War and Peace

Driving past the DMZ on the Ja-yuro - the Freedom Highway. Along a stretch of about 3 miles, one can actually look across the estuary toward North Korea itself.

In a previous post (September 28, 2020) I discussed the Roman General Flavius Vegetius Renatus dictum, ‘Si vis pacem, parabellum” -  “If you want peace, prepare for war. “ My home, a few miles from the DMZ,  provides exemplary evidence that this is sound but sad advice. War between the two Koreas has so far been avoided, and peace has reigned precariously here for almost seventy years largely thanks to military deterrence.

Now, suddenly, thanks to the war in Ukraine, the awful truth of the General’s dictum has been brutally rammed home once again. 

“War is the father of all things” (Heraclitus). “Only the dead have seen the end of war” (Plato).  For the people of the ancient world - actually, for pretty much the whole of human history - war was a fact of life, even a glorious fact of life, insofar as the ideal of the warrior is so important for patriarchal societies. But for us, it is not. By ‘us’, I mean the amazingly privileged people living in those societies an parts of the world that have not experienced warfare for decades. As a boy growing up in England, I spent a huge amount of time and energy on what, in retrospect, I understand was getting acquainted with the ‘warrior’ archetype so as to define myself as a ‘male.’ I played with toy guns, read war comics. One day, I recall I went to visit my best friend, a girl named Mary. I must have been about seven years old, and it had recently dawned on me that boys weren’t supposed to have girl best friends. So, I took my toy revolver along with me, and pulling it out in front of Mary, said ‘You don’t want to play with this, do you?” OK, Freudians, laugh at my infant self. What more obvious evidence could there be of the link between being a ‘warrior’ and having a penis. But as a British baby-boomer, I have never had to put on a military uniform and learn how to fire a weapon.  The ‘warrior’ isn’t exactly a suitable role-model for people like me – a fact that people like Jordan Peterson are grappling with, and which is a major reason why he is so popular amongst young men. The ‘warrior’ archetype just doesn’t resonate. But it is still unclear what positive archetype for a young male can take its place.

I recall a few years ago talking to a German who at the time was in his mid-sixties and so  born not long after the end of the Second World War, and sharing with him my militaristic upbringing. He surprised me by saying he’d never ever played at war as a kid. War was taboo in Germany for obvious reasons. But now, because of Russian aggression, Germany has announced a huge increase in its military budget. But as several commentators have noted, including the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQqthbvYE8M&t=3s) this is good news. The Germans are no longer afraid that everyone thinks they’re closet Nazis, and they realize they must play their role in trying  stabilize  the new situation.  Prepare for war if you want peace.

The almost miraculous fact that I have never been compelled to wear a military uniform, let along go to war, is impressed on me  almost every day here in South Korea, where all able-bodied males must do two years military service.  But living near the DMZ I am obviously even more acutely aware of the way in which peace is guaranteed by preparedness for war.  The other day, for example, we were obliged to wait at a nearby traffic intersection as a convoy of huge tanks rumbled by. We often hear guns being fired by soldiers training in the nearby bases. Every time we take a walk, we pass pillboxes and trench lines (see the photos below).

The view from a gun emplacement, and from a strategic hilltop. That’s North Korea in the distance.

As I wrote in my previous post: “the current state of so-called ‘peace’ on the Korean peninsula has come at a high price.  There may have been  no  armed conflict since 1953, but  the result of a situation in which ‘peace’ is guaranteed by the perpetual preparation for ‘war’ has been the creation of   militarized surveillance societies on both sides of the DMZ. This is obviously the case in North Korea, but who can deny that South Korea is also constrained in far-reaching ways  - social, economic, political, cultural - by the necessity of its perpetual preparedness for war?”

I am against war. Any sane person must be. But although we think we no longer live in the endemically belligerent world of Plato, Heraclitus, and General Flavius Vegetius Renatus, or even of our parents or grandparents, we are only a small way along the road towards guaranteed peace. Here are a couple of graphs:

The graphs clearly show that war is less deadly and less pervasive than ever before. For us in the west, with the terrible exception of the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s, it has only seemed to happen just over the horizon – in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria.  Well now, it’s happening rather closer to home, and on a potentially much more disastrous scale.

Our pacific existence has had enormously positive consequences, but also some intellectually negative ones for people like me.  For example, I can see now that when I wrote the above quote in my earlier post I was succumbing to an intellectual relativism  which too readily flattens opposites down to a state of moral parity so as to chastise my own culture. Of course, South Korea has suffered as a result of its need to be ever-ready for war. But the stance it has adopted is defensive, not offensive.  The Ukraine war makes this all to horribly obvious.  There is a world of difference between preparing for peace through defensive military action and using one’s army for offensive action like the Russians have done. 

Being a progressive and being critical of one’s own society’s many shortcomings has led to a dangerous loss of conviction. For example, it has made patriotism very difficult. But as Richard Rorty observed back in 1994 in an essay about the political left’s dominance of the Humanities in the American academy (which has only got stronger since then): “like every other country, ours has a lot to be proud of and a lot to be ashamed of. But a nation cannot reform itself unless it takes pride in itself – unless it has an identity, rejoices in it, reflects upon it and tries to live up to it. Such pride sometimes takes the form of arrogant, bellicose nationalism. But it often takes the form of a yearning to live up to the nation’s professed ideals.” As Rorty concludes: “A left that refuses to take pride in its country will have no impact on that country’s politics, and will eventually become an object of contempt.”

In 1941 at a low point in the war against Hitler, George Orwell penned an essay entitled ‘England, Your England’, which begins: “As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.” Orwell reflected on what it was he loved about England - what was worth dying for - and observed:

An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face. The familiar arguments to the effect that democracy is ‘just the same as’ or ‘just as bad as’ totalitarianism never take account of this fact. All such arguments boil down to saying that half a loaf is the same as no bread. In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions. The belief in them influences conduct, national life is different because of them. In proof of which, look about you. Where are the rubber truncheons, where is the castor oil? The sword is still in the scabbard, and while it stays there corruption cannot go beyond a certain point. The English electoral system, for instance, is an all but open fraud. In a dozen obvious ways it is gerrymandered in the interest of the moneyed class. But until some deep change has occurred in the public mind, it cannot become completely corrupt. You do not arrive at the polling booth to find men with revolvers telling you which way to vote, nor are the votes miscounted, nor is there any direct bribery. Even hypocrisy is a powerful safeguard. The hanging judge, that evil old man in scarlet robe and horse-hair wig, whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living in, but who will at any rate interpret the law according to the books and will in no circumstances take a money bribe, is one of the symbolic figures of England. He is a symbol of the strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and privilege, humbug and decency, the subtle network of compromises, by which the nation keeps itself in its familiar shape.

So, let’s try to remember as we scramble to make sense of and form an opinion about what’s happening in the Ukraine that half a loaf is NOT the same as no bread.