Book review: Wounding the World

Wounding the World: How Military Violence and War-Play Invades Our Lives

By Joanna Bourke

Virago, 320 pages, £20

In Helmand province in September 2011, Sergeant Alexander Wayne Blackman shot a wounded Taliban fighter, a killing recorded by a helmet-mounted camera. “Shuffle off this mortal coil, you [expletive] ... ” Blackman said before turning to his comrades and adding, “Obviously, this doesn’t go anywhere, fellas. I just broke the Geneva conventions.” He was subsequently convicted of murder and given a minimum sentence of 10 years before he becomes eligible for parole. When it closed this month, 107,000 people had signed an e-petition demanding his release.

In Wounding the World, Professor Joanna Bourke reports that one of the highest-ranking officers in the marines argued that Blackman is “a normal civilian tainted only by the impact of war”. Bourke’s central thesis is that we have all become tainted.

Bourke, a historian of violence, has written a series of books, including the award-winning “An Intimate History of Killing” (1999) and “What It Means to Be Human (2011), in which with scholarship, clarity and a skilful way with the telling phrase that sticks in the mind long after the final chapter is read, she vigorously reminds us that we need a greater sense of vigilance about what is being done to us — and in our name.

“Wounding the World” is essential reading, and particularly so at a time of the commemoration of two world wars. “We are a warring people,” she begins; men and women. “War has entered, uninvited, our homes and taken up residence.” This invasion is insidious, destructive and dehumanising and rich in hypocrisy and black humour (French soldiers in the First World War were instructed to shoot people but not pheasants). Bourke poses a crucial question: “How does the militarisation of society normalise and neutralise the effects of violence?”

Militarisation is certainly big business. In 2012, the United Kingdom had the fourth highest annual military expenditure in the world at £61 billion (Dh353 billion). It exported more than £12.3 billion of arms to countries that the Foreign Office admits engage in serious human-rights abuses, including Israel, China and Zimbabwe. The US has an annual military expenditure of $682 billion (Dh2.5 trillion) with 1.4 million service personnel on active duty.

Bourke is most effective in showing how the toxic stain of militarisation spreads into civilian life. She reports that between 2001 and 2006, there were at least 1,900 military projects conducted in 26 UK universities valued at around £725 million, and says that the UK is the second highest funder of military R&D in the world.

In her fine polemic, Bourke also shows how “words are always political”. So a neutralising vocabulary communicates murder and mutilation. In the First World War, bullets were called “haricot beans”. In Vietnam, cluster bombs were “pineapples”. Collateral damage is now familiar code for civilian casualties.

Modern war demands cultural and legal validation to mask and justify its horrors and distract from what is often, although not always, its pointlessness. Spilling blood in battle is eulogised as the alleged making of men. “Killing is a formidable taboo,” Bourke writes. “It almost always leads to self-hatred, shame and guilt — and yet people are constantly inventing ways to aestheticise it and make it enjoyable.”

She quotes from memoirs and letters in which men talk of killing as “ecstatic”, “a strange thrill ... nothing in peace time could make a man feel like that.”

She explains how the doctrine of double effect eases the conscience. “You must sometimes do evil in order to do good,” said Robert McNamara, the US Secretary of Defence from 1961-1968. Bourke’s point is that too many barriers have been removed to erode the ethical terms of engagement, to limit the extent of that evil and to question the need to take up arms in the first place. While one has to have sympathy for the trauma that war can inflict on soldier and civilian, Blackman’s casual disregard of the Geneva conventions is a case in point. As are the atrocities inflicted at Abu Ghraib prison in 2003. Both events were revealed to the wider world by the camera — the unflinching chronicler of the most brutal aspects of militarisation.

Bourke details how lawyers, far from being the guardians of impartiality, justice and ethical behaviour, too frequently legitimise the disregard of international conventions and the abuse of human rights. In the 1990 Gulf war, for instance, the US had 430 lawyers with its armed forces, and they rarely challenged their military masters. Bourke quotes from a 2005 article entitled International Humanitarian Law and Combat Casualties.

The author warns against “setting legal standards that are impossibly high”. If we ignore what is “militarily practicable” we risk “bringing the law into disrepute”. It is an Orwellian world, seeking legitimisation, soaked in blood.

Bourke quotes from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in “Multitude” (2004) in which they warn that one role of the military in our societies is “the production of social life in its entirety”. A militarised civilian society is “the foundation of politics, the basis for discipline and control”. Bourke reports that in February 2012, Congress effectively approved more than 30,000 drones, “controlling domestic population on US soil”. CS gas developed at Porton Down for use against the enemy and inflicted on “volunteer“ guinea pigs was first deployed in 1969 by the British government against civil-rights protesters during rioting in the “Battle of the Bogside” in Londonderry.

Bourke also argues convincingly that we blur violence and entertainment as “militainment” at our cost. Millions are made from films, toys and video games that glorify war and serve the needs of its industry. In 2002, “America’s Army”, for instance, was made for $7.5 million as a video game to recruit teenagers, aged 13 and older, allowing “players to test drive the army”. It has been downloaded more than 42 million times. Many will watch and be immune to its message but where is an anti-militaristic popular culture on the same scale?

True life and fantasy blend chillingly again and again in “Wounding the World”. Bourke refers to Matt J Martin, the American navigator of “Predator”, a 27-foot drone. In his 2010 book, “Predator: The Remote-Control Air War over Iraq and Afghanistan”, he explains how he is based in Nevada. He sends drones 7,500 miles to kill “precision” targets, feeling like “God hurling thunderbolts from afar”. Thunderbolts that too often destroy children and ordinary citizens. Then, at the end of his shift, “the warrior” does the school run.

In the last chapter, Bourke addresses how best we can fight back with “fear and hope” and cleanse the bellicosity that reduces too many fellow citizens to “the other”, deserving of obliteration. The challenge is immense, the tools rudimentary. Bourke’s argument is that we have little alternative but to wake up and resist the terrible power of militarisation — or lose our humanity in the process. Be convinced

source : gulfnews