Old men cry war, young men die - Part 1
When Eric Johnston, who befriended Stalin at the Kremlin in 1944, was asked if he thought ‘ Uncle Joe ’ — short for Joseph Stalin — would start WW-3, he replied, “He is an old man, and old men do not start wars.” How wrong he was. Hitler was 50 when he started WW-2 in 1939 – a ripe old age when Germany’s average life expectancy was 61. Mussolini was 56, Stalin 60, and Roosevelt too was nudging 60 when the US entered the war in Dec 1941.
Life expectancy has increased everywhere since then, and so have the ages of the lead figures in today’s wars. Ismail Haniyeh was 61 when he ordered the Oct 7, 2023 attack on Israel from the safety of Qatar. Putin is 72, Netanyahu 75, Trump 79, and Khamenei 86. Alexander of Macedon was indeed young, just 22, when he set out to conquer the world, but he was an exception.
Young Men Die
If starting wars is the prerogative of old men, the young go into battle to die. Soldiers aged 21-24 were WW-1’s biggest cohort. In WW-2, 42% of soldiers were aged less than 20. The tragedy of war is, first of all, the tragedy of young men. They are led to the slaughter in the name of glory and duty. Nobody returns unscathed. Those who escape death or physical mutilation bear psychological scars for life. In the US, 30,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have died by suicide — as against 7,057 killed in action.
Drug addiction is rampant among combat veterans now as it was during the Vietnam war. When Nixon was asked in ’71 about US troops’ heroin addiction — 10-15% incidence — he dismissed the report. But he was 58, while 61% of the soldiers who died fighting were younger than 21. NYT’s Anthony Lewis summed up the problem thus: “They are fighting for a cause they do not understandand do not believe in, by methods that are cruel and in some cases criminal.”
A Growing Disconnect
In War and Peace, Tolstoy says: “If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.” But young men have to fight for the convictions — cynicism, rather — of men too old to fight themselves. So, when New York University professor Scott Galloway points out that 51% of Americans aged 18-24 “believe the Hamas attacks of Oct 7 can be justified by the grievances of the Palestinians”, the establishment should wake up and listen.
Do The Obvious
After Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961 — which almost triggered nuclear war — writer Walter Lippmann famously said, “I don’t think old men ought to promote wars for young men to fight.” His prescription for them was “to try as best as they can… to avert what would be an absolutely irreparable calamity for the world”. And the biggest calamity today is lack of opportunity for youth. What Galloway calls the broken social contract: “Today’s 25-year-olds make less than their parents and grandparents did at the same age… the statistics on children’s and young adults’ well-being are staggering.” Dropping GBU-57s won’t blow them away.
Women & children: War victims no one talks about - Part 2
In some places, they’re called the Children of Agent Orange. Not in Vietnam, Laos or Cambodia, but in the US. It wasn’t only American troops who returned who fell sick. Their children had odd birth defects — missing or extra limbs. For decades, any link was denied. Then more was revealed. Neurological conditions, gastrointestinal issues, spina bifida. Ravages of war didn’t spare soldiers’ families.
Generational damage
As epigenetics grows, scepticism over a link between Agent Orange and generational disability is reducing. There’s some recognition that what a young soldier had to do in the faraway fields of Laos 50 years ago could today be harming his grandchild. A 2016 ProPublica investigation reported, “The odds of having a child born with birth defects during or after the war were more than a third higher for veterans who say they handled, sprayed or were directly sprayed with Agent Orange than for veterans who say they weren’t exposed or weren’t sure.” Has anything come of it? Not yet.
The world’s most powerful country, inured to its own gun violence culture, ignores the impact on American children at home when Washington wages war in the eastern hemisphere.
Easy targets, innocent recruits
Such denial to what war visits on children is evident in every conflict. Palestinian children in food queues bombed, Ukrainian kids held by Russia on the pretext of “rescue”, guns pushed into the hands of 10-year-olds dehumanised as tools of battle are atrocities sheltered under the umbrella of Collateral Damage.
Unicef estimates that 50,000 children in Gaza have been killed or injured since Oct 2023. Kyiv estimates 20,000 Ukrainian children were taken away by Russia. There is no accountability anywhere. There is no paucity of data either on child recruitment in Sudan’s Darfur — an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 children have been recruited by govt paramilitary group RSF since 2023.
Burden of war
When children are a blind spot, it should be no surprise that the well-documented impact on women is just as ignored. Every day, 500 women and girls in war-torn countries die from complications of pregnancy and childbirth. Bombed hospitals mean no access to maternal care for pregnant women.
