At War with War

by Seymour Chwast

  1808 Peninsular War. France invades Spain. England aids Spain

  1808 Russia occupies Finland

  1812 War of 1812. Britain attacks American navy

  1812 Napoleon invades Russia

  1815 British win Anglo-Gurkha War

  1817 Spanish troops start a violent campaign in Colombia

  1817 War between the Seminole people and U.S.

  1822 Ottomans massacre thousands of insurgents on Chios

  1823 Antonio López de Santa Anna leads an uprising in Mexico

  1824 Britain is at war with Burma

  1827 Russia is at war with Iran

  1828 Russia declares war on Ottoman Empire

  1831 Egyptians conquer Ottoman Syria

  1832 The Battle of Bad Axe. U.S. troops massacre Chief Black Hawk and his people

  1834 Belgian War of Independence

  1836 Seminoles massacre 100 U.S. troops who tried to drive them out of Florida

  1838 African Boers kill 3000 Zulus in Battle of Blood River

  1839 British conquest of Afghanistan

  1844 French squadron bombards Tangiers

  1845 British start conquest of Kashmir and Punjab in the First Anglo-Sikh War

  1846 U.S. war with Mexico, winning Vera Cruz

  1848 Austria invades Hungary

  1849 British win the Battle of Gujarat, defeating Sikh forces

  1852 second Anglo-Burmese War

  1853 Crimean War. Russia invades Moldavia and Wallachia. French, British and Turks defeat Russians in Crimea

  1853 Ottomans declare war on Russia

  1854 Britain and France declare war on Russia

  1856 Britain declares war on Persia after Persia’s invasion of Afghanistan

  1857 France and Britain declare war on China

  1859 English and French occupy Beijing

  1859 France declares war on Austria

  1859 Austria and Prussia at war

  1861 U.S. Civil War. Slave states secede from the Union. 750,000 Union and Confederate dead

  1864 British, French, Dutch and U.S. navies bombard Japan to force it to open to trade

  1864 Paraguayan War. Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay defeat Paraguay

  1866 War between Prussia and Austria escalates

  1866 Italy declares war on Austria, defeated at Battle of Custoza

  1866 First Sioux War

  1866 Peru declares war on Spain

  1868 Britain defeats Ethiopia at the Battle of Aroge

  1870 France declares war on Prussia. Napoleon III defeated by Prussians

  1871 Apache Wars in the southwestern U.S.

  1872 Native American Modoc War in Oregon and California

  1874 Red River War to forcibly relocate Comanche, Kiowa, Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes

  1876 Battle of Little Big Horn. Sioux warriors kill 250 U.S. soldiers

  1876 Serbia and Montenegro declare war on Ottomans

  1877 Russia declares war on Turkey

  1877 War between U.S. and Nez Perce in Montana led by Chief Joseph

  1878 Qing conquest of Chinese Turkestan

  1878 British invade Afghanistan in Second Anglo-Afghan War

  1879 First Anglo-Zulu War. British troops invade Zululand from the Boer republic of Natal. Caused by British aggression

  1880 South African Boers fight the British and win

  1880 Cuban revolt. Spain sends 250,000 troops

  1886 Third Anglo-Burmese War. Britain takes upper Burma

  1890 U.S. troops massacre 350 Sioux at Wounded Knee

  1895 Battle of Weihaiwei. Japanese defeat Chinese

  1898 Lord Kitchener wins the Battle of Omdurman, controlling Sudan

  1898 U.S. destroys Spanish fleet in Manila Bay in the Spanish-American War

  1899 Germans take Isangi and conquer Rwanda

  1900 An anti-Western revolt in China called the Boxer Rebellion has a Chinese secret organization fight Western and Japanese influence. 32,000 Christians killed

