On any given day for the past quarter of a century, the United States was probably dropping bombs on a country somewhere. And then there are the sanctions: “We have heard that half a million children have died,” Madeleine Albright was told by a reporter about Iraq in 1996. “And, you know, is the price worth it?” “I think that is a very hard choice,” Albright said, “but the price, we think, the price is worth it.” The era of regime-change wars began three years later, with the 78-day NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. That campaign had as its ostensible reason the prevention of genocide by the Serbian armed forces; but a desired result was also the forging of a new nation, Kosovo; and, soon after, the construction of Camp Bondsteel, the largest American base in the Balkan region. In the decade and a half that was to follow, preventive war would become a normal feature of U.S. foreign policy, “preventive” being a rationalization that stretches the idea of self-defense to the breaking point. A similar NATO action, in Libya in 2011, tore the country apart and led to the opening of slave markets and the flight of tens of thousands across the Mediterranean. Most recently, the ousting of Bashar al-Assad by rebel forces in Syria was largely assisted by the CIA-run Operation Timber Sycamore: the fruit of a 2012 presidential finding by Barack Obama. Timber Sycamore channeled nearly one billion dollars to the anti-Assad forces—a policy continued by other means in the Trump and Biden administrations. U.S. intervention thereby enabled the triumph of the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda and ushered in a new wave of massacres, this time of Alawite Muslims.
The above is a partial record. It leaves out the disaster of the Iraq War and the consequent saber-rattling and ever-increasing U.S. sanctions against Iran, escalating earlier this summer into a direct aerial bombardment. If one asks where else the missiles were heading and the bombs falling this spring, one answer is Yemen, but maybe also Somalia, or any of the half dozen nations of the Sahel region whose names we can only with difficulty recall. We have grown used to the thousands of tons of U.S. weapons regularly deployed by our proxy army in Ukraine and by our regional partner, Israel, in Gaza.
War makes violence a habit: the horror disappears in the routine, and we come to accept it as part of human nature. And there is a shade of truth in that acceptance. War appeals to the propensity (keener in men than in women) to cut short all reasoning and go fast and hard into a physical assault that stops all argument. The violent thrust bespeaks decision, a pride beyond challenge in the person who commits it: the act acquits itself, and postpones any weighing of motives. War thus forms an exception to the rule of empirical prudence, in favor of a vainglory that human nature has always found ways to permit. War stands outside the usual priority of moral considerations. It must often be, for many people, a relief from the day-to-day routines of work and responsibility. And in the conditions of modernity, where inaction is the normal human state, war appeals to the craving for action. We are taught early that nothing is so honorable as to act decisively in an approved cause; and war is the preeminent instance of such action—as much for the spectacle it affords as for the change it effects.
But there is also a quasi-moral seduction in the violence of war. It commits the individual who supports the otherwise abstract entity that is a nation. It makes each of us a little bigger. Even in a vicarious war such as the American fight against Russia by alliance with Ukraine, the consciousness of sympathy links the anonymous citizen with a remote effect: a satisfaction that is hardly available in the ordinary rounds of social engagement or political work. As a site of impressive action, in which one person can see the difference he makes, the only rival of war might be the construction of a new city. But that is a long-term ameliorative project that requires imagination and the passage of time. Destruction is faster.
●
William James’s utopian essay “The Moral Equivalent of War” spoke for the author’s belief that “the martial type of character can be bred without war.” James was writing in 1910, in the aftermath of two imperialist adventures, the Boer War and the Spanish-American War, and he could not imagine what the next war would bring—a mechanized pattern of annihilation in which “the martial type of character” was scarcely in view. Yet James understood the allure of war itself: looking back on the American Civil War, he recognized that a sentimental attachment to the conflict outlasted the recognition that one side had been wrong. “Those ancestors,” he said, referring to the North and South alike, “those efforts, those memories and legends, are the most ideal part of what we now own together, a sacred spiritual possession worth more than all the blood poured out. Yet ask those same people whether they would be willing, in cold blood, to start another civil war now to gain another similar possession, and not one man or woman would vote for the proposition.” Why then did the memories and legends continue to be cherished beyond reason? “We inherit the warlike type,” said James, since war itself “was the gory nurse that trained societies to cohesiveness.”
