|
The French Commander Joffre—after pinning a military decoration on a blinded soldier—said to his staff: “I mustn't be shown any more such spectacles. I would no longer have the courage to give the order to attack.”
|
ABSTRACT of Adam Henry Hughes' essay: Despite the fact that graphic images of war are easily located and displayed—and are legitimate historic artifacts—real death and killing must be erased from official war remembrance. Death becomes a passive event visited on soldiers by an unknown, alien force; the daily acts of deliberate killing soldiers carry out are best left to implication.
The reality of war requires intellectual and cultural sanitization. Citizens must be shielded from the consequences of the activity—often waged on their behalf by some authority or government. In many cases, citizens prefer to be shielded from this burden. |
| Koenigsberg: At is core, this is what war is: the production of dead and mutilated human bodies + the refusal to look at the dead and mutilated bodies produced by war + the creation of "beautiful" memorials--that function to "hide" the dead and mutilated human bodies. |
|
I just published an essay, "Hiding the Body Bags: The Nation-State, Killing and Death" by Adam Henry Hughes. A summary is in the box to the right.
Hughes' essay brought to mind a passage from my paper, Awakening from the Nightmare of History, in which I made a similar point--about the denial of what happened to the bodies of the soldier in the First World War:
Perpetuation of warfare requires a denial of what happens to the body of the soldier. Delusions of honor and glory can be sustained only by turning away from the results of battle.
Haig's son reported that the British Commander-in-Chief felt that it was his duty to “refrain from visiting the casualty stations because these visits made him physically ill (in Gilbert, 1994).
The French Commander Joffre—after pinning a military decoration on a blinded soldier—said to his staff: “I mustn't be shown any more such spectacles. I would no longer have the courage to give the order to attack.” War is about the mutilation of the body of the soldier in the name of the sacred ideal. We want the “beautiful” ideals, but don't want to look at the body of the soldier.
These were military commanders who ordered the soldiers to go into battle and who refused to look at the results of their handiwork.
What we witness is massive denial occurring in statu nascendi. The generals who generated death and bodily mutilation refused to look at what they had done; what they had brought into being. They ordered the death charges and then refused to look at the bodies of soldiers--the results of their orders. How strange. How weird. How ordinary. How predictable.
This is why I often produce gruesome images of dead soldiers in trenches, etc. in the Newsletters I publish. It's not that I enjoy these images. Rather, my mission is to overcome the mechanism of denial that perpetuates the institution of warfare. This is the first step toward awakening from the nightmare of history.
Awakening from the nightmare requires seeing and saying: this is what war is. This is what battle does to human bodies. Whatever the "reasons"--and each war seems to have its own reasons--wars have one thing in common: the production of dead and mutilated bodies. Perpetuation of the dream of warfare means not recognizing what happens to the bodies of soldiers.
At is core, this is what war is: the production of dead and mutilated human bodies + the refusal to look at the dead and mutilated bodies produced by war + the creation of "beautiful" memorials--that function to "hide" the dead and mutilated human bodies.
Richard Koenigsberg
|