The long war and the short peace

The war in Ukraine has arrested the attention of the thinking world more than the coronavirus global pandemic. Nothing in the present has captured the imagination and work of scholars and journalists than the missiles, bombs, casualties and captives in Ukraine. Even some of us in the Global South where colonial wars and civil wars have been naturalised and normalised are captivated by the spectacle of war in Ukraine. The sight of white European refugees, European dead bodies, demolished buildings, and the human debris of large-scale violence in Europe is something to ponder and be shocked about.

My article today is a philosophical view of war as naturally colonial, barbaric and inhuman but an evil that has become so natural and normal to political life and world history. I ponder the paradox that the more human beings want to understand themselves as modern, civilised, and advanced, the more their animalism, their kinship to beasts, easily becomes exposed. The war in Ukraine is a Fourth Industrial Revolution war that deploys futurist gadgets of human destruction, making modernity primitive, bloody and evil. That war has become the real oxygen of world history is tragic and much unfortunate. 

One of the justifications, and excuses, that European colonisers gave for invading and occupying Africa was that African “barbarians” had to be stopped from killing each other with tribal wars. The natives, colonisers argued, had to be protected from themselves and their blood-thirsty rulers such as Tshaka and others. But a second look at human and world history from a decolonial vantage point very easily shows that it is the European colonisers and enslavers that have been blood-thirsty and barbaric in their wars of conquest and colonisation.

From Namibia to Sudan and from Congo to Kenya western wars of conquest were genocidal. Aime Cesaire was right that Adolf Hitler’s principal crime in the Holocaust was that he practiced on white people in Europe barbaric violence that the Europeans had reserved for Africans and other colonial subjects. In the present there is open disgust  in the western media about how the conflict is going on in Ukraine.

Regarding pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial Africa, Ali Mazrui observed, in 1977, the presence of the “warrior tradition” in the continent. Being a warrior and a liberator is an African quality, a leadership quality, in the view of Mazrui. Africans valorised wars, especially wars of liberation from invasion and colonial domination.

The Euro-American ‘paradigm of war’ that decolonial historians and philosophers have noted is different from the ‘warrior tradition’ of African wars of liberation from settler colonialism that could be called ‘just wars’ in so far as they were part of the human right to rebel and conduct armed uprising against colonial tyrannies. 

By any measure, in form and in content, the Zulu battle of Isandlwana of 22 January 1879 that vanquished an exalted British army cannot be compared to the German genocide of the Herero and the Namaqa of Namibia from 1904 to 1908. A war of conquest cannot weigh the same as a war of liberation on the scale of morality and justice. Frantz Fanon made the good distinction between revolutionary violence and non-revolutionary violence. Military attack, otherwise, cannot be equalised in moral measurement with military defence and resistance. 

Plato, in his seminal imagination of the ideal Republic, opined that societies must be led by “philosopher kings” that would lead with reason and wisdom. Plato spoke from Athens, the cradle of western democracy, where reason was to be exalted above brute force. Europeans have from then prided themselves with democracy and the rule of reason, even as they have exceeded themselves in filling the world with bloody wars of conquest.

Some of the greatest celebrants of war, its turmoil and tenacity, have been European philosophers, poets and politicians of different generations and nationalities. Chief among the European celebrants of war, perhaps, was the philosopher-soldier, Carl von Clausewitz who noted that “war is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means.” He meant that when politics and dialogue fail war became an inevitable necessity, which was a normalisation and naturalisation of war.

Friedrich Nietzsche was less shy about the importance of war. In his vaunted Zarathustra offering he declared that as people “you shall love peace as a means to new wars- and the short peace more than the long.” Peace, to Nietzsche, was a threat to human security and happiness while war was the best way of preserving security and human happiness.

Dialogue and reasoned communication that are thought to be an alternative to war were dismissed by Nietzsche as a waste of time unless if the communication itself was war-like and hot words are thrown out as swords and bullets that can tear the other apart, as communication as war, not as dialogue. 

Niccolo Machiavelli, the ultimate technician of power, cautioned about war but went on to sell a huge part of his body of the thought to the valorisation and celebration of war. To Machiavelli “finishing with war what could be finished with words can at the end only lead to the peril of the commanders.” Besides that high wisdom on the virtue of dialogue ahead of war, Machiavelli’s Art of War is a book that can be considered a western manual and manifesto of war. 

It is the sober Immanuel Kant, the prophet of ‘perpetual peace’ who observed the irony that “even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.” Kant believed that even in struggle, the enemy himself should be “trusted” that he will not resort to violent barbarism but preserve what is common and dear to humans, which is life and dignity. It is with some rare passion that Kant advanced his idea of “public use of reason” and the pursuit of “perpetual peace” in a shared world.

The true fall of Man might not be the defeat of Adam in the Garden of Eden by intimate temptation but the human propensity to war. A critical examination of world and human history yields a picture where the Euro-American Empire has led not through reason and democracy but war, the long war and the short peace, where such spaces of the world as Africa have in many ways lived under the permanence of war and domination. 

If the animalism of Man did not rule over reason there was going to be another politics where competition for power and resources would be conducted aggressively but in peace, and where battles would be fought in words and not swords. 

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from the University of Free State, Bloemfontein, in South Africa. Contacts: [email protected].