A broad historical surmise, which James derived from Walter Bagehot’s Physics and Politics, was buried in that mention of the “gory nurse.” Bagehot had argued that war is the formative vehicle for the advance of civilization. Societies, he wrote, persist and are unified by “the cake of custom,” but custom itself is inert, and it is not by maintaining the “preservative habit” but rather “breaking through it, and reaching something better” that a primitive society ceases to be primitive. So, in the logic of this conjectural history, “civilisation begins, because the beginning of civilisation is a military advantage”; and if, by civilization, we agree to mean chiefly technological advance, Bagehot’s hypothesis is enormously plausible. The only escape from his conclusion is to define civilization in a way that excludes the invitation to war. James came close to formulating a proposal on these lines; but his anti-moralistic generosity toward “the energies of men” rendered him finally uncertain. It was left to Mohandas K. Gandhi—a thinker whose religious asceticism places him at the antipodes from James’s athletic morale—to pursue the analysis of war to its genealogical source in the spirit of violence itself.
Gandhi’s most vivid formulations of the principle of nonviolent resistance appeared in the 1920s, on the other side of the war that saw all Europe nearly destroyed by the gory nurse of civilized society. His statement on the Russian Revolution in an article of 1924 confesses that he does not know whether Bolshevism is “for the good of Russia in the long run. But I do know,” Gandhi adds, “that in so far as it is based on violence and denial of God, it repels me. I do not believe in short—violent—cuts to success.” But how, in that case, can he get along with his fellow men and women, the majority of whom have not yet been convinced of his principle? The creed of nonviolence, he explains,
not only does not preclude me but compels me even to associate with anarchists and all those who believe in violence. But that association is always with the sole object of weaning them from what appears to me to be their error. For experience convinces me that permanent good can never be the outcome of untruth and violence. Even if my belief is a fond delusion, it will be admitted that it is a fascinating delusion.
“The way of peace,” Gandhi would sum up his argument two years later, “is the way of truth”:
Truthfulness is even more important than peacefulness. Indeed, lying is the mother of violence. A truthful man cannot long remain violent. He will perceive in the course of his search that he has no need to be violent, and he will further discover that so long as there is the slightest trace of violence in him, he will fail to find the truth he is searching for.
The common false characterization of Gandhi as a mystic—or, more recently, as an agitator who supported nonviolence only on instrumental grounds—treats statements like those above as an indulgence in paradox. Why would anyone suppose that truth and peace are inseparably allied?
Human life in society, as Gandhi saw it, is soaked in an atmosphere of always-possible violence. His solution was radical. To free oneself from violence would require, ultimately, an achieved indifference to every pressing and immediate demand of the senses, including the impatient desire to emerge as victor by “short—violent—cuts.” The cogency of his analysis in no way depends on the ascetic inference he drew in his own life. For it is true among human beings generally that our wish to be aroused by stimulants, not only in common experience but in sports and the arts and other scenes of spectatorship, with their attendant satisfactions—all these addictions prevent us from acquiring the strength to respect the dignity of life. Appeals to the necessity of violence make a perpetually seductive demand that creates its own code of behavior. We are reactive by a seemingly undeterrable reflex; and this holds the more surely where one mass of people is pitted against another mass. Race prejudice, or some such distinction between like-me and not-like-me, can be relied on to finish the work that began with parochial bigotry; the people you want to kill, it will be agreed, are subhuman, even if their degradation was imposed on them in the system to which they were subjected. That is the unstated view of Palestinians held by many Israelis, and the view of Russians held less consciously by many Americans. Beneath the national differences by which wars are nominally caused, there is almost always a racial underlayer. If it was not there at the start, it is imposed in the course of the war itself.
