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Rambo and Stallone on War
“Wisdom is better”
by Charles Strohmer
“Old men start wars. Young men fight them. And everyone in the
middle gets killed. War is natural. Peace is accidental. We’re
animals.” According to Joel Stein, in Newsweek (Feb. 4, 08), that’s what Sylvester Stallone wanted John Rambo to explain in the new Rambo
film. Stallone, however, cut that dialogue, “because Rambo is a
silent man, and blurting out your thesis is for college papers, not
movies.”
“What I was trying to say,” Stallone told Stein, “is
that the world will never come together and say we are one. Rocky
represents the optimistic side of life, and Rambo represents purgatory.
If you think people are inherently good, you get rid of the police for
24 hours—see what happens.” Is the new Rambo, then, a jaded realism that will make audiences feel good about going to war?
Viewers will have to judge for themselves. I won’t be seeing
the film. It’s reviewed as the most violent Rambo
in the series, which is saying a lot, and I’ve got wiser ways to spend my time, and
money, than sitting for ninety minutes in a comfortable theater
chair imaging hell.
Stallone’s an interesting guy, however, and listening to him rap about war and the new Rambo
revived a thought I’ve had buried: why did so many Americans who
now admit that they should have known better endorse the war about Iraq
in the first place? The media, like a particularly annoying dripping
faucet, never tires of reminding us that many Americans signed
off on the war: to rid the world of a dictator, or to bring freedom to
the Iraqis, or to find Saddam’s stockpiled WMD, or because Saddam
had helped al Qaeda with the attacks on 9/11, or to spread democracy in
the Middle East. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.
I’m not going to recite, here, what is objectionable about those
sound bites. (I would, however, be happy to supply interested
readers with a list of reputable titles which disclose just that.) I
want to deal with something else, instead. I want to suggest a reason
of my own, about why it was that so many Americans who should have
known better endorsed the war about Iraq, and why, by default, many
remain willing to bless another war of the same sort (I’m thinking
of Iran, here).
Here it is, in brief. People will support a war because they are
personally
unacquainted with the pathology of war. Never having themselves been to
war, they give their
blessing to a war out of naivety, not knowing what it is, really,
that they are sanctioning. Even the evening news footage coming
out of Iraq, relentless as it is in its horrific images of carnage and
human cost, may never be enough, not even in its accumulated effect, to
turn many people from the rush to war. For war remains
ever at a
distance to them, the intervening space being no substitute for the
kind of wise decision-making that only personal knowledge makes
available for some people, who might gain a different cast of mind
if they fought in a war or if
their families had been ravaged by one. Since that seems unlikely, is
there any alternative? For minds open to a wiser way ahead, perhaps.
Try this.
From a distance, then, pluck up your nerve and get hold of a copy of Chris Hedges’s War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.
Hedges was a veteran war correspondent for more than twenty years. He
reported from many fronts, throughout a career in which he’d been
ambushed (Central America), imprisoned (Sudan), beaten (by the Saudi
Police), shot at (Iraq; Serbia), shelled for days (Sarajevo), seen
children murdered for sport (Gaza), and much else. Close up like this,
one comes to know the pathology of war, which for Hedges includes such
human concerns as: the cries of the vanquished; the empty jingoism
behind abstract words like glory, honor, and patriotism; the lies that
victors often do not acknowledge; and the truth about war, which comes
out, Hedges acknowledges, but usually too late.
Up close and personal, Hedges gained wisdom for understanding just what
one is sanctioning in a war. Those who have been to war
will know, as will its victims. They rest of us need to know, as best
we can from a
distance, in order to become wiser about what we are
being asked to bless. Maybe our endorsement of a distant war
provides a vicarious sense of satisfaction about the itch for a fight
that remains too latent in many of us who have never been in a
war. Hedge’s honest, albeit disturbing, voice has earned
him the right to be heard by those of us who have never
personally experienced war’s hell on earth, and yet who think we
can make intelligent decisions about endorsing a war.
