Ending the Logic of War
Fabian Scheidler / Substack
(May 6, 2024) — Over more than two decades, the Western world has moved further and further into a permanent state of crisis and emergency, which, according to the rhetoric of some of our leading politicians, has now escalated into an outright state of war.
It began with the “war on terror” after September 11 and the subsequent attacks in Europe, followed by the responses to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and finally the Gaza war, which especially the US and Germany are supporting with massive arms supplies.
A state of war was also declared by many Western heads of state in response to the pandemic, with Emmanuel Macron famously proclaiming: “We are at war. And that requires our general mobilization.”
In the name of fighting the respective enemies, a massive rearmament of the military, police and surveillance technologies was set in motion, basic civil rights were restricted. Urgent concerns such as social justice and climate protection have been and continue to be marginalized with reference to ever new states of emergency and the overpowering threat posed by the current enemy. In Germany, we are hearing increasingly militaristic tones from top politicians that are reminiscent of the late days of the German Empire, with the Minister of Defense, Boris Pistorius, calling on the country to become “ready for war”.
While the capitalist world-system is in a permanent structural crisis and the legitimacy of Western political elites is dwindling, governments tend to resort to states of war and emergency, as this allows them to silence domestic conflicts and to justify massive crackdowns on dissidents. In the logic of war, the view is narrowed to the external enemy, societies are called upon to close ranks. Anyone who disagrees runs the risk of being declared an ally of the enemy.
It is obvious that these developments are extremely dangerous for a democracy. In view of the global challenges that are likely to increase in the coming decades due to geopolitical shifts, growing environmental crises and scarcity of resources, it is high time question the logic of war and to highlight different responses to current and future crises.
First of all, when we look back, it should be noted that neither the US nor any EU country has been attacked militarily since the Second World War (apart from the conflict over the British colony of the Falkland Islands in 1982). The attack on September 11, 2001 was a serious crime, but – as the term terrorist attack implies – by definition not a military attack. Since then, despite all internal conflicts, peace has prevailed in these countries. The situation, however, is different when we look the other way around: The US alone has been involved in around 200 military interventions around the globe since 1950. In addition, it has engaged in more than 70 covert regime change operations – often against democratically elected governments – plunging the affected nations into decades of chaos or authoritarian rule. The UK, France, Germany and other Western countries were also involved in numerous military operations abroad, most of which were sold to the public as noble missions in defense of human rights. But the real balance sheet looks different.
The war in Afghanistan alone, the centerpiece of the “war on terror”, has cost 176,000 lives, 98 percent of them Afghans. The September 11 attacks, to which this war was the response, claimed 2996 lives – one sixtieth of the victims of the subsequent war. While 80 percent of Afghans lived in poverty before the war, 97 percent did so after the withdrawal of the USA and its allies. Terrorism has exploded worldwide as a result of these “wars on terror”. Whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya: wherever Western missions have been active, they have left behind failed states and a trail of devastation.
As a result of these interventions, terror finally arrived in Europe. Western societies did not respond to the attacks in Madrid, London, Paris and elsewhere with self-reflection and a change in their policy towards Arab states, but with more military operations abroad, while boosting mass surveillance, militarization of the police, and restrictions on civil liberties domestically. This is despite the fact that even in the years of the most bloody attacks in Europe, more than 100 times as many people died from multi-resistant hospital germs as from terror. If the money had been invested in the healthcare system, ruined by decades of austerity, instead of the military, tens of thousands of lives could have been saved instead of sparking new wars.
We encounter here two essential characteristics of Western responses to crises and violence: firstly, the extreme disproportionality between event and reaction. The threat posed by the enemy is magnified out of all proportion, the responses are completely out of scale in relation to the original act and can even cause orders of magnitude more damage and casualties. Secondly, the inability to grasp the cycle of cause and effect. Acts of violence such as terrorist attacks are interpreted as manifestations of a primordial evil without a history; the world disintegrates into a Manichean duality of good and evil that no longer allows for any complexity or shades. There is no analysis of the causes and prehistory, especially not when it comes to one’s own mistakes or even complicity. On the contrary: anyone who addresses the genesis of the violence and the role of their own governments in it is accused of relativizing and trivializing the enemy.
After the Hamas attacks on Israel, which claimed the lives of 1140 people, one might have expected that lessons would have been learned from the disastrous outcome of the war on terror. But instead, Western governments supported the Israeli government in repeating the mistakes of that time. Once again we are witnessing an almost obscene disproportionality in the military response, which has now claimed the lives of 34,000 people, 14,000 of them children. This is 30 times as many deaths as on October 7. The causes of the violence are not only being ignored, but are even being exacerbated by the permanent traumatization and humiliation of the enemy. An analysis of the roots of the escalation, such as Israel’s 16-year blockade of the Gaza Strip in violation of international law, is denounced as a legitimization of Hamas’ deeds and a betrayal of Israel. Hence, the Israeli government and the Western states supporting it have embarked on a maelstrom of blind destruction without any realistic political goal.