  1903 Ottomans massacre 50,000 Bulgarians in Monastir

  1904 Russo-Japanese War. Japanese defeat Russians at Telissu, China

  1911 Mexican Revolution

  1911 Chinese Revolution; Republic of China declared

  1912 Balkan League takes most European Ottoman territories in the First Balkan War

  1912 Nicaraguan Civil War. U.S. military intervenes

  1914 World War I begins. Ottomans, Germans and Austrians vs. British, French and Russians

  1915 Italy declares war on Austria-Hungary

  1915 U.S. invades Haiti and Dominican Republic

  1915 Turks deport or massacre about one million Armenians

  1915 Germans use gas on the Polish front

  1916 Battle of the Somme, in France. 60,000 casualties on the first day. An estimated 1,000,000 men killed or wounded during the five months of the battle

  1917 October Revolution in Russia. Alexander Karensky takes power

  1917 Russian Revolution. 80,000 Russian troops mutiny. Tsar Nicholas II abdicates and Bolshevik factions under Lenin take power

  1917 U.S. declares war on the Central Powers. Begins U.S. involvement in World War I

  1918 Russo-Polish War

  1919 Anglo-Irish War. Sinn Fein proclaims Irish independence

  1921 Morocco defeats Spain at the Battle of Annual

  1921 Greeks make war with Turks

  1922 Turks defeat Greeks in Asia Minor

  1925 Civil War in China. Chiang Kai-shek gains power

  1926 U.S. occupies Nicaragua

  1927 France launches major campaign against Druze uprising in Syria

  1930 Military revolution in Brazil

  1931 Japan invades and occupies Manchuria

  1936 Germany supports Fascists fighting Republicans in the Spanish Civil War

  1939 General Franco captures Madrid, ending the Spanish Civil War

  1939 Germans invade Poland. Anglo-French declaration of war prompts World War II

  1940 Germans invade France, Belgium, Luxemburg and the Netherlands

  1940 Japan joins Germany and Italy in World War II

  1940 Fall of France to Germans

  1941 Japan begins control of southeast Asia

  Randolph Bourne

  War is the Health of the State

  This excerpt is from the 1918 essay “The State.”

  The State is the country acting as a political unit, it is the group acting as a repository of force, determiner of law, arbiter of justice. International politics is a “power politics” because it is a relation of States and that is what States infallibly and calamitously are, huge aggregations of human and industrial force that may be hurled against each other in war. When a country acts as a whole in relation to another country, or in imposing laws on its own inhabitants, or in coercing or punishing individuals or minorities, it is acting as a State. The history of America as a country is quite different from that of America as a State. In one case it is the drama of the pioneering conquest of the land, of the growth of wealth and the ways in which it was used, of the enterprise of education, and the carrying out of spiritual ideals, of the struggle of economic classes. But as a State, its history is that of playing a part in the world, making war, obstructing international trade, preventing itself from being split to pieces, punishing those citizens whom society agrees are offensive and collecting money to pay…

  There is, of course, in the feeling toward the State a large element of pure filial mysticism. The sense of insecurity, the desire for protection, sends one’s desire back to the father and mother, with whom is associated the earliest feelings of protection. It is not for nothing that one’s State is still thought of as Father or Motherland, that one’s relation toward it is conceived in terms of family affection. The war has shown that nowhere under the shock of danger have these primitive childlike attitudes failed to assert themselves again, as much in this country as anywhere. If we have not the intense Father-sense of the German who worships his Vaterland, at least in Uncl
e Sam we have a symbol of protecting, kindly authority, and in the many Mother-posters of the Red Cross, we see how easily in the more tender functions of war service, the ruling organization is conceived in family terms. A people at war have become in the most literal sense obedient, respectful, trustful children again, full of that naïve faith in the all-wisdom and all-power of the adult who takes care of them, imposes his mild but necessary rule upon them and in whom they lose their responsibility and anxieties. In this recrudescence of the child, there is great comfort, and a certain influx of power. On most people the strain of being an independent adult weighs heavily, and upon none more than those members of the significant classes who have had bequeathed to them or have assumed the responsibilities of governing. The State provides the convenientest of symbols under which these classes can retain all the actual pragmatic satisfaction of governing, but can rid themselves of the psychic burden of adulthood. They continue to direct industry and government and all the institutions of society pretty much as before, but in their own conscious eyes and in the eyes of the general public, they are turned from their selfish and predatory ways, and have become loyal servants of society, or something greater than they—the State. The man who moves from the direction of a large business in New York to a post in the war management industrial service in Washington does not apparently alter very much his power or his administrative technique. But psychically, what a transfiguration has occurred! His is now not only the power but the glory! And his sense of satisfaction is directly proportional not to the genuine amount of personal sacrifice that may be involved in the change but to the extent to which he retains his industrial prerogatives and sense of command…