“War and conflict have marked most of my adult life,”
Hedges writes. “I have seen too much of violent death. I have
tasted too much of my own fear. I have painful memories that lie buried
and untouched most of the time. It is never easy when they surface. I
learned early on that war is its own form of culture. The rush of
battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I
ingested for many years. It is peddled by mythmakers —
historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists, and the state
— all of whom endow it with qualities it often does not possess:
excitement, exoticism, powers, chances to rise above our small stations
in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and
dark beauty. It dominates cultures, distorts memory, corrupts language,
and infects everything around it, even humor, which becomes preoccupied
with the grim perversities of smut and death. Fundamental questions
about the meaning, or meaninglessness, of our place on the planet are
laid bare when we watch those around us sink to the lowest depths. War
exposes the capacity for evil that lurks not far below the surface
within us all. And this is why for so many of us war is so hard to
discuss once it is over.
“The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its
destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can
give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the
midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of much of our
lives become apparent. Trivia dominates our conversations and
increasingly our airwaves. And war is an exciting elixir. It gives us
resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble. When we ingest the anodyne
of war we feel what those we strive to destroy feel.... It is the same
narcotic. I partook of it for many years. And like every recovering
addict there is a part of me that remains nostalgic for war’s
simplicity and high, even as I cope with the scars it has left behind,
mourn the deaths of those I worked with, and struggle with the
bestiality I would have been better off not witnessing. There is a part
of me — maybe it is a part of many of us — that decided at
certain moments that I would rather die like this than go back to the
routine of life. The chance to exist for an intense and overpowering
moment, even if it meant certain oblivion, seemed worth it in the midst
of war — and very stupid once the war ended.
“I covered the war in El Salvador from 1983 to 1988. By the end I
had a nervous twitch in my face. I was evacuated three times by the
U.S. embassy because of tips that the death squads planned to kill me.
Yet each time I came back. I accepted a grim fatalism that I would be
killed in El Salvador. I could not articulate why I should accept my
own destruction and cannot now. When I finally did leave, my last act
was, in a frenzy of rage and anguish, to leap over the KLM counter in
the airport in Costa Rica because of a perceived slight by a hapless
airline clerk. I beat him to the floor as his bewildered colleagues
locked themselves in the room behind the counter. Blood streamed down
his face and mine. I refused to wipe the dried stains off my cheeks on
the flight to Madrid, and I carry a scar on my face from where he
thrust his pen into my cheek. War’s sickness had become
mine” (pp 3-6). Hedges, who holds an M.Div. from Harvard Divinity School, would be a
good source of wisdom for those whose psychology allows them to endorse a
war out of naivety.
If you’re more drawn to theory than to
narrative, give Jonathan Schell a go. Schell, a distinguished
international relations theorist, has written an eloquent and
thoughtful work, The Unconquerable World,
which convincingly draws from modern history to explain why nations
can more frequently chose non-martial means for solving
international crises than they customarily choose to do. Commenting on
the net effect of the militarism of the past 100 years, including the
invasion of Iraq, Schell writes that “in a steadily
and irreversibly widening sphere, violence, always a mark of human
failure and a bringer of sorrow, has now become dysfunctional as a
political instrument. Increasingly it destroys the ends for which it is
employed, killing the user as well as his victim. It has become the
path to hell on earth.” The “days when humanity can hope to
save itself from force with force are over. None of the structures of
violence ... can any longer rescue the world from the use of violence,
now grown apocalyptic. Force can only lead to more force, not to peace.
Only structures of cooperative power can offer hope” (pp 3-7;
345).
There are ways wiser than war. This is true even for resolving
seemingly intractable problems like the ones that were posed by Saddam
Hussein’s regime. But in the rush to war, the path of wisdom gets
trampled under foot. Hedges and Schell, who, interestingly, at the end
of the day do not consider themselves pacifist, are two of the emerging
trustworthy voices crying, each in their own way, for ways wiser
than war in international relations.
Of wisdom, the Bible itself so cries: Listen to me! Listen! Counsel and sound judgment are
mine. My paths are paths of peace. Wisdom is better than weapons of
war. Here is plea for rulers and their advisors to more consistently follow a worldview in which God
created and sustains the world by wisdom,
not by war.
A worldview in which the one war that was truly worth the fight was fought and won by Christ
on Calvary’s hill, that we ourselves might be made wiser about
war. Any takers?
(Author
of several books and many other publications,
Charles Strohmer is a visiting fellow of The Center for Public Justice
and currently writing and speaking on U.S.-Mideast relations. See:
www.charlesstrohmer.com/wisdomproject.html.)
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