THE CRUEL PARTY
Even though we are aware that war has been intertwined with human history since its dawn, we find ourselves today - once again - at a passage in history in which war becomes perceptively closer, almost as if we can feel its warm and acrid.
As Europeans, we have a past soaked in blood, between internal and colonial wars, but after the horrors of the two world wars (which were fought above all in Europe, and for Europe), we have tried to remove the idea of war from the political horizon, to the point of inscribing its rejection in the fundamental Charter, as Italy has done. But, as unfortunately often happens, an ideal approach ends up proving too much in contradiction with reality, in this case one might say with the nature of things.
The fundamental question, ultimately, is that if war is so profoundly linked to our species, if despite its (increasingly terrible) consequences we cannot ban it, then there must be an - so to speak - objective reason. In fact, we could say that, contrary to what Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought, man is not "a good savage", a fundamentally good being but corrupted by society. Which, after all, is itself a human creation... Upon closer inspection, ours is only a luckier species than others, which thanks to an incredible series of events (linked together), relating to the history of the planet and its living species that inhabit it, has had the possibility of evolving to the role of dominant species, capable - among other things - of reflecting on itself. The idea of good, as well as its opposite, bad, is in fact nothing more than a product of the human mind, a judgment, which however simply does not exist in nature.
Man, therefore, wages war, and at the same time reflects on it, judges it according to a series of values (religious, moral, ethical, political...), which in turn can change over time and based on the cultures in which they are formed. At the risk of saying inaudible things, we should perhaps ask ourselves a crucial question: is war just horrible? The question does not arise here whether it is (if it can be) right, or simply necessary. Here we would be in the field of an instrumental evaluation of whether or not it has - even occasionally - its own usefulness. Or, on the other hand, whether it can have a superior justification, which transcends its mere advantage; and we know, in this regard, that man has responded to this countless times, from the crusades to the jihad.
The most radical question, however, goes even deeper to the heart of the problem. Can war (also) be beautiful? And obviously, this is not an aesthetic question, but a much deeper one, which questions the human soul. That is, can war be an (also) positive emotional sphere, of such power as to make its horror surmountable? Put even more brutally, can it harbor an emotion comparable to that of its opposite, love?
The question is so strong that we do not intend to venture an answer here, considering it already bold enough - and necessary - to ask the question.
Over forty years ago, the historian Franco Cardini wrote an important book, "That ancient cruel party", which already in the title (not surprisingly taken up for this article) held together two apparently opposite terms, almost an oxymoron: "party" and “cruel”.
Understandably, there is an endless production of books on the war, and among this a good part (even if less valorised) is memoirs, which could help in seeking answers. Even if it is difficult to find such a vivid trace of the celebration, since it is a memoir written at a distance from the lived experience, the pain of cruelty rightly prevailing. Yet - I am thinking for example of Ernst Junger and his "Storms of Steel" - sometimes it is possible to glimpse some glimmer of the non-horrible of that experience.
The importance of questioning this, however, is not so much in finding an answer, but in already asking the question. Because in doing so we open a window, in my opinion absolutely important (and today more than ever), on the human nature of war, which is much more than an activity practiced by man, but has to do with the profound nature of himself.
War, just like love, is profoundly human.
At the same time, as with any other activity, war has also been progressively transformed by technological evolution, which has made it gradually less and less human. Individual subjectivity has progressively lost importance, especially in the modern era, when the technical dimension of war has not only become predominant, but has ended up giving shape to war in its entirety; the war of industrial civilization is in turn an expanded form of factory work, requires the same basic skills, and its chain of command reproduces the needs of productivity. And just as the factory becomes the place of alienation of/in work (which only class conflict can partially reverse positively), so the regiment becomes the space of compression of the individual's war experience.
To fully understand the scope of this expropriation of the personal dimension in combat, the only one in which it is possible to look for something else beyond horror, reading another fundamental text, "The Face of Battle" , by John Keegan, may be enlightening. His analysis and description of the psycho-physical - therefore emotional - experience of fighting at Agincourt (1415), can help us understand much better than any other dissertation how modern technology (not only the weapons and means, but the organization itself of the battle and the fighters) radically affects subjective perception.
This technological evolution, which has now reached very high levels, is paradoxically moving towards a sort of divergence of experience on the battlefield. On the one hand, in fact, it produces an increasing distance between the weapon and its operator (even if there is one...), who can even be located thousands of kilometers from the place where the combat takes place, and which therefore determines not only a physical distance (therefore a dilation of space), but also and above all a psychic and emotional distance. For another, it shortens distances, effectively returning to the dimension of melee.
The drone that launches a missile on the target, operated remotely, and the Palestinian fighter that hits a Merkava tank from a few tens of meters, are both faces of contemporary war, but on an experiential level there is an abysmal difference.
And a new, even more extra-human dimension of combat is already emerging, determined by the use of artificial intelligence. Perhaps in its first actual application, in a real combat setting, it is now used by the Israeli armed forces in their operation on Gaza. An AI software, called Gospel (sic!), is in fact responsible for processing all the information available to the secret services and forces in the field, continuously producing a list of targets which are then hit. A leap in quality in the mechanical dimension of war, which - another paradox - appears in a frighteningly asymmetrical conflict, in which a modern army (with all its technological power) massively invests an area with a very high population density, in which various fighting formations operate with almost homemade armament.
This situation, understood as a whole, is in fact being reflected in the way in which soldiers in the field live the experience of combat; apart from the consequences deriving from a supremacist and messianic ideology, the double dehumanization of war produces - as documented by the Israeli press itself - either a regressive trauma (combat shock, panic, rejection) or an aggressive one (cruelty, loss of moral inhibitory brakes).
Therefore, in a certain sense, we can say that the more war distances itself from (its) human dimension, the more it amplifies its horrible part - and this applies both to external, visible manifestations and to internal, intimate perception.
In any case, and even more so since it seems that we are heading down a path that sees opportunities for conflict extending and intensifying, perhaps we should try to recover the human dimension of war, which essentially means accepting it as part of our nature. An acceptance which is naturally not merely passive, but which on the contrary, precisely in the awareness that it is within us, seeks to temper it, to contain its terribleness.
Surrendering ourselves to its vortex, as well as deluding ourselves into believing that we can reject it as a stranger, will still prevent us from coming to terms with this dark side of ours.