War delivers a sense of purpose that seems to be missing in many lives much of the time. Gandhi saw this plainly in the First World War, in which he felt obliged to assist the British Empire: an entity he still at that time believed to be capable of reforming itself. But the moral simplicity of purpose may be assisted by a theoretical expansion of the physical need for safety: strategic thinkers cover this ground with the jargon of collective security, but for ordinary people a simple allegory will do. For example: “This war is the latest episode of a worldwide battle between democracy and authoritarianism.” The enemy, authoritarianism, is an abstraction vacuous enough to encompass a democracy whose most recent election result we do not approve. Authoritarianism has taken the place of the old enemy communism; and it is obviously a weak replacement. Without the trailing ghost of its predecessor—and the same country, Russia, cast in the same role—it would lack the requisite heat for the serial battles it may be called on to support.
The dawning of the “unipolar moment” was anticlimactic—an epochal change, perhaps, but so deficient in piquancy that its prophet, Francis Fukuyama in “The End of History,” could lament that men and women freed from wars would face the overwhelming burden of boredom. A kind of relief presumably set in with the resumption of history, over the long decade of the War on Terror and a decade now of the West against the shifting mass of the non-West. Video war games were a standard device for the recruitment and training of American soldiers as far back as the regime-change wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And the program of drone assassinations, initiated by George W. Bush and greatly expanded in the two terms of Barack Obama, can be understood as a remote but predictable outgrowth of video games. “Terror Tuesday” meetings, led by John Brennan at the CIA and President Obama, arrived in the latter years of the War on Terror: a fair alternative (it was thought) to the Bush policy of capturing terror suspects for transportation to an indefinite imprisonment in Guantanamo. Though their names were not always known—a pattern of suspicious contacts was enough to convict—they could now be killed individually by presidential command. Death may somehow have seemed cleaner than the kidnapping and torture and the consequent twilight legal status of a suspect who fitted the category of “enemy combatant.”
Two things must strike an American looking at a pattern that now extends from the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia to the three-year trench war in Ukraine. First, to repeat, these wars have all been preventive wars. They have had to travel an extraordinary distance in the cause of safety. The other curious feature is the pride with which American leaders have announced that most of these wars required no sacrifice of American lives. (This is said in a bluff shorthand: we have no “boots on the ground.”) All the killing and dying is done by other people.
We have found a means of dodging the fact of violent death: the very thing that, according to Hobbes, all men would “seek peace” to avoid. Meanwhile, the popular culture in America is as violent as ever. The online culture is, if possible, more violent than ever.
●
An omen of the wars to come appeared in a 2024 New York Times Magazine story on the Ukraine war by C. J. Chivers. “The Swarm” was about the unleashed droves of FPVs, the first-person killer drones controlled by patriotic high-tech snipers far behind the battle lines in Ukraine. FPVs are a low-cost innovation that enables their operators to slaughter the enemy one soldier at a time; but the scare of Chivers’s title was tactfully softened in the online version to read: “How Suicide Drones Transformed the Front Lines in Ukraine.” There is in fact nothing suicidal about this weapon; on the contrary, the men at the trigger do their killing at little risk, from an undetectable launchpad.
Ukraine was ahead of Russia (though the gap is closing) in the development and manufacture of these reconnaissance vehicles that turn into guided missiles. “Here,” writes Chivers, “was a weapon that could fly horizontally or vertically, change speed or direction, stop in midair, loop around corners and slip through windows, doors or an open hatch. If an FPV drone overshot a target, which for any other weapon would be a miss, it could swing around and try again—all while transmitting video of its panicked victim.” The dread of a sudden violent death is heightened and disseminated through broadcast video streams of the killings. The innovation and, much more, the added value through live-action re-cordings, seems a familiar offspring of the reality-TV shows that photographed real-life cops hunting their real-life quarry. This recent genre offered a thin cover of civic concern for the sadistic appetite it pandered to; and the hatred primed by the FPV death videos has been excused by the always acceptable motive: love of one’s country. The fact remains that patriotic Ukrainian viewers and their American allies are enjoying the spectacle of humiliation and suffering pressed to the cruelest imaginable extreme. These are, in effect, snuff videos, recorded, avidly watched and celebrated in the cause of national selfhood. In the same way, the system of Orwell’s 1984 conveyed its liveliest propaganda in scenes of the hunting and killing of enemies of the state. The sensational entertainment served to break down ordinary scruples in the cause of political indoctrination.