  Wartime brings the ideal of the State out into very clear relief, and reveals attitudes and tendencies that were hidden. In times of peace the sense of the State flags in a republic that is not militarized. For war is essentially the health of the State. The ideal of the State is that within its territory its power and influence should be universal. As the Church is the medium for the spiritual salvation of man, so the State is thought of as the medium for his political salvation. Its idealism is a rich blood flowing to all the members of the body politic. And it is precisely in war that the urgency for union seems greatest, and the necessity for universality seems most unquestioned. The State is the organization of the herd to act offensively or defensively against another herd similarly organized. The more terrifying the occasion for defense, the closer will become the organization and the more coercive the influence upon each member of the herd. War sends the current of purpose and activity flowing down to the lowest level of the herd, and to its most remote branches. All the activities of society are linked together as fast as possible to this central purpose of making a military offensive or a military defense, and the State becomes what in peacetimes it has vainly struggled to become—the inexorable arbiter and determinant of men’s business and attitudes and opinions. The slack is taken up, the cross-currents fade out and the nation moves lumberingly and slowly, but with ever accelerated speed and integration, toward the great end, toward the “peacefulness of being at war,” of which L.P. Jacks has so unforgettably spoken.

  The classes which are able to play an active and not merely a passive role in the organization for war get a tremendous liberation of activity and energy. Individuals are jolted out of their old routine, many of them are given new positions of responsibility, new techniques must be learned. Wearing home ties are broken and women who would have remained attached with infantile bonds are liberated for service overseas. A vast sense of rejuvenescence pervades the significant classes, a sense of new importance in the world. Old national ideals are taken out, re-adapted to the purpose and used as universal touchstones, or molds into which all thought is poured. Every individual citizen who in peacetimes had no function to perform by which he could imagine himself an expression or living fragment of the State becomes an active amateur agent of the Government in reporting spies and disloyalists, in raising Government funds or in propagating such measures as are considered necessary by officialdom. Minority opinion, which in times of peace, was only irritating and could not be dealt with by law unless it was conjoined with actual crime, becomes, with the outbreak of war, a case for outlawry. Criticism of the State, objections to war, lukewarm opinions concerning the necessity or the beauty of conscription, are made subject to ferocious penalties, far exceeding in severity those affixed to actual pragmatic crimes. Public opinion, as expressed in the newspapers, and the pulpits and the schools, becomes one solid block. “Loyalty,” or rather war orthodoxy, becomes the sole test for all professions, techniques, occupations. Particularly is this true in the sphere of the intellectual life. There the smallest taint is held to spread over the whole soul, so that a professor of physics is ipso facto disqualified to teach physics or to hold honorable place in a university—the republic of learning—if he is at all unsound on the war. Even mere association with persons thus tainted is considered to disqualify a teacher. Anything pertaining to the enemy becomes taboo. His books are suppressed wherever possible, his language is forbidden. His artistic products are considered to convey in the subtlest spiritual way taints of vast poison to the soul that permits itself to enjoy them. So enemy music is suppressed, and energetic measures of opprobrium taken against those whose artistic consciences are not ready to perform such an act of self-sacrifice. The rage for loyal conformity works impartially, and often in diametric opposition to other orthodoxies and traditional conformities, or even ideals. The triumphant orthodoxy of the State is shown at its apex perhaps when Christian preachers lose their pulpits for taking in more or less literal terms the Sermon on the Mount, and Christian zealots are sent to prison for twenty years for distributing tracts which argue that war is unscriptural.

