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1 Mar 2022

War - What is it Good For?

 
Russian tank entering eastern Ukraine (24-02-22)
Photo by Nanna Heitmann / Magnum Photos
 
 
Well, if nothing else it reminds us that violence is one of those things which, as Byung-Chul Han says, never disappears; not even in its negative, fully visible and all too real form, which, as the Ukranians are now discovering, is "explosive, massive, and martial" [1]
 
Those who (naively) believed that the age of military conflict was over have been given a brutal wake up call by Vladimir Putin and the Russian Armed Forces. 
 
The invasion of Ukraine may only prove to be a temporary set back to the process of globalisation and the utopian dream of a world without borders, etc., but, on the other hand, maybe this would be a good time to reconsider violence in all its externalised macrophysical manifestations ...
 
 
Notes 
 
I know that many readers will think of the No. 1 single by Edwin Starr (Motown, 1970) when they read the title of this post, but what they might not know - unless they happened to work at Pendant Publishing back in the mid-1990s - is that this was originally the title of Tolstoy's novel War and Peace (1869) and it's this little known fact that I was recalling here. 
 
[1] Byung-Chul Han, Topology of Violence, trans. Amanda DeMarco, (The MIT Press, 2018), p. vii.
 
 

1 comment:

  1. Leaving aside the trenchant triumph of political analysis embedded in Starr's song (later covered by those renowned genii in the lyrical field, Frankie Goes to Hollywood) - I give you 'War, huh, yeah / What is it good for / Absolutely nothing, uhh War, huh, yeah / Say it again, y'all / War, huh (good God) etc. etc' -
    readers may be interested to consult James Hillman's 'A Terrible Love of War'(Penguin, 2005), whose author, deploying his recognised mode of archetypal analysis that encompasses Twain, Tolstoy, Kant, Foucault and Arendt, invites us to 'move our imaginations into the martial state of soul' to excavate authentically this mode of in/human agency that is as old as humans and 'comprehend its pull'.

    While it seems oddly perverse to see the Ukrainian people and their government as utopian idealists who want nothing more than to transcend their own borders, given the ferocity with which men, women and children are manufacuring Molotov cocktails to defend them as I write - and when it is clearly Putin and his zombie-like thugs (in their state of archetypal possession by 'Mother Russia') who are the ones who have contempt for the sovereignty of national boundaries and will even bomb kindergartens in pursuit of their deranged will to dominate - this monstrous conflict on Europe's eastern flank mainly serves to remind us of the cancer of imperialist expansionism and the wound of empire on the world-stage. Or, if the reader prefers, the ineliminable complicity of paranoiac statehood and political violence.

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