First-person assassin drones have returned war to its origin in the violent subjection of an individual by a conqueror. “Everyone at the front,” writes Chivers, “knew the sound of drones”:
Even soldiers who had yet to see firsthand the hunter-quadcopter’s grisly effects had witnessed onscreen an un-countable number of peers die from the attacks, brought to them by the messaging app Telegram. War-related Telegram accounts posted constantly updated streams of short videos showing the fates of soldiers chased by drones. The accounts accumulated together as a sort of DeathTube, an expanding montage of cornered men frantically doing whatever they could to survive, only to die nonetheless, each spending his last seconds alive as an unwilling extra in the public visual chronicle of the rise of homicidal flying machines.
Entirely in keeping with the sadistic motive are the “ideas for expansion” now circulating among the Ukrainian high command—among them, the recruitment of an all-female FPV killer unit for its value as “an emotionally productive outlet for a grieving population.” The democratization and domestication of terror was a feature of the never-ending war that Orwell envisaged between Oceania (the giant North Atlantic state) and its alternating enemies, Eurasia (Russia) and Eastasia (China). So, too, the leader of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, Colonel Vadym Sukharevsky, finds the idea of a female unit appealing “because widows want to avenge the deaths of their husbands.” The random revenge of the legalized murder of war can now be carried out from the intimacy of home, and it can find its justification in the name of love.
Notice that the possibility of human contact with the enemy is utterly excluded by the growing reliance on the hidden soldier-assassin. The result is one more erasure of the distinction between civilian and soldier. But it may be asked: What difference does that really make? None, if the aim of war is the total annihilation of the enemy. But the normalization of the kill-from-a-distance program also abolishes the possibility of the act of surrender. Where two armies stand within sight of each other, a life may be spared and—in rare but recorded instances—a mutual recognition of humanity may pass between captor and prisoner. Even if such leniency were desired by the FPV sniper, it could never rise beyond an idle thought in a battle where miles of no-man’s-land separate the remote-control killer and the victim who might have preferred to save his life and throw down his gun. And yet, mechanized first-person killing is fast becoming the normal order of battle in Ukraine. As Chivers puts it: “In the forever anxious realm of arms design, when a new class of weapons succeeds, copycats follow. In this way, revolutionary weapons arrive with a promise of relief, and linger for a legacy of horror.” The next likely step will be to use FPVs on selectively targeted civilian habitations, where a death in a certain household might have a valuable impact on the battlefield.
Neither James nor Gandhi foresaw the full expansion of the tendencies that the First World War made unmistakable. For it has become possible for the war habit to persist even as war loses its martial character entirely. The NATO wars in Yugoslavia and Libya, the U.S.-subsidized war in Ukraine and demolition of Gaza, even the boots-on-the-ground wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, have proven the feasibility of wars without end so long as they happen far enough away, with minimal consciousness and emotional investment by the citizens of the sponsoring country. It seems enough that we suppose ourselves, as Madeleine Albright put it, “the indispensable nation.” We can go on thinking so, even as we realize how many extinct nations have shared the same sense of their own uniqueness.
