In his column piece entitled, “Why we fight wars” (the title may be an ironic reference to the WWII propaganda films of the same title), Paul Krugman notes that war doesn’t pay, and writes, “Starting a war is a very bad idea. But it keeps happening anyway.” He’s right — but there’s always more to the story.
Understanding the politics of war–that is to say, understanding why a leader like Vladimir Putin goes to war–can perhaps be reduced to a simple principle like “shoring up an authoritarian regime.” A more troubling question, though, is why so many apparently ordinary men—those who do not lead, but follow–seem to embrace wars that to many of us are so obviously foolish.
“Fun and profit” are hardly ever motives on their own; the conquistadors did not conquer the Americas merely for gold, but also to spread Christianity and to gain glory. Conquest was not just a road to riches, but also a path to social mobility and increased status. And then here was the adventure of it all.
Modern wars are similarly complex. Men went off to the Great War not to enrich their nations, but to defend their homeland, save democracy, resist autocracy, to avoid being thought weak, or, like Robert Graves, to defer entering on the even more frightening prospect of going up to Oxford.
We say we are against war, yet we glamorize warriors. We ignore the sad fact that combatants–even those who profess their loathing of war–often see war as a rite of passage; boys become men in the crucible of combat. We forget that Ernst Jünger’s Storms of Steel cast war as noble endeavor ten years before Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war classic, All Quiet on the Western Front.
Until we rid war of its glamor, we have no hope of stopping war. It would do us no harm to revisit Mark Twain’s “The War Prayer.”
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