It’s women who must fend for children and elders in bombed quarters with resources and supplies running low. Also tucked under Collateral Damage. Rape as a weapon of war was once seen as a ‘wrong’ but, fact is, it is normalised. As wars find ways to extend in time and expand by area, there’s nothing to stop soldiers from targeting women, even little girls.
Liberating women
Regressive regimes like the Taliban, and most orthodox rulers, show their writ through subjugation of women. Far too many wars are underpinned by a western ambition to ‘liberate’ women — the status of women in a country is invariably a factor that drives ‘regime change’ activity.
Take Afghanistan alone. British, Russian, American wars found cheerleaders who backed their battles for a “brighter future for women’s rights”. But as Al Jazeera noted, “If Western wars ‘liberate’ Eastern women, Muslim women would be the most ‘liberated’ in the world. They are not, and will not be, especially when liberty is associated with Western hegemony.” Today, the world has neatly abandoned Afghanistan’s women. They still bear the burden of war.
Silent victims: Poisoned land, decimated ecosystems - Part 3
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has destroyed much of Ukraine’s 10mn ha of forest. Greenhouse gas emissions are to the tune of 230mn tonnes of CO 2 equivalent — pollution from about 50mn cars driving for a whole year — since the full-scale invasion began Feb 24, 2022. Israel’s years of bombing Palestine have cratered once-arable land where Palestinians grew grapefruit, oranges, watermelon, eggplants, almonds and olives. Per one study, there were 54 conflicts in 2021 worldwide — each with long-term consequences for the environment, on flora, fauna, livestock.
A Deaf Ear
Environmental legacy of war is seldom talked about — toxic earth, military scrap, barren lands, contaminated water bodies, poisoned marine ecosystems and large tracts of land in a state of upheaval. Damage in Ukraine alone is estimated at over $70bn and counting, per various global estimates. There’s air pollution from smouldering fires, and bombs and missiles, there’s toxins and metals deep in earth, natural water bodies and aqua life are killed by oil and chemicals. Loss of habitat chases local wildlife out, their numbers dwindle — but the extent of biodiversity loss in forests has never been gauged.
A Blind Spot
One can go on estimating the cost of damage and reconstruction but when it comes to air, soil and water, there is little reparation. Forests cannot grow back till soil has healed, and that can take at least 15-20 years. Oil, heavy metals, chemicals, excavations of tunnels and trenches — it could be a war on soil. Water bodies once in decay rarely regenerate. Endangered species die out. In Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park, for example, most large animal populations were reduced by 90% or more during its 1977-1992 civil conflict, a rare case where loss to wildlife was estimated. Military actions fragment ecosystems. The most ignored aspect of war is the noise. Constant noise of warfare disrupts animal behaviour, migration routes, and breeding cycles — wildlife are forced to abandon their territories entirely. This just makes them more vulnerable.
Weaponising Ecology
Ecocide, from the Greek oïkos (house) and Latin caedere (to kill), essentially means the action of killing the earth. Historian David Zierler defines ecocide as the deliberate destruction of ecology and the environment as a weapon of war. When dams are hit to trigger floods in enemy areas, it is the environment that is weaponised. It is nothing new. In the Vietnam war, along borders with Cambodia and Laos’s thick jungles, US used a herbicide called Agent Orange that poisoned over 5mn acres and turned vibrant forests into lifeless wastelands. Scientists called it ‘ecocide’ — a war on nature itself, with dangerous consequences for both land and life. The US simply walked away — leaving behind a deformed land.
Time To Pay
Environmental war crimes get short shrift. Till now. Kyiv has accused Moscow of brutal ecocide following the destruction of the Khakovka dam in June 2023. Kyiv is the first state under attack that wants ecocide added to crimes over which the ICC has jurisdiction. Will the world respond? Probably not.
Words against war: Capturing the horrors of conflict - Part 4
A Bertolt Brecht verse published in 1939 captures the role of anti-war literature: “In the dark times will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.” It seems frail compared to weapons and realpolitik. But to give voice to the case for peace, when govts and populism try to silence it, is a very courageous act. Very resiliently humanist. Instead of death, it embraces the power of life.
Notes On The Killing
In giving voice to the despair, dislocation and trauma that is minimised in war-makers’ calculations, anti-war literature has an ageless, universal quality. Saadat Hasan Manto’s short story Toba Tek Singh calls out the lunacy of neighbours killing neighbours. Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front underlines how primeval ideas of valour first seduce young men, then betray them with brutal mutilations (‘They stagger on their splintered stumps into the next shell-hole’), and finally shrink them into emotionally empty shells. Today’s wars are newer. But Slaughterhouse-Five to Catch-22 , A Farewell to Arms , The Tin Drum and Train to Pakistan , the classics haven’t grown old.