  War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense. The machinery of government sets and enforces the drastic penalties; the minorities are either intimidated into silence, or brought slowly around by a subtle process of persuasion which may seem to them really to be converting them. Of course, the ideal of perfect loyalty, perfect uniformity is never really attained. The classes upon whom the amateur work of coercion falls are unwearied in their zeal, but often their agitation instead of converting, merely serves to stiffen their resistance. Minorities are rendered sullen, and some intellectual opinion bitter and satirical. But in general, the nation in wartime attains a uniformity of feeling, a hierarchy of values culminating at the undisputed apex of the State ideal, which could not possibly be produced through any other agency than war.

  1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. U.S. declares war

  1945 Germany surrenders, ending World War II in Europe

  1945 Atomic bombs devastate Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At least 129,000 people killed

  1945 Japan surrenders. 405,000 U.S. American casualties in World War II

  1946 Civil War between Nationalists and Communists in China

  1946 France fights Ho Chi Minh in Indochina

  1946 Civil war in Greece between Monarchists and Communists

  1948 First Arab-Israeli War

  1949 Communists under Mao Zedong win Chinese Civil War

  1950 Chinese invade Tibet

  1950 North and South Korea at war; U.S. and China join in

  1952 Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya

  1954 French defeated at Diem Bien Phu. Vietnam is divided

  1954 Algerian War of Independence against France

  1956 French and English take Egypt’s Suez Canal

  1957 South Vietnam attacked by Viet Cong

  1959 Fidel Castro leads Communists to power in Cuba

  1960 War between Communists and non-Communists in Vietnam

  1964 Beginning of Vietnam War. 58,000 Americans die; 75,000 severely disabled. Estimates of Vietna
mese killed: 800,000 to 3.1 million

  1967 Six-Day War. Arab forces attack Israel and are defeated

  1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia

  1971 East Pakistan becomes Bangladesh with a civil war

  1971 Idi Amin seizes power in Uganda. 100,000 to 500,000 people killed His aggression leads to Uganda-Tanzania War

  1975 Kmer Rouge’s Pol Pot seizes control of Cambodia. 200,000 to 300,000 killed

  1977 Cambodia-Vietnam War

  1978 Ugandan Civil War

  1979 USSR invades Afghanistan

  1979 Civil War in Nicaragua. Sandinistas vs. Contras

  1980 Iran-Iraq War

  1982 Israel invades Lebanon

  1982 Falkland War between Argentina and U.K.

  1983 Tamil Tigers fight guerrilla war against Sri Lanka government

  1983 U.S. invades Granada in a military intervention

  1989 Over 600,000 people killed in the First Liberian Civil War

  1990 Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait

  1991 U.N. ends 10-year civil war in El Salvador

  1991 Gulf War. U.S. launches battle against Iraqi forces who lose an estimated 200,000 lives

  1992 Bosnia-Herzegovina, three-year war between Muslims, Serbs and Croats

  1992 U.S. and U.N. intervene to end famine and civil war in Somalia

  1994 War between Christian Armenia and Muslim Azerbaijan

  1994 Tutsis massacred by Hutus in Rwanda’s civil war where 500,000 to 1,000,000 Rwandans are killed. Perpetrators include the Hutu civilian population

  1994 First Chechen War with Russia

  1994 Zapatista Rebellion in Mexico

  1996 First Congo War. Rwanda conquers Zaire, renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Leads to Second Congo War

  1996 Taliban captures Kabul and declares Islamic State of Afghanistan

  1998 Bombing attacks at U.S. embassies in Nairobi and other cities by Al-Qaida