"War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has now become cruel and squalid."
Winston Churchill wrote those words in 1930, in the aftermath of the First World War, which, from a purely technological standpoint, rivals any war in history for both cruelty and squalidness.
(The rest of Churchill's famous passage goes: "Instead of a small number of well-trained professionals championing their country's cause with ancient weapons and a beautiful intricacy of archaic maneuver, sustained at every moment by the applause of their nation, we now have entire populations, including even women and children, pitted against one another in brutish mutual extermination, and only a set of bleary-eyed clerks left to add up the butcher's bill.")
The advent of the submarine, the tank, the machine gun and the airplane -- especially the airplane -- made the concept of total war inevitable. Churchill the romantic loathed these weapons, but Churchill the pragmatist eagerly embraced them.
If he was a paradox, it was because he straddled a period of military history changed more profoundly by advancing technology than any other. It's worth remembering that Churchill came of age when the cavalry charge was still a valid tactic for breaching the enemy's defenses and he didn't leave the world stage until Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been vaporized and atomic weaponry was a well-established fact.
You might be tempted to wonder what ennobles the lance or the mace or the broadsword, but I take Churchill's point. The science of killing is a ghastly business, but if you're going to do it there's something to be said for having to face your enemy on the battlefield and watch him die by your hand.
The ability to kill a man without touching him, or even seeing him, reduces the act to an abstract concept. That, in turn, inures us to the actual suffering we cause through waging high-tech warfare, allowing us to use, without irony, phrases like "collateral damage" and "normal wastage" in reference to combatants and noncombatants alike.
No, war is not boxing and the civilities of the Marquess of Queensbury rules don't apply. The object is survival, and, tangentially, victory. But if killing a man with a weapon wielded by hand is immoral, then killing him in a detached fashion, from 40,000 feet up or 200 miles away, is utterly amoral.
And the man who cannot distinguish between right and wrong, or doesn't have to, is the most dangerous animal in the human jungle. This is the jungle we inhabit today. This is where military technology and the inherent weaknesses of human beings have brought us.
It would be naïve, even stupid, to think that we can go back to the idealized Churchillian battlefield. We can't. The toothpaste is out of the tube, we've crossed the Rubicon, there's no crying over spilt milk -- pick your cliché. The fact is there's only one way to go and that's forward.
And in going forward there is only one solution. War itself must be made obsolete and that means eliminating the reasons men wage war: nationalism, religion, greed. But it will never happen, not in my lifetime or in yours, because that means 1.) abandoning the concept of the nation-state 2.) abolishing all religion 3.) replacing stock-market, corporate capitalism with universal socialism. It requires nothing less than a reinvention of the human condition. Imagine.
Hell will freeze first and, given the reality of global warming, that's not likely to happen, either.
So we're doomed. We will continue inventing exquisite new ways of killing each other, and justifying the need to do so, until we succeed in destroying everything.
Which, in the name of somebody's god or somebody's country or somebody's way of life, we will.
You have a nice day, now.
Article writtwn in Wired by The Luddite
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