Herman Melville wrote about an earlier advance of war technology that came into public view in the battle of Hampton Roads, between the new ironclad battleships of the North and South, the Monitor and the Merrimack. From their first encounter neither ship emerged victorious, and Melville dared to hope that the sheer impersonality of the contest, and the consequent loss for an ideal of chivalric honor, might have a chastening effect:
War shall yet be, and to the end;
But war-paint shows the streaks of weather;
War yet shall be, but warriors
Are now but operatives; War’s made
Less grand than Peace,
And a singe runs through lace and feather.
War is less grand than ever, and yet war continues. Gandhi was speaking the most unpleasant of truths when he said that truth could not coexist with a surrender to the habit of violence. There was never a more primitive delusion, nor an idea surer to license immoral actions, than the belief that there are good guys and that you are one of them.
Art credit: Nikita Teryoshin, Nothing Personal, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.
On any given day for the past quarter of a century, the United States was probably dropping bombs on a country somewhere. And then there are the sanctions: “We have heard that half a million children have died,” Madeleine Albright was told by a reporter about Iraq in 1996. “And, you know, is the price worth it?” “I think that is a very hard choice,” Albright said, “but the price, we think, the price is worth it.” The era of regime-change wars began three years later, with the 78-day NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. That campaign had as its ostensible reason the prevention of genocide by the Serbian armed forces; but a desired result was also the forging of a new nation, Kosovo; and, soon after, the construction of Camp Bondsteel, the largest American base in the Balkan region. In the decade and a half that was to follow, preventive war would become a normal feature of U.S. foreign policy, “preventive” being a rationalization that stretches the idea of self-defense to the breaking point. A similar NATO action, in Libya in 2011, tore the country apart and led to the opening of slave markets and the flight of tens of thousands across the Mediterranean. Most recently, the ousting of Bashar al-Assad by rebel forces in Syria was largely assisted by the CIA-run Operation Timber Sycamore: the fruit of a 2012 presidential finding by Barack Obama. Timber Sycamore channeled nearly one billion dollars to the anti-Assad forces—a policy continued by other means in the Trump and Biden administrations. U.S. intervention thereby enabled the triumph of the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda and ushered in a new wave of massacres, this time of Alawite Muslims.
The above is a partial record. It leaves out the disaster of the Iraq War and the consequent saber-rattling and ever-increasing U.S. sanctions against Iran, escalating earlier this summer into a direct aerial bombardment. If one asks where else the missiles were heading and the bombs falling this spring, one answer is Yemen, but maybe also Somalia, or any of the half dozen nations of the Sahel region whose names we can only with difficulty recall. We have grown used to the thousands of tons of U.S. weapons regularly deployed by our proxy army in Ukraine and by our regional partner, Israel, in Gaza.
War makes violence a habit: the horror disappears in the routine, and we come to accept it as part of human nature. And there is a shade of truth in that acceptance. War appeals to the propensity (keener in men than in women) to cut short all reasoning and go fast and hard into a physical assault that stops all argument. The violent thrust bespeaks decision, a pride beyond challenge in the person who commits it: the act acquits itself, and postpones any weighing of motives. War thus forms an exception to the rule of empirical prudence, in favor of a vainglory that human nature has always found ways to permit. War stands outside the usual priority of moral considerations. It must often be, for many people, a relief from the day-to-day routines of work and responsibility. And in the conditions of modernity, where inaction is the normal human state, war appeals to the craving for action. We are taught early that nothing is so honorable as to act decisively in an approved cause; and war is the preeminent instance of such action—as much for the spectacle it affords as for the change it effects.
But there is also a quasi-moral seduction in the violence of war. It commits the individual who supports the otherwise abstract entity that is a nation. It makes each of us a little bigger. Even in a vicarious war such as the American fight against Russia by alliance with Ukraine, the consciousness of sympathy links the anonymous citizen with a remote effect: a satisfaction that is hardly available in the ordinary rounds of social engagement or political work. As a site of impressive action, in which one person can see the difference he makes, the only rival of war might be the construction of a new city. But that is a long-term ameliorative project that requires imagination and the passage of time. Destruction is faster.
