The fetish for violence and war

A few days ago, I wrote about egoism and violence. Americans have quite a lust for violence and war. But in a weird way. We get upset about being shown IMAGES of violence, but not about ACTUAL violence. Many people oppose gratuitous violence in video games and movies. If the news shows dead bodies of soldiers (or even flag draped coffins), people freak out.

Yet for years, the Iraq aggression remained popular with the American public. As long as people were shown smiling faces of young GIs thinking they were going off to save the world from tyranny, all was well and good in the homeland. Once they started coming home in body bags in large numbers, discomfort rose. Despite the fact that this was inevitable once the war was launched. It makes you wonder why people don't think of these things BEFORE deciding to back military action. If your son or your neighbor's brother coming at home in a casket is going to make you oppose a war that you'd previously backed, then you shouldn't support it in the first place. It's not worth it if it's only someone else's relative who should give their life.

Perhaps, one of the reasons I don't share the American fetish for war is because I've seen the effects of war with my own eyes. When I was in Guinea, I went to a camp filled with tens of thousands of refugees from Sierra Leone and Liberia.

The people most affected by war are not those with M16s or Kalashnikovs. The people most affected by war are not those protected by tank armor or flack jackets. The people most affected by war are women, children and the elderly. The people most affected by war are those who did not choose to be a part of it. The real heroes are those trying with true courage to survive the senseless violence, not those perpetrating it. The most tragic victims of war are those with babies on their backs, not a rifle in their hands. This may not be politically correct, but this is truth.

If you have delusions about the glory of war or Orwellian ideas about guns spreading freedom, bombs spreading democracy and torture spreading human rights, then visit a refugee camp. Such a quick interaction with reality will quickly disabuse you of such profane notions.

I do not oppose every war on principle, but I do believe that it should always be the last option. The reason for this is the law of unintended consequences. War inevitably introduces an element of chaos to the situation. For example, when the US launched its aggression against Iraq, people were tricked into believing that the mere removal of the butcher Saddam Hussein would transform Iraq into paradise; if not immediately, then at least within a year or two after we'd installed a government of our choosing. But the removal of the authoritarian that was holding the country together, if by fear, released anarchy on to the Iraqi scene.

The braintrust behind the Iraq aggression either failed to take this potential for anarchy into account or grotestquely underestimated its probablity. A casual look at the histories of Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia (or for that matter current Nigeria) would've enlightened them as to the likelihood of religious or ethnic tensions erupting after the demise of an autocratic regime.

One of the main reasons that the 'remove a despotic regime and everything will be peachy' delusion usually fails is that it doesn't take into account the method required for removing the despot in the first place. Whenever war is the path chosen, it inevitably leaves major scars on society. The trauma of war lasts long, LONG after the guns go silent.

I was reminded of this last week after watching a PBS documentary on gang culture in El Salvador. The small Central American country was ruined by violence in the '80s as Soviet-backed guerillas and US-backed death squads destroyed the country in order to 'save' it from the other side. A large part of the Salvadoran population grew up learning about the logic of force, believing that if you can't get what you want when you want it, then violence is the answer. Now it's considered thuggery, but back then it was fetishized an honorable way to struggle for 'freedom' or 'liberation.' The gangs don't buy the hypocrisy and El Salvador is left still traumatized by the violence and its after-effects 14 years after the peace accords.

Sierra Leone is another country in similar straits. A rebellion was launched there in 1991, ostensibly to oust a corrupt military regime. But as so often happens, the 'cure' was far worse than the disease. The rebels became infamous for hacking off the hands and arms of anyone they felt like torturing. They did so by abducting children, drugging them and ordering them to commit these atrocities. Key to the rebels' 'recruitment' efforts was to sever any ties between their young conscripts and their previous lives. So children, some as young as 10, were ordered to commit atrocities such as rape, amputation or murder against their own relatives and elders of their village. This was a way of turning upside down the established social order and basically forcing the children to stay with the rebels by literally eliminating all other viable options.

Even though the war ended four years ago, the planned rebel strategy of ripping apart the social fabric continues to have devastating consequences in the country and will for a generation. Rebuilding is slow. A huge portion of people in the country suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and other related conditions. Former child soldiers have been rejected by their families and villages because of the atrocities they were forced to commit. There are organizations out there, like War Child, trying to help the kids reintegrate into society but it's very difficult. These honorable NGOs can't impose a collective amnesia on townspeople and villagers.

The psychological trauma doesn't even factor in the massive damage to infrastructure. The absence of destroyed schools, roads and hospitals also has a huge impact on people's lives. And will hurt the chances of at least the next generation too.

And to further the totality of war theme, the war in Sierra Leone erupted as a direct result of spill over from the civil war in neighboring Liberia. Liberia's in almost the exact same situation as Sierra Leone that I outlined above. The wars in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea-Bissau had a huge destabilizing impact on neighboring Guinea, as does the current war in Ivory Coast. The instability, economic destruction and refugee influx from those four conflicts has Guinea itself teetering on the brink.

When people debate a war's merit, they often bat about numbers like enemy body counts, civilian dead or schools built. Or they use deceitful emotional blackmail like, "Do you want an evil dictator to remain in place?" as though that's the only pertinent question, as though war is a surgical procedure where a man can be removed with virtually no entry or exit wound. But the impact of war can not be judged solely by superficial numbers or the presence/absence of a single individual. The impact of war on a country and its people is comprehensive, thorough, utterly complete.

War is real violence against real people. As much as Salvadorans and Sierra Leonians would like to hit the reset button to a time before a bunch of egomaniacs decided that violence would solve all their problems, that isn't possible. That's not the way it works in the real world.