The real evil

I recently heard interviewed on the radio a student at UC Irvine, who is also a marine. When asked about how other students react when they find out that he served in Iraq, he explained that some of them ask "did you kill anyone" but that the main reaction was apathy. This, he found rather frustrating. He said he'd rather have someone condemn the war (an attitude he disagrees with) instead of merely shrugging their shoulders, saying "oh, that's cool" and sticking their iPod headphones in their ears.

Tony Judt has an article in the NYRB arguing that, to put it simply, the United States has been too far removed from war. Compared to most of the rest of the world's population, we've gotten off pretty easily. Even most of the "winners" in World Wars I and II were actually losers: their economies in shambles, an entire generation of young men decimated, millions of widows and fatherless children. By contrast, the United States lost "only" a little over 500,000 soldiers in the two wars combined, and though Americans at home felt the war in different ways (rationing, right-wing crackdowns in WWI, etc.) they were spared the full horrors of war that those living on the Continent or in Asia found unable to avoid.

As a result, says Judt, we've forgotten how bad war is. This makes it easier to sell war as a tool to fix things, a method to destroy evil. But, as Judt says:

It is war, not racism or ethnic antagonism or religious fervor, that leads to atrocity. War--total war--has been the crucial antecedent condition for mass criminality in the modern era.

Judt explains that "The first primitive concentration camps were set up by the British during the Boer War...Armenian Genocide..Holocaust...Pol Pot" None of these would have been possible without the cruelty and dislocations spawned by war.

Judt doesn't answer the question of what to do when war is already ongoing: is more war ever justified? Still, even during the Cold War, there was a sense in the United States that war had to be avoided. Now, it seems we've lost it, and I fear we won't regain it until we blunder into something so big that even Irvine students will have to put down their iPods.