●
William James’s utopian essay “The Moral Equivalent of War” spoke for the author’s belief that “the martial type of character can be bred without war.” James was writing in 1910, in the aftermath of two imperialist adventures, the Boer War and the Spanish-American War, and he could not imagine what the next war would bring—a mechanized pattern of annihilation in which “the martial type of character” was scarcely in view. Yet James understood the allure of war itself: looking back on the American Civil War, he recognized that a sentimental attachment to the conflict outlasted the recognition that one side had been wrong. “Those ancestors,” he said, referring to the North and South alike, “those efforts, those memories and legends, are the most ideal part of what we now own together, a sacred spiritual possession worth more than all the blood poured out. Yet ask those same people whether they would be willing, in cold blood, to start another civil war now to gain another similar possession, and not one man or woman would vote for the proposition.” Why then did the memories and legends continue to be cherished beyond reason? “We inherit the warlike type,” said James, since war itself “was the gory nurse that trained societies to cohesiveness.”
A broad historical surmise, which James derived from Walter Bagehot’s Physics and Politics, was buried in that mention of the “gory nurse.” Bagehot had argued that war is the formative vehicle for the advance of civilization. Societies, he wrote, persist and are unified by “the cake of custom,” but custom itself is inert, and it is not by maintaining the “preservative habit” but rather “breaking through it, and reaching something better” that a primitive society ceases to be primitive. So, in the logic of this conjectural history, “civilisation begins, because the beginning of civilisation is a military advantage”; and if, by civilization, we agree to mean chiefly technological advance, Bagehot’s hypothesis is enormously plausible. The only escape from his conclusion is to define civilization in a way that excludes the invitation to war. James came close to formulating a proposal on these lines; but his anti-moralistic generosity toward “the energies of men” rendered him finally uncertain. It was left to Mohandas K. Gandhi—a thinker whose religious asceticism places him at the antipodes from James’s athletic morale—to pursue the analysis of war to its genealogical source in the spirit of violence itself.
Gandhi’s most vivid formulations of the principle of nonviolent resistance appeared in the 1920s, on the other side of the war that saw all Europe nearly destroyed by the gory nurse of civilized society. His statement on the Russian Revolution in an article of 1924 confesses that he does not know whether Bolshevism is “for the good of Russia in the long run. But I do know,” Gandhi adds, “that in so far as it is based on violence and denial of God, it repels me. I do not believe in short—violent—cuts to success.” But how, in that case, can he get along with his fellow men and women, the majority of whom have not yet been convinced of his principle? The creed of nonviolence, he explains,
“The way of peace,” Gandhi would sum up his argument two years later, “is the way of truth”:
The common false characterization of Gandhi as a mystic—or, more recently, as an agitator who supported nonviolence only on instrumental grounds—treats statements like those above as an indulgence in paradox. Why would anyone suppose that truth and peace are inseparably allied?
Human life in society, as Gandhi saw it, is soaked in an atmosphere of always-possible violence. His solution was radical. To free oneself from violence would require, ultimately, an achieved indifference to every pressing and immediate demand of the senses, including the impatient desire to emerge as victor by “short—violent—cuts.” The cogency of his analysis in no way depends on the ascetic inference he drew in his own life. For it is true among human beings generally that our wish to be aroused by stimulants, not only in common experience but in sports and the arts and other scenes of spectatorship, with their attendant satisfactions—all these addictions prevent us from acquiring the strength to respect the dignity of life. Appeals to the necessity of violence make a perpetually seductive demand that creates its own code of behavior. We are reactive by a seemingly undeterrable reflex; and this holds the more surely where one mass of people is pitted against another mass. Race prejudice, or some such distinction between like-me and not-like-me, can be relied on to finish the work that began with parochial bigotry; the people you want to kill, it will be agreed, are subhuman, even if their degradation was imposed on them in the system to which they were subjected. That is the unstated view of Palestinians held by many Israelis, and the view of Russians held less consciously by many Americans. Beneath the national differences by which wars are nominally caused, there is almost always a racial underlayer. If it was not there at the start, it is imposed in the course of the war itself.
