So, here we are in what might be seen retrospectively by historians as the beginning of World War III. All wars are stupid, but this one has been started out of such rampant stupidity that it\u2019s really hard to believe. Neither the governments that clashed in WWI, nor Hitler, who provoked World War II, were so flagrantly stupid (and they were so by a good measure). At the same time, the idiots who have unleashed the current wave of international attacks are all patriarchal men who think they\u2019re both intelligent and clever. They are clever indeed in the sense that by starting WWIII they are doing great business for their own personal gain, and covering up their moral and legal deficiencies, but they are profoundly stupid in that they don\u2019t understand the consequences of the attacks and have zero political and military capacity to plan the aftermath of war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The war we are seeing for the time being (Ukraine excluded) is a war waged from the air, consisting of destroying property and persons by using self-propelling long and mid-range missiles, and other explosives carried by drones. Civilians are dying; if you recall in one of the first attacks the USA military killed about 150 Iranian schoolgirls. So far, we have not seen any boots on the ground, and it seems clear that any use of troops is doomed to fail. Perhaps Israel can manage to invade south Lebanon again, as it has invaded Palestine, but it\u2019s just totally out of the question that they and the USA can successfully invade Iran, considering the total failures of Vietnam and Afghanistan, and the awful mess left in Iraq. The EU has made it clear that we will not participate in this war (thanks Pedro S\u00e1nchez!), China is standing by mightily annoyed, and Russia is still embroiled in Ukraine, so hopefully this is not really WWIII. However, because of the energy crisis the conflict is already unleashing, the environmental damage and the concern that the food chain might be halted if the Ormuz Strait is closed to all trade, things look ominous. In the meantime, all people care about is tourism. I have just read Spain has doubled its bookings for Easter, being regarded as a safe destination unlike all of the Middle East. We are really an idiot species.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I have being hearing in my head today a great song, simply called \u201cWar\u201d, by Black soul singer Edwin Starr, which hit the top of the US charts in the Summer of 1970, when the Vietnam War was raging. I know the song thanks to Bruce Springsteen\u2019s cover, from his Live\/1975\u201385<\/em> album, which he sang to protest Reagan-era foreign policy, with all its misguided misadventures. The lyrics<\/a> of Starr\u2019s song are as straightforward as possible, let me quote part of them. Apart from the iconic lines \u201cWar, huh, yeah \/ What is it good for? \/ Absolutely nothing, uhh\u201d, Starr sings \u201cWar, I despise \/ ‘Cause it means destruction of innocent lives \/ War means tears to thousands of mother’s eyes \/ When their sons go off to fight \/ And lose their lives.\u201d Also \u201cOh, war it’s an enemy to all mankind \/ The thought of war blows my mind\u201d and \u201cOh, war, has shattered many a young man’s dreams \/ Made him disabled, bitter and mean \/ Life is much too short and precious \/ To spend fighting wars each day \/ War can’t give life \/ It can only take it away, oh.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Starr\u2019s lyrics focus on the combatant soldier (and his mother) while the fact is that civilians of all descriptions have always borne the brunt of war, being besieged and attacked with all manner of weapons (from clubs to atomic bombs), killed, maimed, and abused in all wars. I don\u2019t think I need to explain that wars are an expression of the patriarchal disdain for life, even of its necrophilia. Some patriarchal women have also shown an interest in war, even happily accepting the sacrifice of their children (mainly sons) to this patriarchal necrophilia (otherwise known as \u2018glory\u2019), but if the lyrics of Starr\u2019s song refer specifically to mothers this is because if it were up to them, wars would stop immediately. Women understand life much better than (patriarchal) men, for obvious biological reasons. You don\u2019t go through the pains of childbirth and the effort of rearing a son, for him to be used as mere cannon fodder by idiot rulers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Military censorship makes sure war is misrepresented while it happens so that, for instance, along the years of the Ukraine war we have seen very few images of the damage done to persons. We\u2019ve seen countless images of war-torn cities (allow me to recommend the documentary 20 Days in Mairupol<\/em><\/a>) and given nonchalantly daily figures for casualties (the Ukrainian claim<\/a> that 1288850 Russian troops have been \u2018liquidated\u2019). War correspondents, beginning with William Howard Russell, the Irish reporter for The Times of London<\/em> in the Crimean War (1854\u201355); war photographers, from Roger Fenton (in the same war) onwards; and reporters using a film camera (Frederic Villiers\u2019s lost footage of the Greco-Turkish War of 1897, the combat images of the Boer War (1899-1902) filmed by John Bennett in South Africa in 1899) have brought war home to those away from the frontlines. Yet I insist, military censorship and media self-censorship have always intervened to spare us the most graphic images, the ones that would make us scream and render us sleepless at night. Without those images, war is sanitized, undistinguishable from an action film or a videogame.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This censorship I\u2019m talking about creates a time lag between actual war and understanding by the general public, which benefits the war mongers because by the time the process of grasping the reality of a specific war is complete, this war over and the next one, claimed to be completely different, begins. As happens, I\u2019ve working with diverse research groups connected with the theme of war since 1998 (I am currently a member of the research project Beyond Postmemory: English Literary Perspectives on War and Memory in the (Post)Postmodern Era (POSTLIT), PID2023-147481NB-I00, IPs Cristina Pividori and David Owen, UAB). And that is one of the main lessons I have learned. While the war is happening, people are saturated by the news and the need to go on living the approximation of a normal life and tend to take contemporary testimonials with a bit of wariness. Once the war is over novels, memoirs and films start flooding the market. For WWI (1914-1918), for instance, 1929 was a key year, even though poets and some novelists have been decrying the horrors of this war since at least 1916. I\u2019m not talking about books and films with a propagandistic intention, of which there were plenty during WWII, but of the high and low poetry and narrative with an honest intention to offer a testimonial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The only time in my life I have left a cinema was back in 1998 when I was so shocked by the first hour of Steven Spielberg\u2019s Saving Private Ryan<\/em>, which narrates the D-Day landings in Normandy, that I couldn\u2019t focus on the rest of the film. It took me three tries to finally watch the complete film at home because I couldn\u2019t go past that first hour. And it took me about a year to be able to return to a cinema with the confidence that I could watch anything, no matter how horrific (well, I stopped watching horror films after Eli Roth\u2019s Hostel<\/em>, in 2005). I\u2019m no soldier, and I can\u2019t tell whether Saving Private Ryan<\/em> is a realistic representation of war, but I can say that we need to be shocked out of our complacency. War consists of doing persons grievous harm with intention to kill, which is a very serious crime in any other circumstance, and it is absolutely monstrous to think that ordinary men can participate in war and keep their mental health intact. We learned that lesson from WWI poetry and Vietnam movies but pretend that war is a normal part of civilization instead of its antithesis. The way to debunk that lie is to openly show, with no censorship, what war is really about in the news as it happens, through social media and through documentaries, memoirs and, yes, fiction. War is not about moving troops from point to point to conquer territory: it\u2019s about destroying bodies and minds with unbounded violence in ways that are absolutely repellent in any civilized society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n