The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, May 27, 2024

Notably: I find it odd that in our war-remembrance ceremonies, so richly irrigated with wanton wasted blood, we always remember only the more recent wars, or–since there have been so many, since the United States has seemed incapable of staying out of war for more than a couple of years at a time, if that–the most recently sensational: those wars that can still yield the odd survivor or twelve who could be featured (used, exploited, usually with their sordid or senile consent) at the ceremonies so the rest of us can put hand to heart or salute or clap and wave little flags while playing moments of silence and pretending we’re heartbroken even as we snap this for Instagram and that for X while scrolling for the latest cat video and begging for the ceremony to end so we can shop or cruise wastelands of our own choosing. For we are a civilization, aren’t we? Maybe we don’t care, or prefer not to remember, World War I or all the wars before it, because that act of remembering would be an indictment of our inability–our refusal– to put an end to these wars, a refusal armored in the insulating but ultimately meaningless language of honor, valor, courage: all those values that we regurgitate in ceremonies as sun-broiled as they glorify a cult of death since they enable us to go on fighting, and worse, to go on fighting wars that, as with every single war since August 9, 1945, without exception, have not protected, let alone enhanced, our freedoms, but compromised them, retracted our moral standing, reduced us to a fortress barely dissimilar from, say, Mali, Malawi or Myanmar, but with nukes, dollars and pretensions. For that matter, why do we remember only our wars? What hierarchy would the very god we invoke in those ceremonies countenance that an American life lost at Khe Sanh in 1968 ranks on a higher plane than a Vietnamese–even a Vietcong–life, even from the same battlefield? Or on a higher plane, more memorable plane, than the life of a poor nameless schmuck  killed at the Battle of Hastings, or at Agincourt, or of an errant “Sarasin,” as Islamophobes like to put it, running away from Poitiers in 732? The hierarchies give us structure and comfort, but maybe the hierarchies of loss and remembrance are at the root of our inability to connect across time, space and cultures as human beings, otherwise how else would we go on dehumanizing and massacring each other? By necessity, the cope of memorial days must be as limited as our memories. We could not handle them otherwise. We would not have the capacity to go on, to keep killing, if our ability to memorialize were more full-hearted as as unlimited as humanity’s history of carnage. We remember so few of the dead so we can kill another day. 

—P.T.

 

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If I may use myself as an example, I know that if the nuclear button were on my desk and a nuclear attack were launched against the United States I would be unable to retaliate in kind. I would utterly lack the “resolve” to do this. In fact, my whole resolve would be that it not be done. This “retaliation” would seem to me to be a separate, new, unspeakable crime in its own right, which was in no way an appropriate response to the unspeakable crime that had just been committed against my country. As I see it, it would, in fact, not even be retalia-ton, since most of the people it would kill innocent citizens, including children- -would have had nothing to do with their government’s criminally insane decision. Yet I know that this unwillingness of mine would, if it were generalized into a pol-icy, be so far outside the pale politically as to have virtually no acceptance. In that sense, to truly say “no” to nuclear weapons forces one into a position that is politically irrelevant- at least, as far as present policy is concerned. Although I can’t speak for others, I suspect that there are many people who want to say a real “no” to nuclear weapons but find that majority opinion is overwhelmingly against them. So, in desperation, they, like the bishops, seek partial and gradual measures that, if they are pursued long enough, may enable us one day not only to say but to practice our “no.” The fissure that nuclear weapons have created between our political selves and our moral selves is precisely delineated by the fact that as long as there are nuclear weapons in the world we are compelled to choose between a position that is politically sound but immoral and one that is morally sound but politically irrelevant.

–From Jonathan Schell’s The Abolition (1984).

The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.