Essay & Film Review: Nature of War vs. Nature of Anti-War Propaganda

Provoked by Netflix's 2022 "All Quiet On The Western Front"

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I.

Let us start by giving the film makers their due: this is a well-made movie, it is aesthetically pleasing. But it suffers from the typical malady of new European movies: there is only a static theme, there is no plot in motion. Nothing opaque becomes transparent, no character "overhears" themselves¹ like in Shakespeare (the 17th Earl of Oxford).

Thus, it is strong, but made of counterfeit material. Its central error and misrepresentation is the frontfighter protagonist’s psychological pain. He spends 18 months as an infantryman, attacking and defending, but he stays very sensitive to his environment. He never ceases to make doe-eyes at the violence he is engaged in.² Such a depiction is untruthful and against nature. Yet so it is made, and it had to be made so: this falsehood comes from an inner necessity that is inextricably linked to the planetary regime that rules us today. What then is the nature of anti-war propaganda? What then is the nature of war that this propaganda falsifies?

II.

The narrative arts are the creations of poets. As opposed to plastic arts, by their nature they praise and blame actions or things.³ In this age of democracy, the priestly, gerontocratic, gynocratic rulers have an interest in permanently falsifying the nature of war, in the same way that they falsify⁴ classical antiquity and bury it in the bed of slander. The truth is a refutation of democracy.⁵

Stated directly: “If you go to war, you will suffer and die” will never be an effective vehicle for anti-war sentiment because it is an unjust and false message. We suffer and die in peace as well.⁶ But notice that such a message only pretends to be anti-war. It wants to form your sentiments in another way instead. It is easy to understand that you never hear the bullet or the bomb that gets you; if you are fatally injured, you feel pain for only a short time before passing away. If you are maimed, you are not prevented from being useful for some noble cause.⁷ If even this becomes impossible, putting a dignified end to your life is always an option.⁸

III.

Imagine a story, set in Vietnam or Algeria, or someplace like it, where an undersupplied and outnumbered army, through its superior camaraderie, morale, courage, intelligence, and skill triumphs against all odds, and the victory they bought so dearly is thrown away by their politicians, who openly sympathize with the enemy. And when they come back, young women spit on those veterans and call them evil, and their wives divorce them to marry traitors, and they are forced to pay alimony. This is how a true anti-war message could be given. For that reason, it would never be made. Because the most horrible possibility is that everything that was done was done for no purpose at all. You have sacrificed uselessly—you have risked, and lost, for nothing.

IV.

In All Quiet in the Western Front, as well as many other works that trumpet our regime's values, post-traumatic stress disorder is given a false primacy. Millions of men participated in World War I and saw combat in it. In the last three millennia, hundreds of millions of men have engaged in close combat and obeyed when they were commanded to fight, kill, or wound. The overwhelming majority of them did not psychologically crack up. They changed⁹ yet remained themselves, they went on with their lives and did not look back upon it with regret.¹⁰

Only rather recently, it seems, have we discovered that men are unable to cope with war and violence. In the old times, a country incorporated the violence necessary for its existence into the constellation of its values. War is a permanent fact of life. The conventions of a nation can recruit art and artifice, and use that necessity as a resource for the health of the society that its regime constitutes and the individual it educates. Aesthetics can transfigure grief. Art can transform pain¹¹, and pain and grief are turned into nourishing food. Art can give a voice to the inchoate and inarticulate but encompassing longings that press heavy on your soul. It can represent the mute but manifest feelings of those who have known a soldier’s fare.¹²

Yes, art is beautiful, and Dionysian. It seduces us to life.

V.

War did not use to be an alien event. It was understood and made familiar through parades, festivals, ceremonies, honors, literature, music. A veteran was given his just recognition, and the honor he deserved. Ruling did not belong to women and cowards then, who loathe those reminders that at the moment of truth they will never measure up. The presence of the veteran who risked his life, or the monuments that a grateful posterity erected make them feel ashamed. Their shame will turn into rage.¹³ They will always know at the back of their minds that they would submit to the stronger at the hour of their decision. Their rule depends on caponizing those who have not submission, but confrontation in their blood. Hence their overwhelming need for this massive value-falsification project, this permanent psychological operation, this society-wide learned helplessness. Hence their insatiable lust for being in charge of children, so that they may surveil and constrain, medicate and keep ignorant.

The false primacy given to the idea that war by itself traumatizes, is therefore necessitated by the planetary regime. The idea of this primacy, through its propagation, hides the fact that war traumatizes only where the coalition of the deformed, the inferior, the resentful rule.

