Spectacle, reality, resistance
Peter Coltman reviews a book that challenges the culture of militarism
Human beings do not naturally kill each other. In Britain, the chances of being murdered are slightly less than one in 100,000 – a product of natural revulsion against violence and of culture rather than a fear of the law. In the USA, which has substantially higher rates of homicide than the UK, fiercer laws are no deterrent: the murder rate in those states which carry the death penalty is higher than for those which do not. So, what keeps most of us, worldwide, from murdering each other is an innate horror of the process and its results.
The issue which David Gee addresses in his remarkable book Spectacle, Reality, Resistance: Confronting a culture of militarism is why, as citizens of the UK, we tolerate the wars which are conducted in our name – the ‘industrial business by which people’s bodies are punctured, torn, crushed, burned or otherwise mutilated on a mass scale’. As Elaine Scarry writes: ‘Injury is the relentless object of all military activity… the central goal in war is to out-injure the opponent.’
In three linked essays, Gee explores the ways in which we are manipulated into acceptance. In the first, ‘Distance’, he shows how we are ‘poor witnesses to war’. For example, we mythologise our heroic resistance to the German air raids of the second world war, which killed 60,000 civilians, while blinding ourselves to the 800,000 people killed by bombing in Germany. We are all familiar with the Nazi atrocities of Belsen, but how many of us have seen images from the firebombing of Dresden: ‘Dead, dead, dead everywhere. Some completely black like charcoal… women… young girls… small children, almost all of them naked. Some clinging to each other in groups as if they were clawing at each other.’ It was only when television reports of the horrors of Vietnam stirred the American electorate that the war there became unsustainable.
Secondly, we romanticise our wars as forms of heroic chivalry. In ‘Romance’, Gee traces the elements of the heroic quest that are as common to a James Bond film as they are to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: the perilous journey leading to the crucial struggle, resulting in the exaltation of the hero. Political rhetoric takes on this discourse. Tony Blair is on ‘a mission’, George W Bush, ‘a crusade’; opponents become ‘an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world’. The media can be complicit: heroes are created to shore up crumbling public opinion in doubtful escapades. Meanwhile, the Pentagon provides equipment to film producers who churn out ‘patriotic mind-blinding kitsch’, while denying it to those whose work questions or satirises the ‘morality’ of war.
Most important of all is ‘Control’. In the last essay, Gee reminds us that decisions to wage war are mostly not taken by us but by our leaders, so it is necessary for them to exercise control over an increasingly dissenting population. Central to this is embedding the armed forces as a virtuous part of our national culture. Recruitment, underpinned by visits to schools, including primary schools, starts early. Only eighteen countries worldwide recruit at sixteen and the UK is one of them. Army life is glamorised by presenting it both in terms of the heroic myth and of the computerised war games with which children are familiar: the notion that a recruit might actually play these games for real contrasts starkly with the dreary unquestioning obedience of infantry life to which s/he is then contracted.
This is not such a gloomy picture as it may appear. In a well-researched, superbly documented and, above all, passionately argued book, David Gee also quotes the dissenting voices, the people who refuse to say ‘yes’: Percy Miles, who first stood at the roadside in Wootton Bassett to bear witness to the returning dead; Gus Hales, whose poem shattered the pomposities of a remembrance service on the Falklands Islands; Vic Williams, who was jailed for refusing to take part in the ‘pure naked aggression’ of the 1990 gulf war; and Ben Griffin, who founded the British branch of Veterans for Peace. These are inspiring examples of people whose experience of war taught them that it is wrong. This is the light. We need to live up to it.
Spectacle, Reality, Resistance: Confronting a culture of militarism by David Gee, ForcesWatch, ISBN: 9780993095504, £7.
