A/N: I have decided to use my blog posts for my researches on standardised fiction and related topics because I can. This one is one of my college assignments and I personally love it because I had a tough time figuring it out. Hopefully, people in need of this material will not plagiarize it because if you do my collge will kill me for its publication.

How does the validation of violence within state-legitimised frameworks like war rests on invoking a collective ethic as well as a desired aesthetic?

   “Corporal Clegg had a wooden leg 
                                      He won it in the war, in 1944. 
                                              Corporal Clegg had a medal too 
                                               In orange, red, and blue 
                                                He found it in the zoo”
                                                           - Corporal Clegg, Pink Floyd

Noam Chomsky, in The Legitimacy of Violence as a Political Act?¹, debates with Hannah Arendt and Susan Sontag on legitimate and illegitimate violence. He says that the context of a violent act and the goal that it intends to achieve is extremely crucial to determine the legitimacy of the violence. Although, convincing in the argument he presents, I do believe that the very existence of the word “legitimate” used in association with violence is problematic to begin with. My viewpoint may seem absolutist but it confounds me as to how any violent act can legitimatise the destruction of life and property even if the goal is to eliminate the greater evil.

The violent act needs even less arguments to justify its violence if it is carried out under a state-legitimised framework like war. War, unlike any other violent disturbance, has the rare backing of the state and often-unanimous support of the civilians. Why? Remains the question.

To begin with, war is rarely associated with the term “violence”. War violence, as a term, sounds awkward because people assume war to be violent at all cost and hence, futile a topic to be argued upon. It is this inevitability and the consequent sanction of war violence, which shadows the darker story of war.

War is seen as a national crisis; a moment when citizens are called upon to save the nation. Soldiers are conscripted from all arenas of life, irrespective of their wishes and desires, all in the name of saving the country. Specious idealism and false sentimentality are used to emotionally charge and demand its sacrifice. Death is glorified into martyrdom while killing is glorified as valour and courage. Weakness equates to backing out of war or refusing to fight all together and society, consequently, shuns such ‘weak’ and ‘nation betraying’ souls. Hence, a purely political and military action gains a social dimension and a social sanction. All this, because of one reason, state support.

The government is very aware of the war being a massacre, a forced dragging of people to the frontiers to fight for bureaucrats who prefer staying in the safety of their homes. To validate their luxurious withdrawal from the active war they need to give the war a picture, which does not involve gas masks, bloodied bodies, cries of anguish, body mutilation and other war related tortures. This is achieved by a series of symbols, signs and gestures, which have been used since time immemorial.

The first step to validating war violence is by silencing the soldier, the individual. Often soldiers are seen as mass of men in identical uniforms fighting to save the country. That they can have families, that they too have lives dissipates from the mind of the civilians. The term ‘soldier’ portrays the person as a guardian, as a protector. The use of the terms “guardians” and “protector” create a hallowed image of the soldier who is then perceived as either invincible or someone whose death is justified on the grounds of the labels attached to him. The fact that he may not want this life or reality is not mentioned. The voice of the soldier never reaches the masses, it is the voice of the officer at the top who speaks for the soldier; this officer usually does not take part in direct combat. Hence what the civilians get to know is a filtered reality; a reality devoid of the real.

This filtered reality includes a glorification of war as a service to the nation creating in people’s mind a sense of eternal obligation to the nation; an abstract notion. They forget that it is they who form the nation and in an ironic manner, they believe they are obligated to themselves. The notion of a dead soldier being a martyr and not a victim of war also plays in people’s mind as an image of the glorification of war as the utmost service to the nation. In addition to that is the highly ceremonial funeral and building of memorials. What they fail to realise is that all this ‘respect’ and ‘honour’ can only be received after death and not just any death, a cruel, heartless and isolated death. Almost chillingly, people are brainwashed to take pride in the murder of a person.

The nonexistent term ‘murder’ further purifies the image of war. The state makes sure that the killings are not seen as killings but are seen as an act of defence. Worse, is when the state decides to put the blame on civilians saying that the soldiers are killing people in order to save the civilians. This makes sure that no one points fingers at an ongoing war or on how ethical it is. It is seen as inevitable and this sense of the inevitable creates complacency about war violence. If civilians and soldiers are silenced by intelligent use of terms specially designed for wars then they are even more dazzled by the so-called dignity of participating in a war. The shiny medals, the uniform, the impassioned speeches about the country and the air of pride and honour surrounding the army at all times hides the scars, wounds, the mutilations, the fear, the hesitance and the helplessness which a soldier faces.

The gap between the people on the battlefield and the people out of it is taken advantage of by the government who use it to cover up the reality. The government appeals to the nationalistic sentiments of people and uses the symbol of blood as something, which needs to be shed for the country, which has apparently given us a lot. Protection, preservation and resisting infiltration are made the main goals of the war when in reality the only goal of a war is to kill or be killed. In Amitav Ghosh’s Shadow Lines the narrator’s grandmother vehemently argues against Ila being in England, “Everyone who lives there has earned his right to be there with blood: with the their brother’s blood and their father’s blood and their son’s blood. They know they are a nation because they have drawn their borders with blood. Hasn’t Maya told you how regimental flags hang in all their cathedrals and how their churches are lined with memorials to men who died in wars all around the world? War is their religion. That’s what it takes to makes a country.” ² The invocation of homogeneity in terms of nationality and shedding blood for your country being glorified as worthy of being something inscribed on memorials or in India’s case, at India Gate, is again a validation of war; looking at it with awe and respect completely forgetting the gory depths.