War delivers a sense of purpose that seems to be missing in many lives much of the time. Gandhi saw this plainly in the First World War, in which he felt obliged to assist the British Empire: an entity he still at that time believed to be capable of reforming itself. But the moral simplicity of purpose may be assisted by a theoretical expansion of the physical need for safety: strategic thinkers cover this ground with the jargon of collective security, but for ordinary people a simple allegory will do. For example: “This war is the latest episode of a worldwide battle between democracy and authoritarianism.” The enemy, authoritarianism, is an abstraction vacuous enough to encompass a democracy whose most recent election result we do not approve. Authoritarianism has taken the place of the old enemy communism; and it is obviously a weak replacement. Without the trailing ghost of its predecessor—and the same country, Russia, cast in the same role—it would lack the requisite heat for the serial battles it may be called on to support.
The dawning of the “unipolar moment” was anticlimactic—an epochal change, perhaps, but so deficient in piquancy that its prophet, Francis Fukuyama in “The End of History,” could lament that men and women freed from wars would face the overwhelming burden of boredom. A kind of relief presumably set in with the resumption of history, over the long decade of the War on Terror and a decade now of the West against the shifting mass of the non-West. Video war games were a standard device for the recruitment and training of American soldiers as far back as the regime-change wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And the program of drone assassinations, initiated by George W. Bush and greatly expanded in the two terms of Barack Obama, can be understood as a remote but predictable outgrowth of video games. “Terror Tuesday” meetings, led by John Brennan at the CIA and President Obama, arrived in the latter years of the War on Terror: a fair alternative (it was thought) to the Bush policy of capturing terror suspects for transportation to an indefinite imprisonment in Guantanamo. Though their names were not always known—a pattern of suspicious contacts was enough to convict—they could now be killed individually by presidential command. Death may somehow have seemed cleaner than the kidnapping and torture and the consequent twilight legal status of a suspect who fitted the category of “enemy combatant.”
Two things must strike an American looking at a pattern that now extends from the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia to the three-year trench war in Ukraine. First, to repeat, these wars have all been preventive wars. They have had to travel an extraordinary distance in the cause of safety. The other curious feature is the pride with which American leaders have announced that most of these wars required no sacrifice of American lives. (This is said in a bluff shorthand: we have no “boots on the ground.”) All the killing and dying is done by other people.
We have found a means of dodging the fact of violent death: the very thing that, according to Hobbes, all men would “seek peace” to avoid. Meanwhile, the popular culture in America is as violent as ever. The online culture is, if possible, more violent than ever.
●
An omen of the wars to come appeared in a 2024 New York Times Magazine story on the Ukraine war by C. J. Chivers. “The Swarm” was about the unleashed droves of FPVs, the first-person killer drones controlled by patriotic high-tech snipers far behind the battle lines in Ukraine. FPVs are a low-cost innovation that enables their operators to slaughter the enemy one soldier at a time; but the scare of Chivers’s title was tactfully softened in the online version to read: “How Suicide Drones Transformed the Front Lines in Ukraine.” There is in fact nothing suicidal about this weapon; on the contrary, the men at the trigger do their killing at little risk, from an undetectable launchpad.
