Tani Newton
As time moves on and the world changes, the danger of using outdated paradigms increases, especially if we are using them as a way of understanding what is happening around us.
What does the word ‘war’ make us think of? In the Anzac countries, it immediately brings to mind the World Wars, diggers, poppies and “the horror of the trenches”. Fifty years ago, one mentally added ‘We will remember them,’ ‘For king and country,’ or something similarly impressive and imperialistic. Nowadays, in a world where patriotism is anathema and freedom is something that only evil conspiracy theorists want, the Anzac Day sentiment has meaninglessly become ‘They died for our freedom.’
Whatever the words, though, we still have the image of something idealistic, of people fighting for something that was more dear to them than life itself. Go back the odd century, and we have even more stirring images of valiant men riding into battle or going down with their ships. The farther back you go, the more elevated it becomes, from quests for grails and maidens in towers to the Greek legends where the combatants might even be semi-divine.
The cynics among us will say that all of this is moonshine and that wars are fought over the ownership of land. But, just as importantly, no one goes to war privately or for private reasons. War is a public affair and unlikely to succeed without the support of the public.
Which brings us to the question of consent in war. As I mentioned in a previous article, Mediaeval rulers, far from having absolute power, were unable to raise an army without the voluntary support of the barons, and military service was limited by law. War was, to a considerable degree, fought by consent. Mass-scale conscription is largely a feature of the modern world. It has baffled me for decades how people can say ‘they fought for freedom’ when they are talking about men who were forced into the army, and sent out to be shot by the enemy on threat of being shot by their own side. If that is freedom, who would want to defend it?
Of course, the concept of freedom in past centuries was not so much one of individual choice as of national freedom from foreign domination. And we are back to war being about the ownership of land.
But there is one great difference, one difference of staggering proportions, between war as it is practised today and war before the modern era. And that is that in the past, the kings and rulers who declared war rode into it at the head of their troops. There was no question of whether or not they believed in what they were doing when their own lives were first in the firing line. That, surely, makes modern warfare a fundamentally different thing. And I think we are entitled to ask whether wars today are being waged for financial gain or other personal and undeclared reasons, rather than the seemingly noble rationale that may have been provided for public consumption. The idea of going valiantly to die in the necessary defence of one’s country or heritage is a paradigm that may not fit any more. If so, then we should be challenging it, and questioning the right of people who have no intention of getting hurt themselves to annihilate hundreds of thousands of people who did not ask for war.
