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In his posthumously published On War (1832), Carl von Clausewitz (1780—1831) wrote:“War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.” [1] The Clausewitzian conception of war is absolutely right in the general sense of military science, but it does not provide an ethical judgment for what war is or means. The key question is who“our enemy”is, which requires further specification in any literary criticism. There are wars and different wars: inter-national wars, in which the conflicting parties are the states; civil wars, in which the conflicting parties are domestic political entities; the so-called current“wars on terror”, in which the warring parties are ambivalent, and etc. As a state activity pursued to fulfill the ends of policy, the resort to war seems to be the monopoly of the state, and warfare is therefore solely a feature of international politics. As civil conflicts conducted to define the state,whether in terms of religion, ethnicity, or governmental structure, wars have always tended to be fought with no less brutality and no less perseverance. Terrorism and violence characterized is deemed not to be wars in any normative sense, where such conception has been broadened to embrace many more levels of violence, including its use for purposes that are not strictly political, thus the adoption of the“global war on terror”(by the US, for instance) is largely oxymoronic usage.
The warring subjects have over-determined the nature of wars. To go to war, the subject has at first to create or identify its enemy by manufacturing collective identity or collective divide between“we”and“them”. A state or a collective is always justified and obliged to resort to such an organized violence, as Niccolò Machiavelli (1469—1527) says in his
The Prince
(1532):“A ruler…should have no other objective and no other concern, nor occupy himself with anything else except war and its methods and practices.”
[2]
The frequently discussed
jus
ad bellum
framed in terms of a state's or political collective's decision to resort to violence has always been heavily focused, and a Marxian or Marxist conception and interpretation has been strikingly the most convincing. The Marxist theoretical tradition insists on“the state as the institution beyond all others whose function…is to maintain and defend class domination and exploitation”, and in their classical formulation in the
Communist Manifesto
, Marx and Engels wrote that“the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”
[3]
Marx and Engels have offered a historicized critique of Hegel's conception of the state as the embodiment of society's general interest, and argued for instrumentality of the state marking the hard fact that, as has been summarized,“the state is a neutral warrant of the general interest is not only an illusion handed out by corrupt political scientists, but part of the politico-philosophical folklore used by the dominant class to legitimize its dominance and to reproduce the mode of production that makes its dominance possible,”and“the state is thus derivative of a particular kind of empirical state: a bourgeois state sustained by a bourgeois ideology within the same super-structural arrangement.”
The Marxist conception of war in its critique of the state is overwhelmingly illuminating,and can thus lead to such a conclusion: All wars in history have been resorted to legitimizing the dominants and thus reproducing the mode of production before the advent of socialism or communism that serves the interests of the people while containing the ruling or dominant. In order to launch and wage their self-interested wars whether in the name of the state or collective, the dominants have to invent a system of ideas and values that fosters a layered system of warring ideologies, in Marxian terms, a system of“false consciousness”or as Dipak K. Gupta has termed“collective madness”in his studies of“social order and political pathology”. From the killing fields of the Holocaust in Europe, the massacres of the indigenous population in Latin America, the turn-of-the-century vigilantism in the United States, to frequent genocides or a violent civil wars pandemic across the globe,“human history is full of such appalling stories.” [4] Perhaps, the only“therapeutic”wars to various symptoms of“collective madness”are what the Marxist tradition has called the“revolution wars”, which can be ethically justified by the simple fact that“the people liberate themselves”or defend their national or collective interests against their aggressors or oppressors. This stand or standpoint will be adhered to in theorizing and interpreting literature of war in general and poetry of war in particular.
The Anglo-American war poetry is a vehicle of representing their history and ideology that can be theorized as such: those wars that the British and Americans participated as a state agent represented their ideologies of“national collective madness”except for their participation as wars of defense; those wars that take place in their respective domestic spheres dwells on how the people's interests can be clearly defined; and thus poetic representation that propagates or negates these ethical standards witnesses an urgency of specific“historicized”analysis. To proceed with such a theorization, the critical anthology will frequently make such distinctions; between the state and society as it has become blurred due to an increasing diffusion of power within societies, between collective madness and revolutionary enthusiasm as it has always been displaced for the dominants' manipulation of power; between collective identities and individual experience as a collective one moves to the extreme spectrum while individual transgression starts and thus the collective madness quickly turns catastrophic.
This Marxist scheme of war and poetic representation not only initiates a refreshed understanding and evaluation of past poets writing wars, but also generates a new requirement for the way we read and revere them in identifying what we are and what we want to be, as a critic or reader of any piece of war writing or discourse.
[1] Carl von Clausewitz, On War , ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1976, p.75.
[2] Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince , ed. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 51-52.
[3] Tom Bottomore, and et al, A Dictionary of Marxist Thought . Maiden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2001, p.520.
[4] Dipak K. Gupta, Path to Collective Madness: A Study in Social Order and Political Pathology . Westport,Connecticut and London: Praeger, 2001, p.8.