Connecting Millions
Many anti-war books have autobiographical underpinnings. Some disguise this more, like Bertha von Suttner’s Lay Down Your Arms: The Autobiography of Martha von Tilling and some disclose it more, like Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July . But by far, it is Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl that is the modern world’s most influential first-person anti-war book, even if this was not something it set out to do. In a hidden nest of rooms she quarrels with family, crushes on a boy, does schoolwork… and worries about the Gestapo knocking on the door. Why did she write it? What if she hadn’t? The horrors of war cannot be captured in statistics alone. For countless readers, it is one account, one life, which connects them to the suffering of millions.
Verses Against Tyrannies
From Sahir Ludhianvi’s Parchaaiyaan to Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach and Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est , poetry can carry its messages more elliptically. Or not. How straight is Siegfried Sassoon being in Does It Matter?, “You can drink and forget and be glad, and people won’t say that you’re mad; For they know that you’ve fought for your country, and no one will worry a bit.” Or Faiz, resisting the tyrannies that torment the politics of protest, here: “If a seal were put upon my tongue, what does it matter? For I have put tongues into the links of my chains.” And here: “There where you were crucified, so far away from my words, you still were beautiful.”
In 2023, a few weeks after Gazan poet Refaat Alareer shared this 2011 poem, “If I must die/you must live/to tell my story,” he was killed in an Israeli airstrike. To sabre-rattlers and philistines, that would convey the powerlessness of literature. But what they are deaf to, the rest of us hear loud and clear. If you take a gun to culture, you kill the human spirit - Part 5
Art and culture are both among the first casualties of war. Conflict not only makes people more parochial, it also breeds myths and misconceptions. It damages the soul and impedes evolution of the human spirit and mind. Artists and their works are victims of this destructive process. But so too are ordinary people, cities, places and shared cultural history.
Ukraine: A Deeply Cultural War
Many believe that the ongoing war in Ukraine is not just about territory but also about culture. That Russia is trying to erase Ukraine’s identity. There’s some evidence to show that Moscow has been targeting Ukrainian cultural elements. More than 1,000 Ukrainian heritage sites have been damaged and destroyed during the war. But this destruction is also a self-inflicted wound for Russian society itself.
Before the war began in 2014 — the fullscale war commenced in 2022 — there was much intermingling between Ukrainian and Russian cultures. Russian language was spoken by many Ukrainian families due to the legacy of the Soviet Union, and joint cultural collaborations and projects were routine.
In fact, Zelensky , who was formerly an actor and comedian, used to regularly perform in Russia, in Russian. In his early years as a comedian, he would take part in the biggest comedy competition in the Russian-speaking world called the KVN championships. It was the most influential cultural product coming out of Russia, connecting all the former Soviet republics. But war has severed all those connections today. And Zelensky, like many of his countrymen, no longer speaks Russian.
The Othering
War weaponises differences while deliberately ignoring shared experiences and enriched intermingling. Moses Maimonides was a 12th century Jewish philosopher, considered one of the greatest Jewish intellectuals of all time. He even rose to be the court physician of Sultan Saladin . His seminal work, Mishneh Torah, a 14-volume text on Jewish law, would not have been possible without Arab-Muslim interpretations of Aristotle and Plato. For logic, he relied on Arab scholar Al-Farabi.
Yet, today this shared history between Jews and Muslims is largely forgotten in the din of conflict. Narratives have gained ground that sees Jews and Arab-Muslims as separate people, without any shared constructive history.
Even sectarian conflicts within a religion can lead to extreme othering. During the civil war in Iraq in the last decade, a common myth among Sunnis, incredibly, was that Shias have ‘tails’. This othering completely ignores the fact that Shias and Sunnis have lived together for centuries, contributing to each other’s cultural and material life. The same is true for North and South Korea, where years of conflict and separation are witnessing the common Korean language diverge.
Some Hope?
But thanks to the internet, during recent conflicts, people from warring countries like Israel and Iran have been connecting via online platforms to engage outside govt communications. This raises hope that online connectivity can mitigate cultural schisms wrought by conflict. But with govts acquiring tools to ‘guide’ online discourse, this window can also be shut, locking societies into reductive silos.
Eat butter in peace, or be toast in war - Part 6
Ukraine is not a rich country. The average Ukrainian earns the equivalent of $15,885 — PPP terms — in a year, which is 75% more than the average Indian but slightly less than the average Iranian. To catch up with neighbours like Romania ($40,304) and Poland ($43,625), Ukraine must spend more on development, but last year it spent a third of its GDP fighting Russia. Where India with a $4tn economy had a $75bn defence budget in 2024, Ukraine spent $65bn on defence from its meagre and stagnant $180bn GDP.