VI.

They can never depict and will never depict the moral and intellectual seriousness war brings on men, because their power depends on that seriousness never coming into fruition. If men remain lonely, atomized, unsophisticated; if they do not combine, they will remain weak. Hence the power of the fasces symbol: individuals break, there is safety in numbers. Hence the iconoclasm against the remembrance of great men, and the descendant civilizations of the Indo-Europeans; Greek or Roman, German or English, French or Spanish.

VII.

Where it is incorporated well, war is a useful servant. Left to its own devices, war is a dark and savage master. The true horror of war is not that is traumatizes men, the true horror of war is that it brutalizes men. The kind of civilization that makes life so sweet and beautiful is easily abolished by the sublime and awful power of violence. This is immanent to existence. It can shine forth and sweep away what was vainly believed to be more lasting than bronze. Neither man nor the proudest of his works are spared. Empires and cities are buried in a common grave.

The alumni of that dark tutelage look on the violence they endure and inflict with indifferent eyes. They would as soon kill you as look at you, because you inconvenienced them in some way, or because you have something they want.¹⁴

VIII.

But when Achilles speaks in Hades, we are told that he would prefer life in any from, rather than kingship over all the dead. What kind of interpretation is it to say that 'therefore the brave man's life is done in vain, cowardice cannot be blamed'? Those who say so tell on themselves.¹⁵

IX.

General Sherman said of General Grant that although Sherman knew more of the trade and technique of war, Grant was the superior general. At the moment of collision he kept his calm resolve, and did not change his mind, or secondguess. When you are hiking down a precipice, hesitation is harmful, remaining steady often impossible or injurious, but to keep going or even accelerating enables you to overpower and master the difficulty.¹⁶ The Indo-European way of war has always been the tenacious order of cool minds in chaos and danger.

Consider the mountain goat. It is prey, yet it masters its space.¹⁷ The predators force it do so. The enmity is eugenic. Driven by necessity it becomes more beautiful and excellent in its dexterity. Where they are not hunted, the pacific animals would multiply, overconsume the resources, and dysgenic development would take place. They would become deformed. The predator and prey better one another. They become happier, more powerful: they form a kind of friendship through their enmity.¹⁸ Enmity and friendship are contained in the each other, they are both same and different.¹⁹ They are not opposing dualities. They are dyadic.

Poetry and war are also dyadic. When Odysseus comes home, Homer describes him thus: He lifted the great bow and viewed it on every side, and even as when a man that is skilled in the lyre and in minstrelsy, easily stretches a cord about a new peg, after tying at either end the twisted sheep-gut, even so Odysseus straightway bent the great bow, all without effort, and took it in his right hand and proved the bow-string, which rang sweetly at the touch, in tone like a swallow (21.406-411). War also breeds the highest cultivation of letters²⁰, just consider Thucydides, Sallust, Lawrence of Arabia, and Ernst Jünger. In war, thought and action become one, like Homer's metaphor, uniting the bow and the lyre.

X.

Of course, a great deal of how things will turn out for you in war depends on chance, but that is true for peace as well.²¹ Your fate is inscrutable.

We wish that one day a good movie be made about German veterans coming home and suppressing the communist insurrection.

1. A good example of “overhearing” is Part 3 of Henry VI, Act 3 Scene 2. The incel Gloucester in his soliloquy "overhears" himself, he realizes something he already knew, and resolves for something. This moment happens at the lines 153-4: “O miserable thought! and more unlikely/Than to accomplish twenty golden crowns!”

2. How risible it is that it took him 18 months to realize their enemy the French are human beings too!

3. “Die Poeten zum Beispiel waren immer die Kammerdiener irgend einer Moral.”—Friedrich Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 1.

4. “Falsche Werthe und Wahn-Worte: das sind die schlimmsten Ungeheuer für Sterbliche,—lange schläft und wartet in ihnen das Verhängniss. Aber endlich kommt es und wacht und frisst und schlingt, was auf ihm sich Hütten baute.”—Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, Von den Priestern.

5. “Die Lehre von der Gleichheit!… Aber es gibt gar kein giftigeres Gift: denn sie scheint von der Gerechtigkeit selbst gepredigt, während sie das Ende der Gerechtigkeit ist… ‘Den Gleichen Gleiches, den Ungleichen Ungleiches’—das wäre die wahre Rede der Gerechtigkeit: und, was daraus folgt, ‘Ungleiches niemals gleich machen.’—Daß es um jene Lehre von der Gleichheit herum so schauerlich und blutig zuging, hat dieser ‘modernen Idee’ par excellence eine Art Glorie und Feuerschein gegeben, so daß die Revolution als Schauspiel auch die edelsten Geister verführt hat. Das ist zuletzt kein Grund, sie mehr zu achten.”—Friedrich Nietzsche, Götzen-Dämmerung, 48.

