“The practice of violence”, wrote the political philosopher, Hannah Arendt, “changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world”.
Don’t we know it from Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq? We learn fitfully, and too late — usually only after needless suffering and untold numbers of casualties, the majority these days “innocents”. As one Northern Irish politician lamented recently, observing the recent peace agreement between the ultra Protestant, Ian Paisley and the former IRA leader, Gerry Adams, “This was Sunningdale (the aborted peace agreement of 1973) for late learners.”
As we have learned from Iraq, we can be badly hoodwinked by our leaders when it comes to the reasons for war. And after a war there are many with a vested interest who wish us to interpret the reasons for going to war in a way that makes them — or their fathers — look reasonable. Japan today is a painful example of this — very much the opposite of Germany — seeking to airbrush the atrocities its World War II forces engaged in.
Yet the victorious allies play fast and loose with the telling of the saga of that war. Very few of us have been educated at school or even university to understand how the roots of World War II lay in the first one and how much the hostile, humiliating and economically bleeding punishment inflicted on Germany after its defeat in 1918 led to the rise of Hitler. Likewise, we have been brainwashed to believe the war stopped the Holocaust. In fact, it was started by it. As Mark Kurlansky writes in his forceful new book, “Non-Violence — the history of a dangerous idea”, “Before the war the Jews had been stripped of their rights and property and in some cases thrown into labor camps along with Communists and political dissidents. Various schemes emerged, including one in 1940, to deport the Jews to Madagascar. Only in the isolation and brutality of wartime, in 1941, after the invasion of the Soviet Union in late June, when Germans had millions of additional east German Jews under their control, did Germany dare to turn concentration camps into death camps. Only in 1942 did the Germans plan the “Final Solution”.
The bitter truth, that we can somehow never swallow, is that if had wanted to save the Jews we should not have gone to war.
If ever there were to be a war between the West and Russia much of the blame should be lain on the shoulders of the US and most of its NATO partners who in the 1990s provoked Russian nationalism by breaking America’s solemn end-of-Cold War promise on not expanding NATO and on demilitarizing east Germany, and went on to open military bases in parts of the old Soviet Union, to hold back on nuclear arms control, all coming on top of being a dismal and fitful friend during Moscow’s early dismantling of the Soviet economic apparatus. The row over missiles defenses to be placed on former Warsaw Pact territories is just one more bad step, as if the US and NATO wish to gratuitously feed Russian paranoia.
The trouble is human nature is disposed to think violence or the threat of violence works. In a fascinating recent article in Foreign Policy magazine, Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon analyze “Why Hawks Win”. There is, they argue, in the foreign policy making machine a bias in favor of hawkish beliefs and preferences. “It is built into the fabric of the human mind. Humans tend to exaggerate our strengths, to exaggerate the evil tendencies of adversaries, to misjudge how adversaries perceive us, to be overly sanguine when hostilities start and over reluctant to make necessary concessions in negotiations.”
One sees this on a macro level with Iraq and on a micro one with the Palestinians. Polls show that the Palestinians believe the intifada succeeded. An overwhelming majority thinks that Israel only understands the language of force. But most Israelis believe they contained the Palestinian intifada and that the only language the Palestinians understand is force. Can both sides be right? More likely both sides are wrong. As the Israeli poet, Amos Oz, has written: “Everybody knows that when the peace treaty is finally implemented the Palestinian people are going to get a lot less than they could have gotten fifty-five years ago, five wars ago, 150,000 dead ago.........But we Israelis could have gotten ourselves a much more convincing deal, if we had been less arrogant, less power-intoxicated, less selfish, and less imaginative after our military victory in 1967.”
Too often we have what Nadine Gordimer calls a “lying, hysterical babble of world rhetoric about current conflicts.” The evidence should point us in one direction. Our undereducated and perhaps biased emotions allow us too often to be pushed into another.
