The War and the high-risk narcotic of national unity

Iconic photo from the First World War of a wounded soldier deprived of the use of part of his face. His fatherland was no doubt proud of him. Maybe strangers greeted him on the street saying, "Thank you for your service".

At the Web site for The War as of 09/29/07, producers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick write of their series:

Over the course of seven episodes, we spend a great deal of time in battle - on the ground, in the air and at sea, in Europe and the Pacific - examining in countless ways and from many perspectives what one of our witnesses, Paul Fussell, described as "the real war."

"The rest of it," he told us, "is just the show-biz war. The real war involves getting down there and killing people. And being killed yourself or just barely escaping it. And it gives you attitudes about life and death that are unobtainable anywhere else."

Throughout the series, one theme has stayed constant, one idea has continually emerged as we have gotten to know the brave men and women whose stories it has been our privilege to tell: in extraordinary times, there are no ordinary lives. (my emphasis)

That quote gives a good glimpse of what makes the series itself confusing and also at why war maintains a continuing attraction for our us fallible humans.

What does this business about the "real" war versus the "show-biz" war mean? Are they saying to us that all those chats and segments about life on the "home front" are worthless fluff? Seriously, that short excerpt from Paul Fussell doesn't make much sense to me on its own. Is he saying that only military events, literally only battles, are "real" war? If he is, I find that hard to interpret any other way than as his own personal preference for military history. The armaments production isn't part of the "real" war? Domestic politics aren't part of the "real" war?

The sentiment that "in extraordinary times, there are no ordinary lives" is a good statement of the gushy core of the mythology of the Second World War in its most kitschy incarnation.

There's no doubt that war produces a feeling of excitement and solidarity, at least for some moment of time. I often quote the late historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s, comment that all wars are popular for the first 30 days.

But permanent war mobilization is also poison for democratic government. Every war of any size seems to inevitably bring government abuses of the public's freedom, even with the best-intentioned governments. (Just to be clear, a government run by Dick Cheney cannot be counted as a "well-intentioned" one.)

That feeling of national solidarity and patriotism feels good, no question about it. But war also has its price, above all in what was commonly called "the butcher's bill" in the First World War, i.e., the costs in dead and wounded. The promised miracles of air powers for nearly a century now have provided a useful basis for "boys with toys" fantasies about making war antiseptic - for Our Side that is - by killing lots of the Bad People while not killing many of Us. And I'm confident that if Cheney and Bush give the final word for attacking Iran, we'll hear about some new technological twist combined with new experience that will make this war a cakewalk, like the Iraq War was supposed to be.

But that pleasant, exciting feel of solidarity always comes with a price. As I mentioned in an earlier post, national unity isn't all it's cracked up to be. Contrary to the interviewee on The War who said that there was a feeling of unity he didn't think we would ever have again, it's very likely that the national feeling of unity after the 9/11 attacks exceeded even that following Pearl Harbor.

But what good has that feeling done us? Al Qa'ida is still out there plotting and killing. We jumped into a war in Afghanistan that possibly could have been some kind of success and in any case was unavoidable in the circumstances, but which has long since become one more useless little colonial war. We got the Iraq War, the most cynical foreign war that the country ever undertook that I can recall. (Some of the smaller wars, like the Indian Wars and various-and-sundry interventions in Latin America could be contenders.) We got torture as an official policy. We got Dick Cheney's theory of the all-powerful Unilateral Executive put into practice to a disgraceful extent. We got the final transformation of the Republican Party into an authoritarian political movement. We got the USA PATRIOT Act and unlimited NSA surveillance. And as sure as Richard Nixon was a crook, some substantial portion of that surveillance went to domestic partisan political espionage, as we'll someday find out. (The latter is speculation on my part, but speculation with a high confidence level.)

The next time we have a major terrorist attack in the United States, we should all pray for less national unity of that kind.

What Kenneth Galbraith wrote in The Culture of Contentment (1992) is still very true, and sadly will likely be true long after the Iraq War is no longer a living memory for anyone:

Almost any military venture receives strong popular approval in the short run; the citizenry rallies to the flag and to the forces engaged in combat. The strategy and technology of the new war evoke admiration and applause. This reaction is related not to economics or politics but more deeply to anthropology. As in ancient times, when the drums sound in the distant forest, there is an assured tribal response. It is the rallying beat of the drums, not the virtue of the cause, that is the vital mobilizing force.

But this does not last. It did not as regards the minor adventures in Grenada and Panama, nor as regards the war with Iraq and Saddam Hussein. The effect of more widespread wars has been almost uniformly adverse.