Guns Vs Butter
That’s the guns/butter trade-off of war. You can have more of one only at the cost of the other. As Eisenhower said: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed…” It was 1953 and, perhaps, Eisenhower remembered how 3mn Indians had starved to death in the Bengal famine a decade earlier.
Historians say the calamity wasn’t caused by drought but the misplaced priorities of Churchill’s wartime cabinet. True, there was a shortage of grain in Bengal in 1943, but London made it worse by continuing to export rice from the province for British troops. The price of grain skyrocketed, and when Indian officials sought an emergency supply of wheat, London declined. Saving Empire became more important than saving people.
People Suffer
It doesn’t matter who imposes war on whom — whether Russia invades Ukraine or Afghanistan erupts in civil war — non-combatants pay a high price. A UN Women research paper shows how the Afghan govt spent 37% of its budget on defence and policing in 2019, as against 6% on health. In Mali, another war-torn country, defence expenditure in 2017 was five times higher than the outlay for social programmes.
Contrast that with Kiel Institute’s data for G7 nations. Over a 90-year period, from 1872 to 1962, their military expenditure exceeded social programmes, dipping below 20% of their budget only once, immediately after WW-1. But today, these nations spend less than 10% of their budget on defence, as against more than 40% on social expenditure. Under pressure from Trump, Nato members have pledged to raise defence spending to 5% of GDP by 2035, but don’t count on it.
No Winners
War can spur the economy — as it’s done in Russia — by increasing demand for killing machines, but data shows a dollar spent on the military produces fewer jobs than a dollar spent on infrastructure, health, education, etc. The Vietnam war may have been good for US defence contractors, but it hurt ordinary Americans by starting an inflation spiral that lasted till the 80s. Likewise, the post-9/11 American wars diverted money away from infrastructure and the social sector, and have run up an $8tn bill.
So, guns or butter? Sometimes, countries — like Ukraine — don’t have a choice, but when they do — like Russia — they should pick butter, and a loaf of Borodinsky.
War on words: Conflict corrupts language - Part 7
War distorts everything, including language. Govts invent sterile phases and crude metaphors to make violence seem less disturbing and/or to diminish those perceived to be the enemy. But repeated use of such vocabulary changes societies using it, corrupting its soul and desensitising people to brutality or even genocide.
It’s About Control
Ultimately, the goal of war vocabulary is to maintain control and justify actions that would otherwise be deemed as extreme or beyond the borders of reasonability. Writer John Rees says that George Orwell recognised this long ago. He understood that corruption of language was not a side-effect of political decay but the mechanism itself. Words only have meaning in relation to other words. And if one starts shifting those associations, meanings themselves change.
Take Israel’s war in Gaza following the Oct 7 terror attack. Israeli authorities have consistently deployed a strategy that plays on Israeli citizens’ fears and anxieties to justify the relentless bombardment of the Palestinian enclave. Therefore, Israel’s military actions are portrayed as necessary ‘security measures’. And the Israeli phrase that captures this perfectly is ‘mowing the grass’. The latter essentially refers to Palestinians as weeds that need to be cut from time to time to keep the backyard neat.
Former Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant also referred to Palestinians as ‘human animals’, reinforcing the perception that Palestinian lives weren’t equal to Israeli lives.
Moral Detachment
This strategy was also used by the Nazis, describing Jews as ‘the tapeworm in the human organism’. Joseph Goebbels claimed that ‘Jews have to be killed off like rats’. Stalin’s USSR adopted this playbook, but in a more sophisticated form. Political dissidents in Soviet Russia were described as ‘bloodsuckers’, ‘vampires’ or ‘vermin’ that had to be purged. We see this Soviet vocabulary continue in Russia’s war against Ukraine where Ukrainians are described as ‘khokhols’, a derogatory reference to hair, and Ukraine as ‘malorossiya’ or little Russia.
But another layer has been added to the terminologies, that of moral detachment. The latter allows even greater flexibility to bend international rules and normalise brutality. Thus, the term war is replaced by ‘special military operation’ as Russia has done with respect to its Ukraine aggression.
Similarly, American media came up with ‘US military intervention’ in Afghanistan and Iraq instead of US invasion that American actions against those two countries amounted to. Civilian Afghan and Iraqi lives lost in those wars were put down as ‘collateral damage’.
Impersonal War Machines
Worse, sterile terminologies that justify mass death and suffering are likely to get a boost with AI and autonomous defence platforms. When a drone operator takes out a target thousands of miles away, he only sees a blip on the screen. When autonomous tanks roll through civilian areas, the operator is playing a video game in his bunker. These technologies desensitise us to the horrors of war and normalises conflict. Then people are no longer killed but ‘neutralised’. Countries are not invaded but ‘restructured’. Civilian targets become ‘human shields’ to be destroyed. And war becomes the solution for ‘root causes’.
