War & History: Sharing Some Thoughts

By Charles Ponnuthurai Sarvan –October 1, 2016

Prof. Charles Sarvan

I am neither a military analyst nor a military historian. I have read but little on military matters, and what follows are very much the thoughts of a layman. As a student of Literature, my concern has been with the victims, and not with the so-called makers of History. My sympathy has been with the Trojans and not with the victorious Greeks; with devastated Carthage and not with proud, imperial, Rome; with the Native Americans, and not with the Europeans who dispossessed and decimated them; though not at all an anti-Semite, I am with the Palestinians and not with the bullying Zionists. Isaiah Berlin in his ‘An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History’ observed that “history normally deals with important, political, events. The ‘inner’ events are largely forgotten, yet it is they “that are the most real, the most immediate experience of human beings; they, and only they, are what life, in the last analysis, is made of”. (The main title of Berlin’s essay is The Hedgehog and the Fox.)

To glorify war is to glorify death and destruction; to glorify war is to glorify wounds, both of body and mind; to glorify war is to glory in the inflicting of suffering and sorrow. The victorious Duke of Wellington seeing the carnage on the battlefield of Waterloo said that the next saddest thing to losing a war is winning it. In certain circumstances, war can be a sign of failure: the failure of negotiation and compromise; the failure of reason and justice. Sun-tzu (BCE 380-316) in his Art of War writes that the greatest military victory is one that is won without a battle. Given this attitude, it’s not surprising his treatise is also known as ‘a Book of Life’.

If language arises from the wider (external and internal) reality, that reality can also be conditioned by language. Once, some students were taken aback when I asked them whether it was alright to kill fellow human-beings. I then inquired whether it was good to kill the enemy, and their indignation turned to discomfort. Visiting St Paul’s Cathedral in London, a place of religious worship, one finds monuments to those who had killed natives who were defending their homeland: the greater the massacre, the greater the glory. The change in classification from “human being” to “enemy” licenses violence, and can incite cruelty. By way of example, I cite from the Guardian newspaper (London, 25 December 2015) which describes a hall packed with Jews cheering the death of a Palestinian toddler murdered in an anti-Palestinian ‘hate crime’. The video, filmed at a wedding, shows guests “dancing with guns and firebombs and stabling a picture of Ali Dawabshe who died with his parents in an arson attack on their home”. (One is reminded of Sri Lanka’s Black July,1983.) Yet some at that wedding celebration would probably jump into the water or fire, instinctively, to rescue a toddler who was unknown to them.

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