There is no finish to a war

I know of only one way to fight, whether at workplace or in geopolitics--civil disobedience.  Thanks to Gandhi, of course.  And the older I get, the more I turn away from violence.  

Thus, these days, this news junkie finds very little to be enthused about.

We are far from Gandhi's pacifism.  What a horrible spring and summer it has been in this year alone.  It is almost as if we humans decided that we will not rest until we completely nuke away the "peace dividend" that we thought was possible when the Soviet empire collapsed and the Cold War ended.

It appears that we have forgotten that, as Hemingway put it, war is hell.  He wrote in A Farewell to Arms:

"There is nothing as bad as war. ... When people realize how bad it is they cannot do anything to stop it because they go crazy.  There are some people who never realize. There are people who are afraid of their officers. It is with them the war is made"
"I know it is bad but we must finish it."
"It doesn't finish.  There is no finish to a war."
"Yes there is."
Passini shook his head.
"War is not won by victory. ...

Yet, we continue with wars. There certainly seems no finish.

The following, which Einstein said in the context of nuclear weapons, is applicable to the non-nuclear kind too:

We cannot desist from warning, and warning again, we cannot and should not slacken in our efforts to make the nations of the world, and especially their governments, aware of the unspeakable disaster they are certain to provoke unless they change their attitude toward each other and toward the task of shaping the future.

Even Japan, a country that renounced war, in favor of peace, right in its constitution, has eased up on that and now encourages exports of weapons.  We humans are, perhaps, doomed to live as the most violent animals until we cause our own extinction.

This piece at the New Yorker discusses, via a Hirohima survivor, a public-health hypothesis that

suggests that untended wartime trauma can move vertically and horizontally through individuals and families, morphing across years, decades, or even centuries.

All the more to worry that there is no finish to a war, right?

Sixty-nine years ago last week, a slender woman named Tomiko Shoji was struck and sent aloft by a bright white light. She’d just arrived at her secretarial job, at a tobacco factory, and was standing by the door when the flash occurred; the light’s source had a nickname, Little Boy, but it meant nothing to her at the time. She flew backward under the crushing force of the office door, passed out, and awoke with shards of glass in her head and an expanse of bodies around her—some dead, some alive but dazed, and many more, she soon found, floating “like charcoal” in nearby rivers. The nineteen-year-old climbed up and out of the shell of her younger self; she had survived the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Nearly seven decades later, Keni Sabath, Shoji’s youngest granddaughter, started to wonder: Had the bombing’s aftermath reshaped not just the psyche of her bachan (grandmother) but also, in ways both culturally and historically particular, her own?

The horrors of war!

In recent years, a growing body of scholarship has sought to better understand accounts like Shoji’s and Sabath’s through the framework of “trans-generational trauma,” which traces experiences of catastrophic loss across the span of a family or a community. A wide range of studies have examined evidence of “secondary trauma” in the children of Holocaust survivors, the wives of Vietnam veterans, and, more informally, in the families of U.S. veterans who’ve faced P.T.S.D. after deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2007, a study on the wives of fifty-six traumatized war veterans in Croatia found that more than a third of the veterans’ wives met the criteria for secondary traumatic stress; often, this meant symptoms “similar to those present in directly traumatized persons: nightmares about the person who was directly traumatized, insomnia, loss of interest, irritability, chronic fatigue, and changes in self-perception, perception of one’s own life, and of other people.” More recently, speaking to Mac McClelland for an article on trauma in the families of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, the clinical psychologist Robert Motta said, “Trauma is really not something that happens to an individual.” Instead, he proposed, “Trauma is a contagious disease; it affects everyone that has close contact with a traumatized person.”

Wishing for peace is something we have been doing for thousands of years.  Perhaps every time we think we are getting close to achieving it, we humans decide to return to our old ways of killing.  I will leave it to Hemingway to explain why this happens:

"There is a class that controls a country that is stupid and does not realize anything and never can. That is why we have this war."
"Also they make money out of it."

I am guessing that the typical war-monger has never read Hemingway :(

Caption at the source:
MORA DE EBRO, Spain—Hemingway on the front lines with members of Gen. Enrique Lister’s Loyalist 5th Regiment
who were holding out against Gen. Franco's offensive, Nov. 5, 1937.

Update at 22:45 on Aug 14th:

Marine Cpl. Robert Richards, a medically retired combat veteran who was badly wounded in Afghanistan and later appeared in a controversial video urinating on dead Taliban insurgents, was found dead Wednesday night in his home in North Carolina. He was 28.
...
a sniper team led by Richards recorded a video on July 27, 2011, of him and other Marines urinating on the remains of Taliban fighters they had killed. It was never intended to be seen by the public, but Richards later said that the Marine who owned the camera stepped on an IED a couple weeks afterward, and it ended up in the hands of another Marine in the unit. It was posted online, causing an international uproar that led to eight Marines facing discipline.
...
In an exclusive 90-minute interview with this reporter for Marine Corps Times in September 2013, Richards acknowledged intense struggles with post-traumatic stress and night terrors afterward, and taking a variety of medications to deal with it. In one ugly night in Florida, he said he was caught off-guard by a celebration involving replica cannons being fired, and fired a pistol in his hotel room while his wife, Raechel, was present. He thought he was under attack, he said.

There is no finish to a war :(