4. Every day factors
supporting the institution of war.
War is not to be accepted
as a necessary evil: what we need is a whole new attitude to war.
The heroic acceptance of war illustrated by “An Airman’s Letter
to his Mother” (see chapter 5) now seems dated, but we must go much
further and cease to recognise war as an acceptable way to settle
disputes. One route to a new attitude lies in the recognition that
there is a two-way relation between what is generally accepted in
society and the assumptions of individuals: societal norms both
influence and are influenced by how individuals think and behave.
We can help to change attitudes to war by making slight adjustments
to the way we speak and behave. Let us start with an example of
a different sort.
Many who read this will have experienced a major change in conventions
about the differences between what men should do and what women
should do. Before World War 2 many people saw the proper place for
a woman to be the home. During the war women took over some men’s
jobs, working as radar operators and lorry drivers in the army,
and in many other jobs previously done by men. They were even allowed
to ferry aircraft from factory to squadron – a big change from pre-war.
Some went as couriers into Occupied France and fought with the Resistance.
In civilian life also they took over men’s jobs in farms, factories
and offices. My own mother was out patrolling the streets as an
Air Raid Warden, checking the blackout and giving help where needed
in a raid.
When the men came back to civvy street, many women resented being
displaced and sent back to the housework. Of course the demand for
greater gender equality had been there for a long time, but in the
years after the war it was greatly helped by a change in general
attitudes. It became improper not to recognise the change in the
way one should talk and behave. Anyone who made a remark derogatory
to women, or wrote “he” when “he or she” was meant, was regarded
as a male chauvinist. Journals gave advice on how to avoid “sexisms”,
like the he/she problem, for instance by writing in the plural.
Whether people say “he” or “she” seems a trivial matter, but disapproval
of the use of “he” for both sexes helped to promote recognition
of greater sexual equality. In the same way, banishing warisms can
help make war less respectable. That will be no easy task because
our everyday discourse is peppered with them. We talk about “keeping
your head down” (good advice in trench warfare), “outflanking your
rival” (a useful cavalry tactic), and “digging in” (trench warfare
again). It seems a trivial matter, no doubt, but eliminating warisms
can help to make war seem less ordinary, less a part of normal life.
Perhaps even worse are phrases like “War on want”: they may help
motivate people to try to eliminate poverty, but there is a hidden
cost, because the way in which we think is shaped by the language
we use. Bush’s totally illogical phrase “War on terror” is particularly
dangerous because it both encapsulates what Bush wanted to do (Go
to war) and indicates what people ought to do: many lives could
have been saved had he asked why Bush’s America had become so much
hated.
Another factor here is war kitsch. Shell cases used as umbrella
stands, cigarette lighters shaped like pistols. Some such objects
are war left-overs: indeed I confess to keeping in a drawer two
table knives marked with the German swastika that I am ashamed to
say I “liberated” in 1945, but others are manufactured solely to
cater to the perverted tastes of those who are trying to establish
a link between the war and themselves. Perhaps by keeping the knives
I also am guilty here.
A similar issue arises with children’s toys. Construction toys for
making warplanes, battleships or army vehicles seem to have a greater
appeal than their civilian equivalents. I have become convinced
that it is almost impossible to stop boys in our culture from using
pieces of wood as pretend guns and playing “bang bang you’re dead”
games: it seems to be part of their nature, and is much less prevalent
in girls. But there is no need to make war toys available. Children
enjoy making civilian aircraft and cruise liners, and war toys make
them feel that war is ordinary.
When I was a child, in the period between the wars when war seemed
very real, we played very sophisticated war games, using blank cartridge
pistols (now banned as highly dangerous) and borrowing my friend
Graham’s father’s World War 1 revolver. We even had a trench and
made charges against an imaginary enemy. We were encouraged by Graham’s
father, who had lost a leg in 1917: I now believe our games were
helping him come to terms with his disability.
Computer games can be vicious purveyors of violence. While some
earlier research has suggested that on average they have little
effect, the question is whether they increase the tendency to violence
in susceptible individuals. Of that there seems little doubt.
Most, but not all, films and books about war focus on the victors,
while the defeated are mere cardboard figures. The victors’ manly
qualities of courage and endurance are emphasized, and a mythology
is created that portrays war as glorious and exciting. This has
been true for a long time, perhaps as long as books have been written.
My own boyhood experience was with Victorian/Edwardian novelists
like Henty and Rider Haggard: violence and war played a major part
in most. “Modern Boy”, a weekly boys’ paper, carried serials on
Biggles (World War 1 pilot), Grey Shadow (World War 1 spy), Professor
Flaznagel (Science Fiction) and others. I must be careful to say
that not all films and books glorify war. “All quiet on the Western
Front” was an early and honourable exception, and some of the post-Vietnam
war films emphasize war’s horrors. But this is a difficult line
to tread. Even films that do not conceal the suffering that is an
integral part of war can exert a fascination for some. Too much
vivid realism can either encourage violence or numb the senses,
too little makes war acceptable.
Schooling has not helped. History has been taught as a history of
wars and conquests, of the world as composed of rival states led
by warrior heroes. It then reflects the view of generals and politicians,
not the combatants who suffered war’s agonies or the bereaved who
mourned their loved ones.
One might think that veterans would broadcast their impressions
of the horrors they have experienced. Some do, but the great majority
do not. My father, who was involved in the campaigns against the
Turks in World War 1 and experienced the Gallipoli campaign and
the battles for Gaza, would tell me stories about the war, but never
the bad bits. The nearest he got to it was a story about how a sniper
had covered the path between his dugout and the latrines.
I went to St. John’s College, Cambridge almost immediately after
World War 2, where there were already about a dozen ex-service men.
With one exception, who was obsessed by his role in the war, we
never talked to each other about it. My war was relatively tame,
so I had little to talk about. But some of the others were multiply
decorated. My roommate had been a thrice decorated night fighter
pilot, but I did not know that or what he had done until I went
to his funeral over sixty years later. Another had been a navigator
in the Pathfinder force of Bomber Command, also multiply decorated,
but he never talked about his experiences. Yet another ex-naval
friend had no legs, but I never knew how he lost them. We treated
it as rather a joke, and I remember calling out “Come on, Peg-legs”
as he tried to keep up with us on the way to the pub.
Why this reticence? There are many possible reasons. Perhaps it
was a by-product of the psychological mechanisms that protect many
veterans, when reflecting on the past, from the full horrors of
their experiences. Failure of these mechanisms can lead to breakdown
and what has been known successively as cowardice, shell-shock,
LMF (lack of moral fibre) and post-traumatic stress disorder. Perhaps
fear of being seen to be shooting a line sealed our lips: boasters
were seen as beyond the pale. Perhaps we just wanted to leave the
war behind us. But I believe the two most important reasons were
survivor’s guilt, which I think we all felt, and for some, guilt
at having killed, which I was fortunate not to have to feel.
The issues I have discussed in these paragraphs suggest ways of
changing the public attitude to war, to seeing it no longer as something
acceptable though with regret, as not an inevitable part of human
existence. As attitudes change, war will become less likely. War
is not inevitable, there are better ways of settling disputes even
in the world of competing states that we have created. Of course,
each of these issues is itself trivial, and they are not the only
ones that help to maintain the institute of war, as we shall see
in the next chapter.