When Eric Johnston, who befriended Stalin at the Kremlin in 1944, was asked if he thought ‘ Uncle Joe ’ — short for Joseph Stalin — would start WW-3, he replied, “He is an old man, and old men do not start wars.” How wrong he was. Hitler was 50 when he started WW-2 in 1939 – a ripe old age when Germany’s average life expectancy was 61. Mussolini was 56, Stalin 60, and Roosevelt too was nudging 60 when the US entered the war in Dec 1941.
Life expectancy has increased everywhere since then, and so have the ages of the lead figures in today’s wars. Ismail Haniyeh was 61 when he ordered the Oct 7, 2023 attack on Israel from the safety of Qatar. Putin is 72, Netanyahu 75, Trump 79, and Khamenei 86. Alexander of Macedon was indeed young, just 22, when he set out to conquer the world, but he was an exception.
Young Men Die
If starting wars is the prerogative of old men, the young go into battle to die. Soldiers aged 21-24 were WW-1’s biggest cohort. In WW-2, 42% of soldiers were aged less than 20. The tragedy of war is, first of all, the tragedy of young men. They are led to the slaughter in the name of glory and duty. Nobody returns unscathed. Those who escape death or physical mutilation bear psychological scars for life. In the US, 30,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have died by suicide — as against 7,057 killed in action.
Drug addiction is rampant among combat veterans now as it was during the Vietnam war. When Nixon was asked in ’71 about US troops’ heroin addiction — 10-15% incidence — he dismissed the report. But he was 58, while 61% of the soldiers who died fighting were younger than 21. NYT’s Anthony Lewis summed up the problem thus: “They are fighting for a cause they do not understandand do not believe in, by methods that are cruel and in some cases criminal.”
A Growing Disconnect
In War and Peace, Tolstoy says: “If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.” But young men have to fight for the convictions — cynicism, rather — of men too old to fight themselves. So, when New York University professor Scott Galloway points out that 51% of Americans aged 18-24 “believe the Hamas attacks of Oct 7 can be justified by the grievances of the Palestinians”, the establishment should wake up and listen.
Do The Obvious
After Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961 — which almost triggered nuclear war — writer Walter Lippmann famously said, “I don’t think old men ought to promote wars for young men to fight.” His prescription for them was “to try as best as they can… to avert what would be an absolutely irreparable calamity for the world”. And the biggest calamity today is lack of opportunity for youth. What Galloway calls the broken social contract: “Today’s 25-year-olds make less than their parents and grandparents did at the same age… the statistics on children’s and young adults’ well-being are staggering.” Dropping GBU-57s won’t blow them away.
Women & children: War victims no one talks about - Part 2
In some places, they’re called the Children of Agent Orange. Not in Vietnam, Laos or Cambodia, but in the US. It wasn’t only American troops who returned who fell sick. Their children had odd birth defects — missing or extra limbs. For decades, any link was denied. Then more was revealed. Neurological conditions, gastrointestinal issues, spina bifida. Ravages of war didn’t spare soldiers’ families.
Generational damage
As epigenetics grows, scepticism over a link between Agent Orange and generational disability is reducing. There’s some recognition that what a young soldier had to do in the faraway fields of Laos 50 years ago could today be harming his grandchild. A 2016 ProPublica investigation reported, “The odds of having a child born with birth defects during or after the war were more than a third higher for veterans who say they handled, sprayed or were directly sprayed with Agent Orange than for veterans who say they weren’t exposed or weren’t sure.” Has anything come of it? Not yet.
The world’s most powerful country, inured to its own gun violence culture, ignores the impact on American children at home when Washington wages war in the eastern hemisphere.
Easy targets, innocent recruits
Such denial to what war visits on children is evident in every conflict. Palestinian children in food queues bombed, Ukrainian kids held by Russia on the pretext of “rescue”, guns pushed into the hands of 10-year-olds dehumanised as tools of battle are atrocities sheltered under the umbrella of Collateral Damage.
Unicef estimates that 50,000 children in Gaza have been killed or injured since Oct 2023. Kyiv estimates 20,000 Ukrainian children were taken away by Russia. There is no accountability anywhere. There is no paucity of data either on child recruitment in Sudan’s Darfur — an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 children have been recruited by govt paramilitary group RSF since 2023.
Burden of war
When children are a blind spot, it should be no surprise that the well-documented impact on women is just as ignored. Every day, 500 women and girls in war-torn countries die from complications of pregnancy and childbirth. Bombed hospitals mean no access to maternal care for pregnant women.
It’s women who must fend for children and elders in bombed quarters with resources and supplies running low. Also tucked under Collateral Damage. Rape as a weapon of war was once seen as a ‘wrong’ but, fact is, it is normalised. As wars find ways to extend in time and expand by area, there’s nothing to stop soldiers from targeting women, even little girls.
