by Benjamin Harrison
“Our age will be that of wars far more ambitious, far more barbarous than in the past.” – Comte de Mirabeau
“What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence,” wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein. The most effective weapons against silence have been simplicity and common sense. But never have the handlers of the world been so blinded by the realities of power. The Western civilization, as a result of this blindness, is unable to differentiate between illusion and reality and, some might assert, Western culture has become less a reflection of its own society and more so a reflection of the residue from the fog of war.
One of the greatest misconceptions of the twentieth century is that we have been at peace. Certainly the West has been basking in the glow of nuclear peace, the only other viable option being mutually assured destruction. However, if one lifts the veil of nuclear peace in developed nations, then a view of a new conventional world war rears its cataclysmic head. The result is a distorted view of what constitutes war.
In the nineteenth century, war was something that involved ‘civilized’ people on both sides. If only one side were ‘civilized’, then it wasn’t ‘war’, but rather an adventure. In other words, an incident between Austria and Prussia involving a thousand dead soldiers was called a war. However, the fighting between the British and the Mahdi in the Sudan, which resulted in losses of multiple thousands, was merely an expedition. This mindset allowed us the beauty of thinking that the last half of the nineteenth century was peaceful.
This same mindset still enables us to ignore the violence that now surrounds the West. The developed nations (eighteen to be exact) are indeed at peace with one another and have been for the last fifty or so years. Meanwhile, as a direct result of the military violence that has been accelerating outside the West over the last forty years, the undeveloped nations are nowhere neat ‘at peace’. They are more or less lingering in a general instability that will indeed affect all of us.
The thought that extremely high levels of violence in the world are a natural part of Western ‘peace’ would be absurd, if it were not true. This violence is rationalized by excusing it as part of the way the world works. If this is the way the world works, does the world need an average of one thousand soldiers killed daily in more than three-dozen conflicts to keep ‘working’? This is a relatively conservative figure considering the difficulty in obtaining accurate statistics with ongoing conflicts. What are the casualties in the Cambodian countryside? In Burma or Surinam? A thousand soldiers a day is roughly equal to the number of French soldiers killed daily during World War I, a conflict that lasted only five years. In addition, five thousand citizens die everyday, both indirectly and directly from war. If you total the figures up over the last decade, the death toll reaches over three million soldiers and twenty million civilians. Keep in mind, however, that these figures do not include acts of genocide, such as in Cambodia.
In other words, while we have been able to relatively maintain the illusion of peace, most of the rest of the world is at war and has been for sometime. We are most definitely the exception, not the rule. However, the dead in question are far from our civilization—forty murders per month in Washington D.C. from gang wars pales in comparison to the thousands that are killed daily elsewhere.
Periodically though, we manage to shift our focus on one of those conflicts for a short time. This usually involves some correlation between the event and the West—hostages or perhaps the involvement of a Western humanitarian group. Photojournalists manage to keep our attention on these matters for at least the blink of an eye before we switch the channel or flip the page to something of greater interest. And when a conflict pulls at our heartstrings, we view it as though it was an entity unto itself. Consideration is never given to the outlying nations that are involved. For example, when the war-related starvation of millions of Ethiopians was brought to national attention, we failed to recognize the surrounding people caught in the conflict—the Sudanese, Somalis, etc. The ability to focus our attention on one fashionable war at a time allows us to continue thinking that when the conflict ends, the world drifts back into its peaceful slumber.
Our myopia provides us with an artificial peace of mind. In our collective imagination we cannot see these forces struggling close around us, but they are there. Only the occasional terrorist attack on our own citizens seems brutal enough to force us to look around. Were it not for the media, we would be denied the thousands of terrorist attacks that happen annually around the globe. For example, when a bomb went off in Paris in 1986, in an area dense with theaters, restaurants, and shopping centers, the sound of the blast could not be heard more than two blocks away. So, thousands of people went on happily eating, socializing and shopping, completely unaware that a few blocks away 150 people had just died; perfectly unaware that anything had happened at all until they got home in time for the evening news. This begs the question of why those people had to die. Based on their comrades general ambivalence, these people were not killed to set an example, since no one even bothered to notice it happened. Rather, these people were killed to provide film footage and newspaper copy which generalizes the incident in such a way that it will merit political impact—to remind us of the unacceptable level of violence in our modern world, even though we are at ‘peace’.
You see, if we have the illusion of peace, then we can go on with daily life and the Western world can go on selling arms—the biggest business in the world and a huge percentage of the GNP—to undeveloped nations that will in turn celebrate their democracy through slaughtering each other, because, for some odd reason, those nations have enough money to buy our military surplus, even though that can’t afford paper to print books on that will enable their citizenry to lead a more fulfilled existence through knowledge, if their citizenry is lucky enough to stay alive. What does all of this mean? It means we will have to pay $2.21 a gallon for gasoline to compensate for the artificially inflated price of oil that these countries sell us to buy our old F-14’s to murder each other with.