CIVIL WARS: FROM L.A. TO BOSNIA

By Hans Magnus Enzensberger
The New Press (1993)
$18 144 pages
Reviewed by J. Douglas Allen-Taylor

There is this story my mother tells, from the Vietnam times. It was tough on her. My older brother was drafted in 1966. A fierce young African-American Nationalist, he left the country rather than fight in the white mans war. For a long time there was no word from my brother, and we did not know whether he was alive or dead. Within a year I, too, was a war resister: drafted, indicted by a Federal Grand Jury, hunted by the FBI, eventually swallowed up in the shadows of Underground America.

My parents own a Mom and Pop store in Oakland. During the years while I was a fugitive, the sister of one of my high school classmates often came by the store. Her brother had also been drafted, and had chosen to fight with the U.S. forces in Vietnam. The sister was very, very proud of him. She'd show my mother pictures he'd sent: some with him and his war buddies giving clenched-fist salutes; some in Saigon bars with Vietnamese girls on his arm; some with his shirt off, flexing the muscles that had helped him become a star high school athlete; always with his hat at that roguish angle African-American men so often effect.

My mother tried to talk to her about the War. It was wrong. We should not be fighting there. It was a dangerous place to be. He should not have gone.

But this little sister, she did not want to hear it. Her brother was her hero. He'd taught her how to ride a bike. He'd kept the fellows straight when they tried to date her. He'd once gone to the state track championships in L.A., running the 440 backstretch on a sunbaked afternoon at a college stadium in front of ten thousand people. He'd be on a ship docking at the Oakland Army Depot soon, broad black chest full of shiny medals, his hat pulled to the side of his head, laughing and squeezing her until all her breath came out. He was her older brother. He could do everything.

Except, of course, come back from Vietnam.

The girl came into my parents' store one spring morning, and the trembling of her small mouth and the tears that flowed in great streams from her brown eyes told everything that she could not say. My mother came from behind the counter and held her in the way the brother never would again, and the girl just stood there and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. "You was right, Mrs. Allen, you was right," she said, over and over. "I swear to God, he shouldn't have gone. Oh, damn, I wish I'd made him stay!"

They held each other for a while, that spring morning late in the 1960's, an ancient women's ritual...two women who had never taken up arms in anger against another person...united now in the embrace of the fleshless god Grief that rides always in that bright, deathly chariot pulled by the slathering Beasts of War.

I think of that story my mother tells as I watch CNN each evening, awaiting the inevitable news flash of U.S. troops embarking for another foreign port, and U.S. missiles unleashed once more on another section of the world. It's coming, sooner or later. It is in our national character.

Americans were once an arrogant people, thinking we could harness War to master the world. But now we are turning into merely a silly people, a nation of foolish self-delusion. Now we not only think we can conquer War and use it to our own ends, we believe we can sanitize it as well. We think we can make it clean and glittery-glorious-only. We think that we drive War from our shores and send it on the backs of our great fleets to the homes and streets of other nations, and we think that by so doing we can escape from its effects upon ourselves. But we cannot.

Part of the modern mythology of the American nation is that our insensitivity to the effects of War comes from our power and isolation. The two major wars of the twentieth century that laid waste much of the rest of the world hardly grazed American soil at all. Two great oceans and a bristling battery of fierce defenses protects us from invasion on the home front. Let a few bombs drop on American cities for a change, so the myth goes, and we will understand the effects of War and lose our fascination with it.

History, unfortunately, does not support such a view.

The most devastating war to be waged on American soil took place almost within living memory. Between 1861 and 1865, Union and Confederate armies fought battles from Texas to Pennsylvania, soaking the plains and hills with blood, leveling cities in their path. Of particular note was the almost-unobstructed 1864 march of the Army of the Tennessee from Atlanta to the sea and then up through the heart of the Carolinas, burning plantations at will, tearing up crops, slaughtering livestock and tossing the carcasses down the wells so that the water was undrinkable for years. The purpose of that march, according to its architect, General William Sherman, was to let Southern civilians get a personal taste of the war they had unleashed upon the nation, to "make Georgia howl." When I came to South Carolina in the late 1960's, older white Southerners spat out Sherman's name as if he were there in the flesh for them to spit in his face.

You would think, then, that Southerners, who had their faces mashed in the red clay dirt by the great foot of War, would be the most pacifistic of our people. And yet, to this day, they continue to be the most warlike.

And commanders like George Custer, who witnessed the destruction Lee and Meade brought to sleepy, college-town Gettysburg, rode almost directly from the war in East out into the Dakota hills, where they found it quite easy on their consciences to rain the same destruction on sleepy Native American villages. The American nation gave its assent in the only way that matters: we let it happen.

As always when dealing with the United States, a portion of the problem is an issue of race.

We seem to understand the effects of War quite well, when the suffering souls are European or of European descent.

In "Civil Wars," a study of modern world violence, German essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger describes the reactions of the mostly-American newspaper reporters who described the first days in Europe at the end of World War II:

"They each came from which was similar to [Europe]: orderly, normal, characterized by the thousand and one things we take for granted in a functioning civil society. The sense of shock engendered by the European disaster they confronted was all the greater. They could hardly believe their eyes in the face of the brutal, eccentric, terrifying and moving scenes, which they experienced in Paris and Naples, in the villages of Crete and the catacombs of Warsaw."

But when viewing a society that is not "similar" to our own, Americans find ourselves not so shocked by the effects of War. "Well, it's just that They (meaning Africans, Asians, Arabs, Latinos) don't have the same dependence on modern civilization that We (meaning Europeans) do," Americans are fond of thinking (if sometimes a little ashamed of saying). "They don't have the same capacity for democracy and democratic institutions that We do. They have a different, more stoic, more fatalistic, attitude toward death than We do. They have a much, much higher tolerance for pain than We do." And Arab- and Asian- and African- and Latino-Americans, not wanting to be known as disloyal citizens, often join the chorus, merely performing the neat sociological trick of removing our own designation from the They category and moving it over to the We, leaving everything else intact.

And so America, a peaceful nation which abhors War, can in all good conscience practice chemical warfare in the Cambodian forests, or mine Nicaraguan harbors, or send screaming missiles slamming into ancient Iraqi cities. They do not feel it in the same way We do. In such a manner, in earlier times, did the Christian slavemasters justify slavery.

Enzensberger seems to think this is some sort of tragically inevitable, genetic, human flaw. Quoting Claude Lévi-Strauss, he writes:

"It is well known that the concept 'mankind' which includes all life-patterns of the species man, without distinction of race or civilizations, arose very late and is not widespread . . . Mankind stops at the boundaries of the tribe...so that a large number of so-called primitive peoples give themselves a name which means 'men'...which simultaneously indicates that the other tribes...have no share in the good qualities."
And thus, though he fails to so state it, Enzensberger appears to imply that such drawing of differences leads inevitably to War and that War, therefore, is inevitable.

I disagree. War is not a natural phenomenon, nor is it the curse of some angry God for punishment of humanity's sins. For most of humanity's existence on this planet, War did not exist. We created it. We unleashed it. It is within our power, and certainly our responsibility, to rein it in.

America, perhaps, will not live to see that day. We Americans are fascinated with violence. Peaceful as we think we are, when the time comes most of us worship at the feet of the great God War. And those that do not worship too often keep a hush while the services go on, and do not act to make it stop.

War will bite America again one day. It has a way of devouring its own children, yes it does. And when it does, perhaps, that will be the day of our national doom.

Fortunately, the species will most likely survive the loss.