Some thoughts on violence

As a war rages on the eastern periphery of Europe, killing thousands and displacing millions; as violence racks many other parts of the world, including the region in which we live, I was reminded of the British playwright, Edward Bond. Much has been written about Bond’s depiction of violence: whether it’s the baby’s murder in Saved, the motif of cannibalism in Early Morning or the torture in Lear, Bond uses violence both as a symbol and a reality that informs our existence.

Critics differ in their interpretation of whether violence is extrinsic to Bond’s technique or woven into the fabric of his plays. What is obvious, however, is the shock effect. In the preface to his play, Lear, Bond wrote: “I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about manners. Violence shapes and obsesses our society, and if we do not stop being violent we have no future….It would be immoral not to write about violence.”

This statement, especially its operative part, is most interesting. While Bond acknowledges that violence shapes and obsesses our society, he, nonetheless, thinks that if we do not stop being violent we have no future. He thus implies that while violence is present in human societies, it may not be a natural or even an essential condition; hence, the warning that unless it is stopped, we will have no future. This is corroborated by what he says at another point in the preface: aggression is an ability but not a necessity. And, yet, his own work testifies to the fact that violence is embedded in our social fabric and in the way societies and states are structured.

But how do those structures form? William Golding did an experiment in Lord of the Flies, marooning children on an island depicted as a place of death with the dead parachutist hanging from a tree and “decimated coconuts” on the floor. The boys transform, hierarchies are established through raw, physical power, hunting begins and a sow’s head is mounted on a spike.

One of the enduring — and deeply disconcerting — memories of World War II is the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As he watched the fireball of the Trinity test on July 16, 1945, Oppenheimer quoted the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

After hearing of the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima, Bernard Brodie, then a young assistant professor at Yale, is reported to have said to his wife, “Everything I have written so far has become redundant.” Later, in The Absolute Weapon, he summarised the situation in these words: “Thus far, the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on, its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other purpose.”

The shock effect was about the nature of the weapon, the ultimate weapon. Which is why, the firebombings of Tokyo and Dresden have more or less faded from memory even though they killed more people.

Hannah Arendt reached a similar conclusion as she noted the coming of the nuclear age in her On Violence: “The technical development of the implements of violence has now reached the point where no political goal could conceivably correspond to their destructive potential or justify their actual use in armed conflict… it is a game that bears no resemblance to whatever war games preceded it. Its ‘rational’ goal is deterrence, not victory.”

But wars and violence have continued and the question of how one can escape violence, whether intrastate or between states, still obtains? Is it even possible? My own answer to this question, as a structural Realist, is that while we can try and mitigate the circumstances that lead to violence and wars, we cannot eradicate it. The paradox is that we invariably have to resort to violence to put an end to it. This is what Jean-Paul Sartre meant when in response to his own question, “Will we recover?” in his Preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, he replied, “Yes. For violence, like Achilles’ lance, can heal the wounds that it has inflicted.”

So, wars and conflicts will go on, as they did in Heaven. It’s a structural bind. In Book VI of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, after the first day of the great war in Heaven, the rebellious angels gather for the next move. Satan is convinced that the grievous injury they have suffered is owed to inferiority in weapons: “… Perhaps more valid armes/Weapons more violent, when next we meet/May serve to better us, and worse our foes/Or equal what between us made the odds/In Nature none…”.

Years ago, I was introduced by my respected professor of literature, Shaista Sirajuddin, to Keith Douglas, an English soldier and poet who studied at Oxford and then reported for recruitment and graduated from Sandhurst to fight in WWII as an officer in the Second Derbyshire Yeomanry, a Reconnaissance Armoured regiment. Captain Douglas was killed during the Normandy landing on June 9, 1944 by a mortar shell splinter so fine, as Ted Hughes wrote, that no wound showed on the body. Douglas was 24.

War claims the young and the best, as Herodotus noted millennia ago.

I had not heard of Douglas before but have since read some of his poetry and read up on him. There is horror in those lines, the dreadfulness that always attends violence, more so at a large scale. But the paradox is the understanding that comes with it, the value of life in the midst of death, the appreciation of relationships, sacrifice, camaraderie, even empathy for the enemy.

There is deadly, matter-of-fact prose in the rattling of machine guns and the employment of other weaponry; but it’s the human behaviour in the midst of the sound and fury that signifies both much and nothing, that awes, and the combination is always poetic.

What does one say when “returning over the nightmare ground” after “the combatants [have] gone” one sees the soldier sprawling in the sun./The frowning barrel of his gun/overshadowing. As we came on/that day, he hit my tank with one/like the entry of a demon./Look. Here in the gunpit spoil/the dishonoured picture of his girl/who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht./in a copybook gothic script.

There’s the sense of victory for one’s side but there is also human emotion which goes beyond the sides we take because we are either born into them or, as sometimes happens, we think we are fighting a “just” war being on a particular side.

But she would weep to see today/how on his skin the swart flies move;/the dust upon the paper eye/and the burst stomach like a cave./For here the lover and killer are mingled/who had one body and one heart./And death who had the soldier singled/has done the lover mortal hurt.

These are the moments when war’s larger picture, the one that interests the historian and the strategist, shrinks to become one man, the dead soldier who has his woman’s picture in his pocket and who now lies with a burst stomach, decaying, having crossed the line from where none has ever returned, regardless of the pain and love of those who are waiting for the one who death has singled out and claimed at that moment.

But, for the living, or still living, there is also the grim acceptance of the broader picture, of stakes involved, of the job that must be done, no matter how many fall in the course of doing it. That was the advice Krishna gave to Arjuna, the very book from where Oppenheimer took his phrase as he witnessed the nuclear test. As he said, “the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”

War, then, is the constant interaction of deadly prose and awe-inspiring poetry, each informing the other. I cannot think of any other human activity that embraces in itself, and subsumes, so many paradoxes and ironies: such selfishness and such selflessness, such ruthlessness and such compassion, such cold calculation and such passion. And yet, violence, the structural bind, is precisely what would likely destroy us.

The writer is a journalist with interest in foreign and security policies