Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [43]
Because war is the ultimate drama of life and death, stories and pictures of it are more interesting than those about peace. This is so true that all of us, and perhaps those of us in television more than most, are often caught up in the action of war to the exclusion of the ideas of it.
If it is true, as we would like to think it is, that our age is more civilized than ages past, we must all agree that it’s very strange that in the twentieth century, our century, we have killed more than 70 million of our fellowmen on purpose, at war.
It is very, very strange that since 1900 more men have killed more other men than in any other seventy years in history.
Probably the reason we are able to do both—that is, believe on one hand that we are more civilized and on the other hand wage war to kill—is that killing is not so personal an affair in war as it once was. The enemy is invisible. One man doesn’t look another in the eye and run him through with a sword. The enemy, dead or alive, is largely unseen. He is killed by remote control: a loud noise, a distant puff of smoke and then . . . silence.
The pictures of the victim’s wife and children, which he carries in his breast pocket, are destroyed with him. He is not heard to cry out. The question of compassion or pity or remorse does not enter into it. The enemy is not a man, he is a statistic. It is true, too, that more people are being killed at war now than previously because we’re better at doing it than we used to be. One man with one modern weapon can kill thousands.
The world’s record for killing was set on August 6, 1945, at Hiroshima.
There have been times in history when one tribe attacked another for no good reason except to take its land or its goods, or simply to prove its superiority. But wars are no longer fought without some ethical pretension. People want to believe they’re on God’s side and he on theirs. One nation does not usually attack another anymore without first having propagandized itself into believing that its motives are honorable. The Japanese didn’t attack Pearl Harbor with any sense in their own minds that they were scheming, deceitful or infamous.
Soldiers often look for help to their religion. It was in a frenzy of religious fervor that Japanese Kamikaze pilots died in World War II with eternal glory on their minds. Even a just God, though, listening to victory prayers from both sides, would be understandably confused.
It has always seemed wrong to the people who disapprove of war that we have spent much of our time and half of our money on anti-creation. The military budget of any major power consumes half of everything and leaves us half to live on.
It’s interesting that the effective weapons of war aren’t developed by warriors, but by engineers. In World War I they made a machine that would throw five hundred pounds of steel fifty miles. They compounded an ingeniously compressed package of liquid fire that would burn people like bugs. The engineers are not concerned with death, though.
The scientist who splits an atom and revolutionizes warfare isn’t concerned with warfare; his mind is on that fleck of matter.
And so we have a machine gun a man can carry that will spit out two hundred bullets a minute, each capable of ripping a man in two, although the man who invented it, in all probability, loves his wife, children, dogs, and probably wouldn’t kill a butterfly.
Plato said that there never was a good war or a bad peace, and there have always been people who believed this was true. The trouble with the theory is that the absence of war isn’t necessarily peace. Maybe the worst thing Adolf Hitler did was to provide evidence for generations to come that any peace is not better than any war. Buchenwald wasn’t war.
The generation that had found Adolf Hitler hard to believe was embarrassed at how reluctant it had been to go help the people of the world who needed help so desperately. That