Liberating women
Regressive regimes like the Taliban, and most orthodox rulers, show their writ through subjugation of women. Far too many wars are underpinned by a western ambition to ‘liberate’ women — the status of women in a country is invariably a factor that drives ‘regime change’ activity.
Take Afghanistan alone. British, Russian, American wars found cheerleaders who backed their battles for a “brighter future for women’s rights”. But as Al Jazeera noted, “If Western wars ‘liberate’ Eastern women, Muslim women would be the most ‘liberated’ in the world. They are not, and will not be, especially when liberty is associated with Western hegemony.” Today, the world has neatly abandoned Afghanistan’s women. They still bear the burden of war.
Silent victims: Poisoned land, decimated ecosystems - Part 3
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has destroyed much of Ukraine’s 10mn ha of forest. Greenhouse gas emissions are to the tune of 230mn tonnes of CO 2 equivalent — pollution from about 50mn cars driving for a whole year — since the full-scale invasion began Feb 24, 2022. Israel’s years of bombing Palestine have cratered once-arable land where Palestinians grew grapefruit, oranges, watermelon, eggplants, almonds and olives. Per one study, there were 54 conflicts in 2021 worldwide — each with long-term consequences for the environment, on flora, fauna, livestock.
A Deaf Ear
Environmental legacy of war is seldom talked about — toxic earth, military scrap, barren lands, contaminated water bodies, poisoned marine ecosystems and large tracts of land in a state of upheaval. Damage in Ukraine alone is estimated at over $70bn and counting, per various global estimates. There’s air pollution from smouldering fires, and bombs and missiles, there’s toxins and metals deep in earth, natural water bodies and aqua life are killed by oil and chemicals. Loss of habitat chases local wildlife out, their numbers dwindle — but the extent of biodiversity loss in forests has never been gauged.
A Blind Spot
One can go on estimating the cost of damage and reconstruction but when it comes to air, soil and water, there is little reparation. Forests cannot grow back till soil has healed, and that can take at least 15-20 years. Oil, heavy metals, chemicals, excavations of tunnels and trenches — it could be a war on soil. Water bodies once in decay rarely regenerate. Endangered species die out. In Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park, for example, most large animal populations were reduced by 90% or more during its 1977-1992 civil conflict, a rare case where loss to wildlife was estimated. Military actions fragment ecosystems. The most ignored aspect of war is the noise. Constant noise of warfare disrupts animal behaviour, migration routes, and breeding cycles — wildlife are forced to abandon their territories entirely. This just makes them more vulnerable.
Weaponising Ecology
Ecocide, from the Greek oïkos (house) and Latin caedere (to kill), essentially means the action of killing the earth. Historian David Zierler defines ecocide as the deliberate destruction of ecology and the environment as a weapon of war. When dams are hit to trigger floods in enemy areas, it is the environment that is weaponised. It is nothing new. In the Vietnam war, along borders with Cambodia and Laos’s thick jungles, US used a herbicide called Agent Orange that poisoned over 5mn acres and turned vibrant forests into lifeless wastelands. Scientists called it ‘ecocide’ — a war on nature itself, with dangerous consequences for both land and life. The US simply walked away — leaving behind a deformed land.
Time To Pay
Environmental war crimes get short shrift. Till now. Kyiv has accused Moscow of brutal ecocide following the destruction of the Khakovka dam in June 2023. Kyiv is the first state under attack that wants ecocide added to crimes over which the ICC has jurisdiction. Will the world respond? Probably not.
Words against war: Capturing the horrors of conflict - Part 4
A Bertolt Brecht verse published in 1939 captures the role of anti-war literature: “In the dark times will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.” It seems frail compared to weapons and realpolitik. But to give voice to the case for peace, when govts and populism try to silence it, is a very courageous act. Very resiliently humanist. Instead of death, it embraces the power of life.
Notes On The Killing
In giving voice to the despair, dislocation and trauma that is minimised in war-makers’ calculations, anti-war literature has an ageless, universal quality. Saadat Hasan Manto’s short story Toba Tek Singh calls out the lunacy of neighbours killing neighbours. Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front underlines how primeval ideas of valour first seduce young men, then betray them with brutal mutilations (‘They stagger on their splintered stumps into the next shell-hole’), and finally shrink them into emotionally empty shells. Today’s wars are newer. But Slaughterhouse-Five to Catch-22 , A Farewell to Arms , The Tin Drum and Train to Pakistan , the classics haven’t grown old.
