There are those, and I am among them, who are not destined to “think big”, as excessive ambition or greed is commonly called. I’d like to believe that a well-managed conformism won’t hurt others who just try to lead a quiet, level-headed, no-fuss life. When I hear that the word “war” involves nations being guided or pushed into war by their governments, I keep thinking of the words of Henry David Thoreau: “Let us transform our lives into a friction that stops the machinery.” The war that leads to the suffering of ordinary people is disgusting and embodies the quintessential cruelty and injustice. It is precisely there that one becomes aware of a major ruse: war is waged in our name beyond reasoned consent, and it is we who end up wounded, dead, impoverished and increasingly weak when it comes to opposing martial institutions. . In the 21st century, armies would have to disappear or be reduced to guards carrying out civilian functions: the military army is an anachronism. Their existence gives rise to shady arms deals and to the governments in turn using them to strengthen their dictatorship or their decisions. Life and Destiny, by Vasili Grossman, is an extensive novel that tries to take the reader to the battlefield in Stalingrad during World War II. I will not go into the story of this well-known work of gigantic dimensions. I choose two moments in its pages that are reflections regarding the war. The first is the drawing of a soldier who, although at the beginning of the action has the impression of representing a whole that contains him; later and once in the middle of the combat, torn in his uniform, frightened, the bullets grazing his body and beyond any strategy dictated by an officer, he faces loneliness or orphanhood that embraces him as a unique reality . He realizes the enormous deception he has been dragged into, or reconciles himself to the hell he seems to have a duty to live in. The second moment that I chose from this work is when Grossman writes: “There is no fate harsher than feeling that one does not belong to his time. Time loves only those it has spawned; to his children, to his heroes, to his workers.” But, I assert, if being considered the stepson of his time spares one the brutality and madness of a war then welcome bastardity.
In some conference the writer Norman Mailer expressed that since democracy is good and beautiful, it is always in constant danger. It is then that the paladins of the arms company, the armies and the politicians subservient to these consortiums invent a war for their benefit, as was the case with the intervention of Bush and company in Iraq. Regarding the war in Afghanistan, Gore Vidal wrote in Dreaming of War and regarding the American citizen: “We are not idiots. We are cowed by misinformation in the media, by a biased view of the world and tremendous taxes that finance a permanent war machine.
Although it is useless to deny that there are inevitable human conflicts, I believe that in the absurd military, territorial and commercial maneuvers such as those that are expressed today through the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, one should not stop thinking regarding the common individual, that is say in the one who will lose his family, his life, his house; he who works honestly, gets along with his neighbors and does not know regarding the big deals and tyrannies that are plotted in his name. It is better to be the stepson of his time than the son of the wars of his time. It is impossible to appraise the pain caused by these anachronistic, so-called nationalist, manifestations in people who do not want to be dragged into any physical, technological or economic war. Before the experts, politicians and media fill you with history, current, “hard” data, and update you regarding this “new” war, it would be very convenient to remember who are those who suffer in battles and who, often, they live, profit and grow stronger at their expense.
]]>