The inability or reluctance to understand the connection between cause and effect, the excessiveness of reactions, the pompous and narcissistic self-adulation as representatives of the good, the denunciation and suppression of criticism, the lack of empathy towards the victims and the inability to comprehend even a minimum of complexity are signs of an alarming mental regression among the political elites of the Western world. Indeed, this regression is disturbingly reminiscent of the “sleepwalkers” on the eve of the First World War.
And that brings us to the war in Ukraine, which, like the Gaza war, carries the risk of global escalation. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 was undoubtedly a serious violation of international law and a crime against the Ukrainian people. And yet these findings do not exempt us from analyzing the causes and the question of whether and how this war could have been avoided, what role the West played in it – and how it can be ended. It should be a matter of course in political analysis that investigating causes has nothing to do with legitimizing crimes, that there can be more than one culprit in a conflict and that the misdeeds of the one in no way justify those of the other.
But even these minimal requirements for rational thinking seem to go beyond the grasp of Western foreign policymakers and media pundits. Instead of seeing the war in Ukraine as an expression of geopolitical and regional conflicts of interest that have a history and could possibly even be resolved diplomatically, it is portrayed as a Manichean struggle between the ever virtuous, God-sent West against the diabolical dragon from the East, which is driven by an insatiable greed for power, blood and land. A typical indication of this relapse into mythical thinking and propagandistic demonization is the inflation of comparisons between Putin and Hitler, which both the press and top politicians on both sides of the Atlantic routinely indulge in. This tendency culminates in the fully-fledged regressive fantasy that the satanic beast in Moscow wants to devour us all – in other words, the whole of Europe and eventually the rest of the world. In Germany, defense minister Pistorius has already prophesied that the time for a Russian attack on NATO will come in “five to eight years”. Apparently he either disposes of a crystal ball or he sees, like John of Patmos, the approach of the apocalypse in nightly visions. Yet there is not the slightest indication that the Russian leadership would ever be so suicidal as to attack a NATO country and thus send itself to nuclear nirvana.
No, we are not dealing here with an incarnation of primeval evil, not with Voldemort or Sauron, nor with a new Hitler, but with a thoroughly rational, albeit often unscrupulous, actor who in this respect is hardly any different from the major Western powers – just think of the Iraq war. The Russian leadership is pursuing very clearly defined and regionally limited goals with this war. This includes, in particular, the neutrality of Ukraine. According to a recently leaked document on the negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, this was also at the heart of a possible ceasefire agreement in spring 2022 – with Ukraine’s express consent. At the time, Russia had held out the prospect of withdrawing to the lines of February 23, 2022 in return.
Today, this option is practically off the table and Ukraine is in a much worse negotiating position. The suppression of sober analysis by mythical thinking has prevented the West from engaging in de-escalation and peacemaking. Instead of participating in the numerous negotiating missions of the Turkish government, of Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennet and later of the South African, Brazilian and Chinese governments, Western politicians, led by the US, have rejected or even sabotaged all diplomacy and opted for the pipe dream of a complete reconquest of the occupied territories, which even according to the Pentagon and the long-time commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, has long been completely unrealistic. Once again, the West is lurching towards a permanent escalation with pompous rhetoric, but without a political goal, while a new Verdun is looming in Ukraine. The only answer our political leadership has given to the geopolitical changes associated with the rise of China and the decline of the US hegemony is: more weapons. Almost all other pressing tasks, from social justice to a serious protection of the biosphere, are sacrificed on the altar of rearmament, which supposedly has no alternative. Cults of sacrifice are always part of the logic of war.
But the logic of war is not destiny. The answer to the acts of violence of the recent past lies in our hands. Neither the Russian invasion of Ukraine nor the Hamas attack are forcing us into a spiral of militarization, armament and war. On the contrary, this spiral only makes our lives and the survival of our species on the battered planet Earth even more precarious. We can only achieve security by tackling the causes of violence and creating a new peace order that takes equal account of the security interests of all parties involved: Israelis and Palestinians, Ukrainians and Russians, Americans and Chinese. To achieve this, we must learn to see the world through the eyes of others. The West is not God’s chosen force for good in the world; on the contrary, it has left a 500-year trail of violence on Earth. Its dominance will inevitably come to an end in the 21st century. May we find the wisdom to accept this transition and perhaps even see it as an opportunity for a more peaceful world.
This article was first punished in German by the Berliner Zeitung.
Fabian Scheidler is the author of the book “The End of the Megamachine. A Brief History of a Failing Civilization”, which has been translated into numerous languages. In 2021, he published “The Stuff We Are Made of. Rethinking Nature and Society”. As a journalist, he has worked for Le Monde diplomatique, Berliner Zeitung, Taz, Reporterre, Radio France, Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik and many others. Fabian Scheidler received the Otto Brenner Media Prize for critical journalism in 2009. www.fabianscheidler.com
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