Connecting Millions
Many anti-war books have autobiographical underpinnings. Some disguise this more, like Bertha von Suttner’s Lay Down Your Arms: The Autobiography of Martha von Tilling and some disclose it more, like Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July . But by far, it is Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl that is the modern world’s most influential first-person anti-war book, even if this was not something it set out to do. In a hidden nest of rooms she quarrels with family, crushes on a boy, does schoolwork… and worries about the Gestapo knocking on the door. Why did she write it? What if she hadn’t? The horrors of war cannot be captured in statistics alone. For countless readers, it is one account, one life, which connects them to the suffering of millions.
Verses Against Tyrannies
From Sahir Ludhianvi’s Parchaaiyaan to Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach and Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est , poetry can carry its messages more elliptically. Or not. How straight is Siegfried Sassoon being in Does It Matter?, “You can drink and forget and be glad, and people won’t say that you’re mad; For they know that you’ve fought for your country, and no one will worry a bit.” Or Faiz, resisting the tyrannies that torment the politics of protest, here: “If a seal were put upon my tongue, what does it matter? For I have put tongues into the links of my chains.” And here: “There where you were crucified, so far away from my words, you still were beautiful.”
In 2023, a few weeks after Gazan poet Refaat Alareer shared this 2011 poem, “If I must die/you must live/to tell my story,” he was killed in an Israeli airstrike. To sabre-rattlers and philistines, that would convey the powerlessness of literature. But what they are deaf to, the rest of us hear loud and clear. If you take a gun to culture, you kill the human spirit - Part 5
Art and culture are both among the first casualties of war. Conflict not only makes people more parochial, it also breeds myths and misconceptions. It damages the soul and impedes evolution of the human spirit and mind. Artists and their works are victims of this destructive process. But so too are ordinary people, cities, places and shared cultural history.
Ukraine: A Deeply Cultural War
Many believe that the ongoing war in Ukraine is not just about territory but also about culture. That Russia is trying to erase Ukraine’s identity. There’s some evidence to show that Moscow has been targeting Ukrainian cultural elements. More than 1,000 Ukrainian heritage sites have been damaged and destroyed during the war. But this destruction is also a self-inflicted wound for Russian society itself.
Before the war began in 2014 — the fullscale war commenced in 2022 — there was much intermingling between Ukrainian and Russian cultures. Russian language was spoken by many Ukrainian families due to the legacy of the Soviet Union, and joint cultural collaborations and projects were routine.
In fact, Zelensky , who was formerly an actor and comedian, used to regularly perform in Russia, in Russian. In his early years as a comedian, he would take part in the biggest comedy competition in the Russian-speaking world called the KVN championships. It was the most influential cultural product coming out of Russia, connecting all the former Soviet republics. But war has severed all those connections today. And Zelensky, like many of his countrymen, no longer speaks Russian.
The Othering
War weaponises differences while deliberately ignoring shared experiences and enriched intermingling. Moses Maimonides was a 12th century Jewish philosopher, considered one of the greatest Jewish intellectuals of all time. He even rose to be the court physician of Sultan Saladin . His seminal work, Mishneh Torah, a 14-volume text on Jewish law, would not have been possible without Arab-Muslim interpretations of Aristotle and Plato. For logic, he relied on Arab scholar Al-Farabi.
Yet, today this shared history between Jews and Muslims is largely forgotten in the din of conflict. Narratives have gained ground that sees Jews and Arab-Muslims as separate people, without any shared constructive history.
Even sectarian conflicts within a religion can lead to extreme othering. During the civil war in Iraq in the last decade, a common myth among Sunnis, incredibly, was that Shias have ‘tails’. This othering completely ignores the fact that Shias and Sunnis have lived together for centuries, contributing to each other’s cultural and material life. The same is true for North and South Korea, where years of conflict and separation are witnessing the common Korean language diverge.
Some Hope?
But thanks to the internet, during recent conflicts, people from warring countries like Israel and Iran have been connecting via online platforms to engage outside govt communications. This raises hope that online connectivity can mitigate cultural schisms wrought by conflict. But with govts acquiring tools to ‘guide’ online discourse, this window can also be shut, locking societies into reductive silos.
Eat butter in peace, or be toast in war - Part 6
Ukraine is not a rich country. The average Ukrainian earns the equivalent of $15,885 — PPP terms — in a year, which is 75% more than the average Indian but slightly less than the average Iranian. To catch up with neighbours like Romania ($40,304) and Poland ($43,625), Ukraine must spend more on development, but last year it spent a third of its GDP fighting Russia. Where India with a $4tn economy had a $75bn defence budget in 2024, Ukraine spent $65bn on defence from its meagre and stagnant $180bn GDP.
