The Siren Song of Violence
"The siren song of violence is at high volume at the moment, loudest of all in places far from harm’s way, where the human toll of the violence is very abstract and distant . . . "
As we speak, two major land wars are raging in the world, involving two of the most powerful militaries on the planet, with vast assistance from even more powerful players abroad. The level of violence and human suffering is on a scale above and beyond even the already bloodsoaked baseline of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—what we typically call the postwar period. The name is proving a tragic misnomer.
The repercussions of each of these two wars, let alone the two taken together, promise to be so tectonic that they will reshape geopolitics for decades to come. Zhou Enlai-like, it is far too early even to begin to contemplate their long term consequences. But this much we can say with confidence: They have lowered the public’s threshold for the use of force as a tool of statecraft, and prompted a disturbing uptick in self-righteous, even fanatical cheerleading for killing people in pursuit of political ends.
For American observers, the war in Ukraine reignited a World War II-style righteous passion for the use military force that had largely lain dormant since the fall of Berlin. Certainly in the ensuing seventy-nine years there had been idealistic fervor aplenty for using violence to advance the cause of democracy—to a fault, some would say, and often as cover for less noble goals. But brazen Russian aggression against Kyiv had even old hippies waxing poetic about the bravery of the Ukrainian army, adorning their windows and blue-and-yellow flags, and ending their Facebook posts with Slava Ukraini!
They were not wrong. Who could begrudge the Ukrainian people the right to self-defense against a ravenous, bullying neighbor, led by a monstrous despot?
But even among Ukraine’s American supporters, that sense of gung ho has noticeably dimmed as the war has grinded on, and the romance of blackening Putin’s eye (remember the sinking of the Moskva?) has given way to the monochromatic tedium of warfare of a nearly Great War variety. Even the proliferation of combat porn on Reddit has grown repetitive. That our solidarity with the Ukrainian people proved so flimsy did not reflect well on the self-flattering fervor of its early days.
The rise of other high-profile conflicts have also intervened—one in particular—eclipsing the sense of Ukraine as a once-in-a-lifetime global conflagration.
For sheer complexity and unyielding, often blind fervor by the two sides, the war in Gaza is surely the most Gordian political crisis of any of our lifetimes. (The Cuban missile crisis still retains the crown for most dangerous, but it lasted only thirteen days.) In the US, it has scrambled old allegiances, created odd new political bedfellows, and even thrown a highly unpredictable new element into the presidential campaign. Among its most disturbing aspects, many supporters both of Israel and of the Palestinian cause show a remarkable lack of empathy for the suffering of anyone but their own . . . and that is true not only of the extremists, but of people who heretofore have been widely considered moderates.
Imagine a group of people filled with righteous anger over the injustices they have suffered. Their legitimate pain and frustration and fury is so great that they have come to believe that anything they do in retaliation is justified, to include the most terrible acts of barbarity against innocent non-combatants, little children among them. These people are quick to cite sophisticated intellectual doctrines and theories to support such action, some of which have the imprimatur of the most highbrow, moral thinkers. But the blood that is shed is just as red.
Imagine now that both parties feel this way. Imagine the rest of the world looking on and taking sides, often without a thorough and nuanced understanding of this ancient and byzantine situation.
Historically, young people—college students especially—have been passionate about protesting human rights abuses. For their trouble, they are frequently scorned by older generations as disproportionately idealistic, uninformed, and immature. Some of that criticism is on the mark, some not. But notwithstanding those qualifiers, just as frequently, those young people prove to have been remarkably correct. At the same time, righteous anger has frequently tipped into apologia for atrocities committed by one’s own side (adopted or otherwise). We have heard the repetition of slogans that the chanters don’t begin to understand, and the name Nat Turner evoked, and comparisons to the Vietnam-era student left, along with debates over whether such activism helps or hurts the cause, and the presidential candidates it might inadvertently elect or defeat. For idealistic and aggrieved young people especially, a Fanonist belief that revolutionary violence is justified, even required is romantic, and intoxicating . . . and wildly dangerous.
But maybe even Fanon is too tame. Perhaps we are in Robespierre territory.
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