W.B. Yeats, from Preface to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936) says, “If the war is necessary, or necessary in our time and place, it is best to forget its suffering as we do the discomfort of fever, remembering our comfort at midnight when our temperature fell, or as we forget the worst moments of more painful disease.”³ This sort of deliberate forgetting of the atrocities and horror of wars is not only shocking but also deceptive. It is a forceful blindfolding of the civilians and an unfair silencing of a soldier’s tale. Surprisingly, both- the narrator’s grandmother and W.B. Yeats- are people who have never been directly involved in a war; they are too victims of the glorification of war: a legal massacre, done over ages. Both romanticise the war instead of dealing with it head on: and raw.

Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est⁴, spares no gory detail of the horrors of the war. From extremely vivid imagery of “knock kneed, beggar like soldiers” to “Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs/ Bitter as cud,” he demystifies the glorified image of war. In a brilliant example of anti-war Literature, Owen successfully breaks the barrier between the soldiers and awestruck civilians by bringing forth the killing and murder of soldiers, of family members, of individuals and the presence of conflicting psychologies. In this poem, he does not find a reason to glorify a soldiers’ death as heroic. The soldier from being a two-dimensional action figure is successfully humanised into a tortured human being. The fact that Owen himself had seen and undergone war atrocities helped him understand the war dynamics better. It is interesting to note that Owen came from a privileged background and that before he joined the army, he had a bird’s eye view of the war. Only after his active involvement on the battlefield did he realise the brutal reality. In the lines, “My friend, you would not tell with such high zest/ To children ardent for some desperate glory,” he rips off the glorious façade of the war by referring to it almost as a quick and easy way to fame. War seems like a cheap means to earn respect. The use of “children” also brings forth the manner in which parents encouraged children barely eighteen to enlist themselves for the army for they are also victims of the romanticization of war.

This obsession with the martial glory and heroism of war is disturbingly portrayed in Owen’s S I W⁵ (Self Inflicted Wound) in which, using easily graspable imagery he talks about a young soldier whose parents are proudly sending him off to the war hoping for the son to return with remnants of the war such as wounds. There is a subversion of typical anecdote of the self-inflicted wound of a soldier in order to be invalided to go home. The ‘self inflicted wound’ that Owen talks about is suicide, which on one hand, is thought of as a courageous act-“'Death sooner than dishonour, that's the style!'/ So Father said.”- And on the other hand, considering the brutal and inhuman conditions of war and the building social pressure can also be seen as desperation. This is what war, forced upon a young individual by his parents who have glorified it, leads him to do, “With him they buried the muzzle his teeth had kissed,/And truthfully wrote the Mother, 'Tim died smiling'.” Surprisingly both- Dulce et Decorum Est and S I W- deal with an undignified death of a soldier contrary to the usually glory attached to the death of the soldier. Hence, the wreaths, the coffin, the ceremonial burial all seems like a pathetic façade when the reality of the war is put forth so brutally.

The rhetoric of patriotism is one of the most effective techniques used to validate war. Patriotism is often subverted into a simplistic idea of killing the enemy. It is narrowed down instead of broadening its scope. This is effectively dealt by Manto in his short story The Dog of Tetwal⁶. The story is not essentially about war but is about Post Partition politics and is an example of the plight of citizens in their effort to participate in the cause of nationalism. So far, the civilian has been dealt with as the ‘outsider’ but in this story, the civilian is the victim of the animosity persisting between India and Pakistan. Using the dog as the symbol for the several unnamed civilians caught in political and military crossfire, Manto structurally defines the craziness and lunacy associated with patriotism and nationalism. From the naming of the dog until he is shot dead, he is treated as minion of both India and Pakistan. After a certain point of time, it becomes unnecessary to prove whether the dog is Indian or Pakistani with both sides taking sadistic pleasure in the helplessness of the dog. Such a kind of helplessness is also seen in wars when in the name of patriotism even civilians validate war but unfortunately, fall victim to the politics of war. They become identity less in an abruptly boundary changing country.

Manto’s exaggeration helps us understand the stupidity of war and violence. The use of the dog instead of a human being effectively evokes emotions, for the dog is always taken to be a helpless, clueless victim of circumstances much like the citizens trapped in the war whose permission is never taken before going into the war. The glorified image of the soldiers as saviours is built at the beginning of the story and towards the end, eccentrically broken with exaggeration as they use the dog for their personal entertainment. Often, the civilians fail to see themselves as victims because they have blind faith in the integrity of the army. They suffer through torture thinking it to be incidental than deliberate.

The validation of war apart from symbols, signs and gestures comes from the myth of its inevitability and its lack of alternatives. War is never the inevitable reality of a country nor is it without any alternatives. The opposite of peace is definitely not war. But the monopoly of this knowledge by the state prevents for a mass opposition to war violence and hence, its glorification and romanticization still continues till date invoking a collective ethic and a desired aesthetic.
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Sources:

1.        "The Legitimacy of Violence as a Political Act." (1957)

2.        Ghosh, Amitav. "Going Away." Shadow Lines. New Delhi: Oxford UP, n.d. 78. Print.

3.        Yeats, W. B. "The Oxford Book of Modern Verse" wwnorton.com. N.p., n.d. Web. .

4.        Owen, Wilfred. "Dulce Et Decorum Est." The Individual and Society. New Delhi: Dorling Kindersley (India), n.d. 157-58. Print.

5.        Stitson, Roger. "Wilfred Owen's War Poetry." The Age Education Resource Centre. N.p., 6 Apr. 2012. Web. 20 Mar. 2013. .

6.        Manto, Sa’adat Hasan. “The Dog of Tetwal.” The Individual and Society. : Dorling Kindersley (India), n.d. 168-179. Print.