Guns Vs Butter
That’s the guns/butter trade-off of war. You can have more of one only at the cost of the other. As Eisenhower said: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed…” It was 1953 and, perhaps, Eisenhower remembered how 3mn Indians had starved to death in the Bengal famine a decade earlier.
Historians say the calamity wasn’t caused by drought but the misplaced priorities of Churchill’s wartime cabinet. True, there was a shortage of grain in Bengal in 1943, but London made it worse by continuing to export rice from the province for British troops. The price of grain skyrocketed, and when Indian officials sought an emergency supply of wheat, London declined. Saving Empire became more important than saving people.
People Suffer
It doesn’t matter who imposes war on whom — whether Russia invades Ukraine or Afghanistan erupts in civil war — non-combatants pay a high price. A UN Women research paper shows how the Afghan govt spent 37% of its budget on defence and policing in 2019, as against 6% on health. In Mali, another war-torn country, defence expenditure in 2017 was five times higher than the outlay for social programmes.
Contrast that with Kiel Institute’s data for G7 nations. Over a 90-year period, from 1872 to 1962, their military expenditure exceeded social programmes, dipping below 20% of their budget only once, immediately after WW-1. But today, these nations spend less than 10% of their budget on defence, as against more than 40% on social expenditure. Under pressure from Trump, Nato members have pledged to raise defence spending to 5% of GDP by 2035, but don’t count on it.
No Winners
War can spur the economy — as it’s done in Russia — by increasing demand for killing machines, but data shows a dollar spent on the military produces fewer jobs than a dollar spent on infrastructure, health, education, etc. The Vietnam war may have been good for US defence contractors, but it hurt ordinary Americans by starting an inflation spiral that lasted till the 80s. Likewise, the post-9/11 American wars diverted money away from infrastructure and the social sector, and have run up an $8tn bill.
So, guns or butter? Sometimes, countries — like Ukraine — don’t have a choice, but when they do — like Russia — they should pick butter, and a loaf of Borodinsky.
War on words: Conflict corrupts language - Part 7
War distorts everything, including language. Govts invent sterile phases and crude metaphors to make violence seem less disturbing and/or to diminish those perceived to be the enemy. But repeated use of such vocabulary changes societies using it, corrupting its soul and desensitising people to brutality or even genocide.
It’s About Control
Ultimately, the goal of war vocabulary is to maintain control and justify actions that would otherwise be deemed as extreme or beyond the borders of reasonability. Writer John Rees says that George Orwell recognised this long ago. He understood that corruption of language was not a side-effect of political decay but the mechanism itself. Words only have meaning in relation to other words. And if one starts shifting those associations, meanings themselves change.
Take Israel’s war in Gaza following the Oct 7 terror attack. Israeli authorities have consistently deployed a strategy that plays on Israeli citizens’ fears and anxieties to justify the relentless bombardment of the Palestinian enclave. Therefore, Israel’s military actions are portrayed as necessary ‘security measures’. And the Israeli phrase that captures this perfectly is ‘mowing the grass’. The latter essentially refers to Palestinians as weeds that need to be cut from time to time to keep the backyard neat.
Former Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant also referred to Palestinians as ‘human animals’, reinforcing the perception that Palestinian lives weren’t equal to Israeli lives.
Moral Detachment
This strategy was also used by the Nazis, describing Jews as ‘the tapeworm in the human organism’. Joseph Goebbels claimed that ‘Jews have to be killed off like rats’. Stalin’s USSR adopted this playbook, but in a more sophisticated form. Political dissidents in Soviet Russia were described as ‘bloodsuckers’, ‘vampires’ or ‘vermin’ that had to be purged. We see this Soviet vocabulary continue in Russia’s war against Ukraine where Ukrainians are described as ‘khokhols’, a derogatory reference to hair, and Ukraine as ‘malorossiya’ or little Russia.
But another layer has been added to the terminologies, that of moral detachment. The latter allows even greater flexibility to bend international rules and normalise brutality. Thus, the term war is replaced by ‘special military operation’ as Russia has done with respect to its Ukraine aggression.
Similarly, American media came up with ‘US military intervention’ in Afghanistan and Iraq instead of US invasion that American actions against those two countries amounted to. Civilian Afghan and Iraqi lives lost in those wars were put down as ‘collateral damage’.
Impersonal War Machines
Worse, sterile terminologies that justify mass death and suffering are likely to get a boost with AI and autonomous defence platforms. When a drone operator takes out a target thousands of miles away, he only sees a blip on the screen. When autonomous tanks roll through civilian areas, the operator is playing a video game in his bunker. These technologies desensitise us to the horrors of war and normalises conflict. Then people are no longer killed but ‘neutralised’. Countries are not invaded but ‘restructured’. Civilian targets become ‘human shields’ to be destroyed. And war becomes the solution for ‘root causes’.
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