World War I, although it evoked the most powerful of patriotic responses at the time, has passed into history largely as a mindless and pointless slaughter. The party victoriously in power at the time, the Democrats, was rewarded in 1920 with a stern defeat at the polls. World War II, made inescapable by Japanese and German initiation or declaration of war, has survived with better reputation. However, the Korean and Vietnam wars, both greatly celebrated in their early months, ended with eventual rejection of the wars themselves and of the administrations responsible. In the longer run, it cannot be doubted, serious war deeply disturbs the political economy of contentment. (my emphasis)

And now that it's being used as the all-purpose justification for every war any US President deems desirable, we might wish that the Second World War had maintained a less favorable reputation. But not if Ken Burns and the "Greatest Generation" industry have their way!

At the risk of stepping on one of my favorite quotations about war, I would add to Galbraith's comment that American public opinion did stay remarkably strong in support of the goals of the Second World War. Maybe someone will do a real TV documentary someday that spares us the sentimental violin music and actually tries to analyze why that was so. Two thoughts on that: the cause was necessary and justified in a way that was obvious to most people; Franklin Roosevelt had a better fell for the politics of war than did his successors (predecessors, too, for that matter, with the exception of Abraham Lincoln).

Is Galbraith's view of war too cold and unromantic? Good. Any tiny thing I can do to help de-romanticize war, I'm glad to be able to do.

In his 1921 book Massenpsychologie und Ich-analyse (Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego), Sigmund Freud describes with approval several aspects of the work of the French sociologist Gustave Le Bon, particularly his book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895), on the psychological mechanisms at work in unified groups:

In order to make a correct judgement upon the morals of groups, one must take into consideration the fact that when individuals come together in a group all their individual inhibitions fall away and all the cruel, brutal and destructive instincts, which lie dormant in individuals as relics of a primitive epoch, are stirred up to find free gratification. But under the influence of suggestion groups are also capable of high achievements in the shape of abnegation, unselfishness, and devotion to an ideal. While with isolated individuals personal interest is almost the only motive force, with groups it is very rarely prominent. It is possible to speak of an individual having his moral standards raised by a group .... Whereas the intellectual capacity of a group is always far below that of an individual, its ethical conduct may rise as high above his as it may sink deep below it.

... In groups the most contradictory ideas can exist side by side and tolerate each other, without any conflict arising from the logical contradiction between them. But this is also the case in the unconscious mental life of individuals, of children and of neurotics, as psycho-analysis has long pointed out. ...

And, finally, groups have never thirsted after truth. They demand illusions, and cannot do without them. They constantly give what is unreal precedence over what is real; they are almost as strongly influenced by what is untrue as by what is true. They have an evident tendency not to distinguish between the two ... (my emphasis; Standard English edition translation)

That is a good statement of the dynamic by which wars can produce both great achievements of self-sacrifice and personal accomplishment, as well as the greatest and most sickening cruelties. That dynamic operates no matter how worthy the cause in some kind of objective, ethical, moral, religious, political sense. If the best causes need conscious restraint, which is where the rules and laws of warfare have come from over the centuries.

When those boundaries are thrown overboard, as the current administration has with the torture policy and the invasion of Iraq when no imminent threat had occurred, and then reinforced that freedom from constraints by producing only half-baked prosecutions of the most serious legal offenses committed by Americans, for many individuals this no doubt took the lid off "all the cruel, brutal and destructive instincts, which lie dormant in individuals as relics of a primitive epoch, [and which] are stirred up to find free gratification" in group psychology.

And, no, trolls that's not "criticizing the troops", though some certainly deserve to be criticized. It's a recognition that those troops are human beings subject to human dynamics, not the toy-soldier heroes so many Republicans like to pretend that they are.

So in that sense, what Burns and Novick write is certainly true in wartime and other cases where powerful group dynamics come into play, that "in extraordinary times, there are no ordinary lives". But unless we fully recognize the dark side of that kind extraordinariness, we make the positive side into a pretty lie.

Chris Hedges gives a vivid description of his own experience of war fever in the context of his work as a war correspondent in places like El Salvador and Bosnia in his book War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002):

When we ingest the anodyne of war we feel what those we strive to destroy feel, including the Islamic fundamentalists who are painted as alien, barbaric, and uncivilized. It is the same narcotic. I partook of it for many years. And like every recovering addict there is a part of me that remains nostalgic for war's simplicity and high, even as I cope with the scars it has left behind, mourn the deaths of those I worked with, and struggle with the bestiality I would have been better off not witnessing. There is a part of me - maybe it is a part of many of us - that decided at certain moments that I would rather die like this than go back to the routine of life. The chance to exist for an intense and overpowering moment, even if it meant certain oblivion, seemed worth it in the midst of war - and very stupid once the war ended.

A Hallmark-card-style slogan like "in extraordinary times, there are no ordinary lives", standing alone, is about like saying that war gives its participants special opportunities for travel.

Tags: chris hedges, freud, john kenneth galbraith, ken burns, the war documentary