Costs of Victory?
Written by Nygdan
ATS Weekly, Edition 019, November 22, 2005
The world is at war right now and will be for the future, for quite some time indeed. Regardless of what administration is in the US White House
or who resides at Downing Street. When everything happened, just a few years ago, everthing changed. There's certainly a sad side to that sort of
statement, why couldn't things just remain the same no? But, as is so often said, there comes a time to put away childish things. In parallel,
there apparently has come a time when the public has to put away childish things. War was hurtled at the world like a parisian cobblestone, ripped
out of the orderly street by an angry and otherwise impotent mob. The only response to war is to engage in it.
But then what? The real horror of war is that war must not be lost, not matter what. The consequences of loosing a war are, simply, destruction.
One might counter, 'the US lost vietnam and wasn't destroyed'. Of course, the US population still to this day suffers from individual and even
societal impairment from that war, but beyond that, Vietnam was a battle in the wider Cold War. The Soviets lost the cold war, and now their entire
society has been wiped out, their 'great leaders' seen as genocidal maniacal tyrants, and their empire rended into small duchies. Previous to that,
Nazi Germany lost WWII, and today nazi ideology, and I think we all agree that this isn't a bad thing, is outlawed, to even utter words of agreement
with their inhuman policy is to face arrest and imprisonment, like in Austria. Even before that, the German people were so utterly humiliated and
destroyed at the Victory of the Allies in the Great War that they actually turned to a dangerous man like Hitler and the Nazis to get out of it. The
nearby Ottoman Empire was utterly smashed, after reigning for a thousand years practically, and to this day the globe still shakes under the
rammifactions of that, like with israel-palestine, the 'nation' of iraq, etc. Even before that, in the south african conflict, the Boer War, the
Boers lost the war, saw their free republics vanquished, and their civilians were shuttled into concentration camps to control them.
You can not loose a war. You must win it, there is no other alternative.
The logical conclusion of this is that you must do whatever it takes to win a war. But this presents a problem. War is disgusting and loathesome
enough as it is. Its nothing more than men (or women) from one place, going over to another place, and physically killing other men and women until
they agree to listen to you, regardless of the baseness or nobleness of those demands.
But to heap upon that the demands of doing whatever is needed to win, that brings it from being merely horrible. It shows us the old greek god of
Ares. His dented bronze helmet removed, matted sweat filled hair streaking out everwhere, to be shaved off entirely just to get away from the
pollution of it, face literally red from smattered human blood, sticking to itself and crackling as it dried. Peices of human organs cling to the
knotted sinews of his sandals and drag in the blood soaked dust, with hundreds of screaming mourners rippign their hair out of their own heads in
greif, on both sides. Because Ares isn't the god of noble and just battle or courage in the face of immposible odds. He's the god of the ravening
violence of war, the worst aspects of it that simply aren't decent to discuss. His companions aren't Heroism and Victory, the'yre Terror and
Strife.
For a long while, men tried to civilize war. The roman version of Ares is Mars, origianlly more a god of the fields than war itself, associated
with war because it was best fought upon fields. And like a field men have strained for a long time to cultivate war, to tame it, to make it fruitful.
So in European warfare there were officers and there were rules about how officers were treated and what was permissible. And as the society of
europe liberalized, and all men were accorded the rights and responsibilites of gentlemen, so too were all soldiers in war afforded decencies and
protections and rights.
But apparently it was all a social contrusction, vainity of men to quote a book when taken prisoner. Hubris, indeed, in greek tragedy, is something
that the gods despise and punish. And thus we see the tragedy that unfolds now, with Ares wreacking his wrath upon war, unbound by any social
pretensions once again. The real cause for this beyond this cartoon like fiction is that European social conceptions of war have had to clash with
other social ideas of warfare. You couldn't pay a Regiment of British Troopers to abandon, say, Liverpool, and then watch as they move on to Brighton
to fortify that city, and certainly not still consider or call themselves soldiers. Yet this is precisely what we saw in the Afghan War on the part
of the Afghan fighters. They aren't raised and accepting of European Society, and their entire concept of war is something entirely different.
Similarly, we see in iraq the most horrendous atrocities carried out daily. Children hung from trees and bled out like animals for merely
communicating with foreign soldiers. People literally hacking off other people's heads. And european society is starting to question, why do we
civilize war and why do we put its terms to paper? Not even merely as a question of 'if they don't why should we' but why do it at all?
So we see touristy snapshots of prisoners, soldiers standing next to them as if they were on vacation and standing next to a monument. Or we hear
about secret prisons, where godknowswhat is happening. Well, if the god in that statment is Ares, he certianly does know what is happening.
And yet again we are slapped in the face with the undenaible statement, you must not loose a war.
Perhaps this process will exxagerate and war will become a religious ritual and rite, like in the old days when it was fought on sacred marsian
fields.
Nygdan
ATS Moderator
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