A WELTER OF THOUGHTS...

SHOULD WE PRIDE OURSELVES ON WAR EXPLOITS?

A great deal of pride and heroism is attached to exploits on battlefields. War-mongering is a gainful political strategy.

What decides the outcome in war -increasingly so in modern wars- is the superiority in arms. The physical skill of soldiers is secondary. It could soon become redundant, thanks to the ascendancy of electronic and robotic warfare.

When there is a gross imbalance between the two warring armies, the inferior of the two is driven to banking more and more on its human skills and genius. This is evident in the case of Ukraine.

America derived a lot of pride -proved rather fleeting, though- from showcasing its technological prowess, thanks to its 'shock and awe' wherewithal in the Iraq war.

Putin's Russia is doing the same now, though a bit less decisively. That apart, it is inevitable that Putin will prevail, though the timeframe for this cannot be set. I don't see Ukraine enduring the present level of battering for long.

But what I want to focus on is something different. Should we pride ourselves on the engines of destruction we invent? Do the terrible efficiency of our arms and ammunitions prove our capacity or incapacity?

I'm afraid the latter. It is because we lack natural means that we have to invent artificial ones. Lions and tigers do not have to invent weapons. They have the weapons they need. They also have the perfected instincts to use them admirably. Their weapons are not meant for senseless violence, unlike the weapons we invent and manufacture. They suffice for purposes of survival. Aggression in man showcases greed, vanity, and senseless cruelty.

All of our achievements, as Plato said long ago, stand on the ground of human inadequacies and imperfections. Doctors, he said, thrive on human suffering. In a healthy society, they would enjoy no prestige.

In a peace-loving culture, the army will not be venerated and pedestalized as we do today. It is heretical in our country to doubt or dispute what the army says or claims. The irony is that this intensifies even as the army gets more and more politicized, which is logically consistent. It is the political establishment, not the army, that gets offended when even neutral things are said about the army.

Every instrument of war must remind us, if we have any historical and anthropological sense, of the inherent inadequacy of humankind. This goes for inventions in general. If we could fly like birds, we wouldn't have needed or invented airplanes. Think of the eagle. It covers a distance of 350 kms per day; and that, without a drop of petrol! Try and emulate the feat.

It seems impressive that human beings invent and manufacture more and more sophisticated instruments and deadlier weapons. (Remember how the Raphale fighter planes were welcomed and celebrated! The euphoria!!) But the lurking sinister reality is that we become slaves to what we create. Technology enslaves. We become the instrument of the instruments we create.

Since we are enlightened enough, we pride ourselves on these means that, by aiding and enabling, disable us.

As for me, I can never understand why war-making -destroying life and poisoning the world- is a greater achievement than giving birth to new life. Who should we celebrate: soldiers or mothers?

I am never in doubt on this count: I will go with mothers, adoring and wondering how they nourish life and preserve the human species. I weep with them when their sons perish on distant battlefields, fighting those who did them no personal harm, for reasons they are not even free to demand or understand.

When war correspondents report, they sing praises to the technology of war-making. They hide the human misery that the death-dance of technological 'shock and awe' mask from sight.

I cannot read a war dispatch without also hearing the birth pangs of the mothers who gave birth to the young men whose life is snuffed out in these theatres of deluded pride and fleeting vanity.