Ukraine was ahead of Russia (though the gap is closing) in the development and manufacture of these reconnaissance vehicles that turn into guided missiles. “Here,” writes Chivers, “was a weapon that could fly horizontally or vertically, change speed or direction, stop in midair, loop around corners and slip through windows, doors or an open hatch. If an FPV drone overshot a target, which for any other weapon would be a miss, it could swing around and try again—all while transmitting video of its panicked victim.” The dread of a sudden violent death is heightened and disseminated through broadcast video streams of the killings. The innovation and, much more, the added value through live-action re-cordings, seems a familiar offspring of the reality-TV shows that photographed real-life cops hunting their real-life quarry. This recent genre offered a thin cover of civic concern for the sadistic appetite it pandered to; and the hatred primed by the FPV death videos has been excused by the always acceptable motive: love of one’s country. The fact remains that patriotic Ukrainian viewers and their American allies are enjoying the spectacle of humiliation and suffering pressed to the cruelest imaginable extreme. These are, in effect, snuff videos, recorded, avidly watched and celebrated in the cause of national selfhood. In the same way, the system of Orwell’s 1984 conveyed its liveliest propaganda in scenes of the hunting and killing of enemies of the state. The sensational entertainment served to break down ordinary scruples in the cause of political indoctrination.
First-person assassin drones have returned war to its origin in the violent subjection of an individual by a conqueror. “Everyone at the front,” writes Chivers, “knew the sound of drones”:
Entirely in keeping with the sadistic motive are the “ideas for expansion” now circulating among the Ukrainian high command—among them, the recruitment of an all-female FPV killer unit for its value as “an emotionally productive outlet for a grieving population.” The democratization and domestication of terror was a feature of the never-ending war that Orwell envisaged between Oceania (the giant North Atlantic state) and its alternating enemies, Eurasia (Russia) and Eastasia (China). So, too, the leader of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, Colonel Vadym Sukharevsky, finds the idea of a female unit appealing “because widows want to avenge the deaths of their husbands.” The random revenge of the legalized murder of war can now be carried out from the intimacy of home, and it can find its justification in the name of love.
Notice that the possibility of human contact with the enemy is utterly excluded by the growing reliance on the hidden soldier-assassin. The result is one more erasure of the distinction between civilian and soldier. But it may be asked: What difference does that really make? None, if the aim of war is the total annihilation of the enemy. But the normalization of the kill-from-a-distance program also abolishes the possibility of the act of surrender. Where two armies stand within sight of each other, a life may be spared and—in rare but recorded instances—a mutual recognition of humanity may pass between captor and prisoner. Even if such leniency were desired by the FPV sniper, it could never rise beyond an idle thought in a battle where miles of no-man’s-land separate the remote-control killer and the victim who might have preferred to save his life and throw down his gun. And yet, mechanized first-person killing is fast becoming the normal order of battle in Ukraine. As Chivers puts it: “In the forever anxious realm of arms design, when a new class of weapons succeeds, copycats follow. In this way, revolutionary weapons arrive with a promise of relief, and linger for a legacy of horror.” The next likely step will be to use FPVs on selectively targeted civilian habitations, where a death in a certain household might have a valuable impact on the battlefield.
Neither James nor Gandhi foresaw the full expansion of the tendencies that the First World War made unmistakable. For it has become possible for the war habit to persist even as war loses its martial character entirely. The NATO wars in Yugoslavia and Libya, the U.S.-subsidized war in Ukraine and demolition of Gaza, even the boots-on-the-ground wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, have proven the feasibility of wars without end so long as they happen far enough away, with minimal consciousness and emotional investment by the citizens of the sponsoring country. It seems enough that we suppose ourselves, as Madeleine Albright put it, “the indispensable nation.” We can go on thinking so, even as we realize how many extinct nations have shared the same sense of their own uniqueness.
Herman Melville wrote about an earlier advance of war technology that came into public view in the battle of Hampton Roads, between the new ironclad battleships of the North and South, the Monitor and the Merrimack. From their first encounter neither ship emerged victorious, and Melville dared to hope that the sheer impersonality of the contest, and the consequent loss for an ideal of chivalric honor, might have a chastening effect:
War is less grand than ever, and yet war continues. Gandhi was speaking the most unpleasant of truths when he said that truth could not coexist with a surrender to the habit of violence. There was never a more primitive delusion, nor an idea surer to license immoral actions, than the belief that there are good guys and that you are one of them.
Art credit: Nikita Teryoshin, Nothing Personal, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.
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