In contrast with the many myths about those soldiers’ heroism and magnanimity, wars bring out the worst in people. In this sense, those with a military makeup win the first battle, though not the last, by the mere fact of having dragged those with a non-military makeup to war. The former drag the latter into their favorite mode of behavior, their territory, just as those with a penchant for violence win a round after having dragged those with an aversion to it into a fistfight.
Those who are fond of violence are those for whom the worship of force is the deepest source of thought and action, those whose authority is founded on force and whose societies are organized around it. Although a fondness for violence didn’t leave modern Western societies- especially colonial violence- and although it was among the sturdiest bridges that modernity crossed to reach the place it ended up in, today’s democratic regimes and societies are not founded on this principle. Indeed, it would be more accurate to say that each instance of them being dragged into wars weakened their democracy. The complete opposite is true for the effect of force on regimes and societies that are not democratic, as they find in force a source of solidity and strength, turning it into a basis upon which their much-coveted “iron” unity is built.
Even when democracies win a war, as they often do, they are nonetheless playing in an arena that is not their own or are being dragged into what is supposed to be the arena of others. Thus, we note, for example, that the United States did not enter World War II until after the “surprise” of Pearl Harbor, a “surprise” that recurred, in different garments, with the attack of September 11, 2001. Today, with the Russian war in Ukraine, Europe, which had been busy reducing its military budgets, is the one taken by “surprise.”
It goes without saying that those not taken by surprise are the ones behind it.
As for being surprised, it stems from the non-military makeup of the surprised and from their bet on the economy, business and their expansion prevailing, a bet that is supported on a wide and varied array of grounds. The politicians may be naive, frivolous, or just not up to the task in general, and there is an abundance of them in any democratic regime, its parliament, and some of its leaders. More important and profound is that the obscure and unfamiliar are surprising in principle, and modern society, in particular, encourages people to be surprised by what is unfamiliar and obscure. Indeed, with its linear conception of time and delusions of modernity being able to control life, it is even surprised by death being a reality that cannot be controlled.
Moreover, there is no agreed-upon framework for dealing with surprise, and the tremor it creates in our consciousness and behavior brings out primitive impulses that contemporary civilization thought it had turned the page on. What looks like wrongdoing, or rather mistakes, in comparison to normal, peaceful times, suddenly emerge. Thus we start asking: is it fathomable how the United States treated the Japanese residing there as it was waging the great battle for human values against Nazism, or that Muslims in the US were treated as they were treated after 9/11? Is it fathomable today, that the defensive and moral war to liberate Ukraine and safeguard its independence is accompanied by European and US measures that include plenty of collective punishment and “witch-hunting?”
Yes, it is. Unfortunately, nothing else happens in war. In order to bring the picture a little closer to home, we go back to the conditions that we all underwent in the Gulf and the Arab world after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the summer of 1990. At the time, the invasion took the whole world by surprise. It was a real blitzkrieg. It is indicative that the response to this blitzkrieg took the form of a long and complex process- and thus by its nature surprised no one- of building a military alliance to restore Kuwait’s freedom and independence. However, in the meantime, in every Arab country without exception, a tsunami of racism and counter-racism was hit, and many paid the price with their lives, jobs or places of residence.
These incidents of racism are condemned strongly, and as a matter of course. Nevertheless, this condemnation does not take precedence over condemning the reason for the incidents, the flame that lit their fuse, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. Furthermore, condemning them does not change the priorities, at the fore of which is the fact that the battle of the Kuwaitis was truly a just battle while Saddam’s war was an assault, an act of aggression.
The same is true for wars, or most of them: What happened to the Japanese and Muslims in the United States is shameful, wrong and immoral, but it does not diminish the righteousness of the US war against the Axis Powers or Bin Laden. The Ukrainians and their allies are not immune to making mistakes, some of which are grave and significant. However, the battle of the Ukrainians, along with the West, against the Russian invasion is nonetheless just, righteous, and moral.
Those who are surprised are often in the right, even if they were not always, and in each act, up to their cause. Those who do the surprising are often the aggressor. The surprise, this time, might be of a nuclear nature that requires assessing scales and responsibilities more precisely!
