WARFARE AND TRUTH

By Richard Koenigsberg

I.   THAT FOR WHICH WE DIE MUST BE TRUE

In warfare, the body and blood of the sacrificed soldier gives rise to the reality of the nation. Killing and dying are undertaken in order to substantiate belief—to validate the ideology in the name of which killing and dying occurs. The sound and fury of battle suggests that something real is at stake. That for which we die must be true. That for which we kill must be true.

The bodies of dead and wounded soldiers anchor belief in the material world. The frenzy of battle persuades us that nations are more than merely “imaginary communities;” that ideologies are more than mere social constructions. In the midst of war, people reflect: surely human beings would not—could not—be dying and killing for no-thing. The alternative hypothesis is preferable: human beings are dying and killing for some-thing.

Franco Fornari in The Psychoanalysis of War (1975) suggests that warfare represents a human situation in which “death assumes absolute value.” The ideas for which we die must be true. Death, Fornari says, becomes a “demonstrative process.” If human beings are willing to kill and die—to perform such horrendous acts for the sake of an idea or belief—surely this idea or belief must possess validity.

Dead and mangled bodies on the field of battle imply the existence of some “thing” that has produced or given rise to the dead and mangled bodies. What has produced such violence and frenetic activity? What has justified the expenditure of vast quantities of human and material capital? The fact that war has generated such manic activity in the name of this thing—whatever this thing may be—suggests that this thing must be real. We find it difficult to conceive that human beings could produce the monumental performance that we call war in the name of no-thing.

II. WARFARE AS LOVE

Writing during the First World War, infantryman Coningsby Dawson tried to explain what kept British soldiers going in face of the horror that they encountered. One motive that kept them going at the front, he wrote, was a “sense of pride.” Yet Dawson saw “something else” that was essential to the soldiers’ endurance:

It seems a mad thing to say with reference to fighting men, but that other thing which enables you to meet sacrifice gladly is love. It’s the love that helps us to die gladly—love for our cause, our pals, our family, our country. Under the disguise of duty one has to do an awful lot of loving at the Front.

Fornari suggests that war for soldiers represents destruction “put into the service of the preservation of what they love.” Those who make war are driven not by a hate need, but by a “love need.” Men see war, Fornari says, as a “duty toward their love object.” What is at stake in war is not so much the safety of the individual as the safety of the “collective love object:” one’s nation. We wage war in order to show that our love is sincere: to give witness to the truth of our love.

III. DEAD AND WOUNDED BODIES:
THE “PRECIOUS ORE OF CONFIRMATION”

Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain (1985) states that war performs a “demonstrative” function. The dispute that leads to war, she says, initiates a process whereby each side “calls into question the legitimacy and thereby erodes the reality of the other country’s issues, beliefs, ideas, and self-conception.” A society wages war in order to reassert that “its own constructs are real” and that only the other side’s constructions are “creations” (i. e., “fictions” or “lies”).

In order to certify the reality of one nation’s beliefs, Scarry explains, each side in a war brings forward and places before its opponent’s eyes and, more important, the eyes of its own population, “all available sources of substantiation.” The fundamental characteristic of warfare, Scarry says (as compared with other activities that take the form of a contest), is “injuring.”

Wars and battles occur not only to determine a winner or loser, but also to provide an arena in which injuries can be inflicted. Warfare exists in order to create “bodies in pain:” to allow derealized and disembodied beliefs to reconnect with the force and power of the material world.

When people within a society begin to doubt the validity of their belief-system and are unable to draw upon “benign forms of substantiation,” they seek to allay anxiety by other means. Scarry describes injury in battle as the mining of the “ultimate substance, the ultimate source of substantiation”—extraction of the physical basis of reality from its “dark hiding place in the body out into the light of day.”

The purpose of battle is the maiming of the human body. Injury, Scarry says, makes available—bring forth—the “precious ore of confirmation.” The interior content of human bodies—lungs, arteries, blood, and brains—represents the “motherlode” that eventually will be “reconnected to the winning issue,” to which it will lend its radical substance, its “compelling, heartsickening reality,” until benign forms of substantiation come into being.

When doubts about the truth of a society’s belief-system become acute for those who embrace this belief-system, a war may be undertaken in order to put doubt to rest. Wars perform a validating function. It is to soldiers that societies delegate the task of establishing or reconfirming “the truth.” “Look: men still are willing to be mutilated and to die for our beliefs! They must be true!” The interior content of the soldier’s body spilling over onto the field of battle constitutes the precious “ore of confirmation.”

In war, Scarry says, the “incontestable reality of the body—the body in pain, the body maimed, the body dead and hard to dispose of”—is “conferred on an ideology.” The ideology thus achieves for a time the force and status of material ‘fact’ by the sheer weight of the “multitudes of damaged and opened human bodies.” Warfare, in short, is an activity that seeks to produce dead and wounded human beings in order to establish the truth of a society’s ideology.