War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning - Chris Hedges [38]
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.7
As the days wore on, sick, with little to eat, constantly under fire (at one point for sixteen hours), I began to fully appreciate the misery, pathos, and courage of professional soldiership.
One night, sheltering from rebel snipers behind an armored personnel carrier, some of my guards and I shared one can of peas and a jar of peach jam. Each of us got a few peas dropped into our dirt-caked palms and one plastic spoonful of jam. It was all any of us ate that day.
All great works of art find their full force in those moments when the conventions of the world are stripped away and confront our weakness, vulnerability, and mortality. For learning, in the end, meant little to writers like Shakespeare unless it translated into human experience.
“As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter, its role in our lives is salutary,” Proust wrote. “It becomes dangerous, on the other hand, when, instead of awakening us to the personal life of the mind, reading tends to take its place.”8
But when we write about warfare the prurient fascination usually rises up to defeat the message. The successful anti-war novels and films are those, like Elsa Morante’s, that eschew battle scenes and focus on the heartbreak of violence and slaughter. It no doubt helped that Elsa Morante was a woman, less able to identify with and be seduced by war and the allure of violence. But in most wars women, if not engaged in the fighting, stand on the sidelines to cheer their men onward. Few are immune.
One of the most widely read works of Holocaust literature in Israel is not the quiet, meditative reflections of writers such as Primo Levi, who struggled to understand the capacity for evil in all of us, but Ka’Tzetnik’s six autobiographic volumes, published in the 1950s. What troubles the Israeli historian Omer Bartov is that what “makes them so gripping: namely, their obsession with violence and perversity.”9
The main character of Ka’Tzetnik’s sextet, House of Dolls, is a young woman who is made into a prostitute for German soldiers.10 The books were reissued in 1994 and handed out by the Israeli Ministry of Education as recommended reading on the Holocaust in high schools.
“Nothing could be a greater taboo than deriving sexual pleasure from the fact that the central sites for these actions were the concentration camps,” Bartov writes. “Nothing could be a greater taboo than deriving sexual pleasure from pornography in the context of the Holocaust; hence nothing could be as exciting. That Israeli youth learned about sex and perversity, and derived sexual gratification, from books describing the manner in which Nazis tortured Jews, is all the more disturbing, considering that we are speaking about a society whose population consisted of a large proportion of Holocaust survivors and their offspring.”11
The effects on society can only be guessed, he argues, but there is little doubt that those subsequent generations “have not been wholly liberated from this pernicious trap, whereby they must have more of the violent and ruthless attributes associated with the perpetrators so as not to become their victims (whom on some level of consciousness they are still defending).”12
The conflict