To say all war is about power is nakedly self-evident, of course. It’s all about power. Every flesh rendered into a chunky salsa, every hospital set on fire, every city incinerated with its population reduced to shadows on the rubble by the single press of a button, it’s all about power. But war is not about taking power from someone else, as if it’s a zero-sum game and they have to take their portion from another madman. That’s how they sell it to us, that’s how we’re supposed to quietly understand it. Yes, we know that on the surface we’re supposed to pretend it’s about freedoms or preemptive self-defense or vengeance or whatever, but implicit is the understanding it’s actually about our team taking power from some other team. In blood, in territories, resources, whatever.
Freedom is our thin excuse, but conquest our whispered truth.
That’s a lie as well, of course, but we’re American and we do love hiding our horrors under a few layers of ironies, don’t we? We’re like ogres and onions. We have layers, and the more emotional plausible deniabilities the better. It’s a bit like some aging Gen-X hipster making fun of the Shrek film, even though they secretly adore it, so that they can get away with enjoying Shrek publicly.
The level below it all, at the bedrock bottom, is that war isn’t about taking power or maintaining power or keeping power away from the other guy. War creates power. War creates power for the leaderships, the structures on both sides. War isn’t a transfer of power, war’s a creation of power.
War constructs power for both sides. War shuts down opposition for everyone, it makes people think they must fall in with their side, right or wrong, because they’re up against the existential threat of a total destruction. War forces the population to become accomplices to the structures and their sins, because if they lose, we’re going down with them. War thins out the underclass, sacrifices always made first with the children of the desperates. Pulls those who might one day lead progressive thought out of the schools where they would learn, so they can instead perish facedown in the jungles or the sands or the mountains, wherever we’re warring this fiscal year.
War isn’t the pursuit of an enemy’s power, war’s the place where power’s forged for both sides, or anyway for the people in charge on both sides, all sides. When there isn’t war? The common women and men on both sides are not desperate and can think about their own rights, their own needs and the corruption above them. In peace, we can try to fix all the problems power creates.
But the leaders would rather have power than peace, more power for every leader on all sides. And sure, in the process, the rest of us are given only our own ashes to drink? But the wealthy are more than willing to make that noble sacrifice, on our behalf.
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