A thirst for war

I think that one of the main things that sticks in my craw about the war in Ukraine is the absolute speed with which so many people capitulated to the idea of its inevitability. We acted like Liam Neeson in Taken, Sylvester Stallone in Rambo, Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando, Mel Gibson in Payback, or, most recently, Keanu Reeves in John Wick .

Look, you could still enjoy the movies, but you must be aware of how manipulative the initial scene of massive injustice toward our hero or his family is. It’s a fairy tale set up deliberately to eradicate all thought or opposition to the idea of wholesale vigilante slaughter. It engenders the utter opposite of justice, getting you to cheer for a simple world, in which everyone is absolutely good or absolutely evil and moral judgments can be made in a fillip.

Hell, the guys in those movies all showed more reluctance to enter battle than the western world did, which spends so much of the rest of time congratulating itself for the absolutely glorious view that it has from the moral high ground.

Instead, they didn’t even look back. They just sprinted toward war, excited to spend billions and test weapons and fight an enemy that they’d spent decades telling everyone practically had a tower with a fiery eye in the middle of Moscow. There was and is little discussion—just full-throated support of unfettered bellicosity as the only possible solution to any problem.

As luck would have it, I’ve just finished reading War is the Greatest Evil by Chris Hedges. On page 160, he cites Kant,

“Immanuel Kant called absolute moral imperatives that are used to carry out immoral acts ‘a radical evil.’ He wrote that this kind of evil was always a form of unadulterated self-love. It was the worst type of self-deception. It provided a moral façade for terror and murder.”

This, of course, applies not just to the countries and media I know intimately[1], but also to Russia—whose intentions and explanation and media landscape I can only guess at, but which I surmise are also unable to avoid acting in just this way.[2] China’s propaganda to its own citizens will also tend to be quite one-sided, though their lust for war seems to be much more tempered than that of the former colonizers[3] of the entire world in the west.

Citing Hedges again, from page 167,

“There are days I wish I was whole. I wish I could put down this cross. I envy those who, in their innocence, believe in the innate goodness of America and the righteousness of war, and celebrate what we know is despicable.”

Damn, Chris. He’s not wrong, though.

I spoke with a friend the other night who said that I was quite cynical about America and that he’d rather have America in charge than China or Russia.

I was taken aback, but rallied and asked him whether he wasn’t the more cynical one, who couldn’t imagine a world without a boot on our collective necks. He had so internalized the idea that there must be an empire that he’d limited himself to choosing which one. “None of the above,” didn’t enter into it.

I told him that it sounded to me as if he’d resigned himself to the profession that had been chosen for him, and that he thought his agency was limited to being able to vote on who was going to pimp him. We’re friends, though, so he laughed, albeit a bit nervously.

A couple more quotes from Chris Hedges, here citing the inestimable James Baldwin, who grappled with the same problem as Kant did, in his time, and as we continue to do, today.

This is one of the powerful final paragraphs,