no profit at all is terrible painful."

Because after you've demolished their cities, killed, maimed, orphaned, and widowed tens upon tens of thousands of men women and children, how do you say "oops, my bad." How do you say it was all a mistake? You can't. All you can do at that point is intensify your efforts, dial up the fear and propaganda until you believe it yourself, drop more bombs, vow a renewed commitment to victory at whatever the cost. After all, we can't have it that all those who've already died have died in vain. 

How do you tell a returning veteran that their sacrifice was pointless, that their cause wasn't just, that they were manipulated into the fight by vague principles and empty abstractions? Most people can't.  And those who wage war know it. They put the burden on ordinary caring people for whom such burdens are too heavy. Tough love is the toughest thing of all. Those who wage war know that most people haven't the stomach for it; that most of us aren't half so pitiless as they are.  "Support the troops," we're told, "even if you don't support the war." But by supporting the troops you are tacitly supporting the continuation of the war, you are enabling a situation that perpetuates the war. You are honoring an empty sacrifice that upholds the illusion that it was a sacrifice worth making. So more men and women join the fight under the banner of "freedom and democracy." No one tells the truth because the truth hurts too much to tell—and it would be shattering to those who already gave so much and who have nothing to show for it but the belief that it was a sacrifice worth making. 

And so the war continues. 

Towards the end of her life, Simone Weil, a committed pacifist, belatedly regretted not having joined the fight against Hitler, favoring, instead, appeasement. But Hitler was a special case and Weil's regrets were an asterisk in her lifelong belief in pacifism.  
Today, however, you wouldn't think that Hitler was such a special case when you think of how often his name is invoked every time an enemy deemed worth dying to fight is identified. Saddam Hussein was Hitler. Osama Bin Laden was Hitler. Assad is still Hitler, though on the back-burner for the moment. As was Putin when he invaded the Ukraine; he was Hitler all over again. Terrorism, in general, is Hitler, or even worse than Hitler! Hitler is the one enemy we can all agree, even us pacifists, must be fought. So every time they want to mobilize us in favor of war, every time they want a total commitment, which is all the time, they point to the target and scream "There he is…HITLER!"

So what are we to do? For surely there are times, though far rarer than our leaders would have us believe, when it is right to fight. Rachel Bespaloff in her essay takes up a middle position between the extremes of either/or, warrior vs. pacifist. She raises for us the figure of the "Resistance Fighter." That is the person whose conscience causes them to stand up against an oppressor. She uses for her prototype the typical fighter in the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation. It's a good model, a good middle way, a good barometer of when taking up arms is a moral imperative.

But it presupposes certain criteria and the most important of all is that the "Resistance Fighter" is engaged in the repelling of a real oppressor, an invader, an occupying force as the Nazis were in France of the 1940s. That he or she is resisting force, not applying it, not embodying it. And that we are resisting a present, palpable force, not one that might exist, that did exist, that exists in potential somewhere over there on the horizon. You don't resist force preemptively. You don't resist force by being force. 

It may be uncomfortable for us to recall that to the Nazis, the French Resistance was an outlaw terrorist organization. You cannot by definition be "resisting" an implacable invader when you are the invader, when you are standing on someone else's land, occupying it. You cannot reasonably be said to be "resisting" an enemy when you are the aggressor, picking one date and one event in a long history of abuses as the moment when "it" all began and use that as a rationale for attack; you cannot reasonably said to be practicing resistance when your enemy is so vague you've attacked several countries looking for him, trying to define him as you go, and finding him, basically, everywhere.  For Weil and Bespaloff, taking up arms and committing the inhuman outrage of war is morally justified only by the most dire of necessity, in self-defense against the most imminent of dangers, and to be discontinued as soon as possible. 

Seldom are wars fought for these reasons; and, once begun, they are just as seldom ended when the immediate danger has passed.

The War on Terror, 2001 to the present date and counting, is living historical proof of that.