6. How many men are burning up today, in malaise, ennui, or humiliation? Where their prospect appears to be to own no property, to found no joyful family, and downward mobility as far as the eye can see? If Interahamwist rhetoric is leveled against them, if Hutu militias are fermenting against them, if all avenues of advancement are closed against them, why should they not think “let us throw the die”?

7. A Milton can compose poetry, a Hephaestus can become a blacksmith, even a Nestor, disabled by age, can give wise counsel.

8. “Cato, surrounded on all sides by his enemies, unable to resist them, disdaining to submit to them, and reduced, by the proud maxims of that age, to the necessity of destroying himself; yet never shrinking from his misfortunes, never supplicating with the lamentable voice of wretchedness, those miserable sympathetic tears which we are always unwilling to give; but on the contrary, arming himself with manly fortitude, and the moment before he executes his fatal resolution, giving, with his usual tranquility, all necessary orders for the safety of his friends; appears to Seneca, that great preacher of insensibility, a spectacle which even the gods themselves might behold with pleasure and admiration.”—Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Part I Section 3 Chapter 2.

9. “But the soldier who has yielded himself to the fortunes of war, has sought to kill and to escape being killed, or who has even lived long enough in the disordered landscape of battle, is no longer what he was. He comes in some sense a fighter, whether he wills it or not.”—J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, page 27.

10. “Many veterans who are honest with themselves will admit, I believe, that the experience of communal effort in battle, even under the altered conditions of modern war, has been a high point in their lives. Despite the horror, the weariness, the grime, and the hatred, participation with others in the chances of battle had its unforgettable side, which they would not want to have missed.”—J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, page 44.

11. We see that, of the two incels, Alek Minassian and Egg White, the former went on a rampage while the latter used that event to make a song, and hence transfigure his painful life into a powerful expression of anger through his art. “Ernst ist das leben, heiter ist die kunst.”—Schiller.

12. “As soon as he landed, he went up to Ilium, where he sacrificed to Athena, and offered libations to the heroes. He also anointed Achilles’s tomb with oil, and ran a race by it, with his friends, naked, according to the custom; after which he put a crown upon it; he thought that hero extremely happy, in having found a faithful friend while he lived, and after his death an excellent herald to set forth his praise.”—Plutarch, Life of Alexander.

13. Hence the mistreatment the American veterans of the last 20 years received at the hands of their government (openly hostile to them, one might add, on proudly avowed racial grounds) has almost become proverbial. For how many of the combat arms of the military are white men, and what percentage do they make up of combat deaths and injuries?

14. “quod plerique Sullani milites…rapinarum et victoriae veteris memores civile bellum exoptabant”—Sallust, Bellum Catilinae, XVI.

15. “Omnis homines qui sese student praestare ceteris animalibus summa ope niti decet ne vitam silentio transeant veluti pecora, quae naturaprona atque ventri oboedientia finxit.”—Sallust, Bellum Catilinae, I.

16. “In one respect a cavalry charge is very like ordinary life. So long as you are alright, firmly in your saddle, your horse in hand, and well armed, lots of enemies will give you a wide berth. But as soon as you have lost a stirrup, have a rein cut, have dropped your weapon, are wounded, or your horse is wounded, then is the moment from all quarters your enemies rush upon you.”—Winston Churchill, My Early Life, chapter 15.

17. Is not the artist the mountain goat, who invents a new kind of mastery where direct confrontation with predators is no longer possible? Consider footnote 11!

18. “Und wer verstünde überhaupt gut zu lachen und zu leben, der sich nicht vorerst auf Krieg und Sieg gut verstünde?”—Friedrich Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 324.

19. “A Burnt Ship” by John Donne is a poem that expresses this paradoxical appearance of an indeterminate dyad:

Out of a fired ship, which by no way
But drowning could be rescued from the flame,
Some men leap'd forth, and ever as they came
Near the foes' ships, did by their shot decay;
So all were lost, which in the ship were found,
They in the sea being burnt, they in the burnt ship drown'd.

20. “Der Krieg is der Vater aller guten Dinge, der Krieg ist auch der Vater der guten Prosa!”—Friedrich Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 92.

21. “Sed profecto fortuna in omni re dominatur.”—Sallust, Bellum Catilinae, VIII.