Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. Doris Lessing

… in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past, and are permitted to be brutal and cruel.

      It is for this reason, and of course others, that a great many people enjoy war. But this is one of the facts about war that is not often talked about.

      I think it is sentimental to discuss the subject of war, or peace, without acknowledging that a great many people enjoy war – not only the idea of it, but the fighting itself. In my time I have sat through many many hours listening to people talking about war, the prevention of war, the awfulness of war, with it never once being mentioned that for large numbers of people the idea of war is exciting, and that when a war is over they may say it was the best time in their lives. This may be true even of people whose experiences in war were terrible, and which ruined their lives. People who have lived through a war know that as it approaches, an at first secret, unacknowledged, elation begins, as if an almost inaudible drum is beating … an awful, illicit, violent excitement is abroad. Then the elation becomes too strong to be ignored or overlooked: then everyone is possessed by it.

      Before the First World War, the socialist movements of all Europe and America met to agree that capitalism was fomenting war, and that the working classes of all those countries should have nothing to do with it. But the moment war was actually there, and the poisonous, fascinating elation had begun, all those decent, rational, honourable resolutions about keeping out of the war were forgotten. I have heard young people discussing this, uncomprehending. This is because they do not understand how it can have happened. It is because they have not experienced, and have not been told about that dreadful public elation that is so strong – strong because it comes from an older part of the human brain, of the human experience, than the decent, humane, rational part, which passes resolutions condemning war. But suppose the delegates to that socialists’ conference had had such information. Even more importantly, suppose they had been prepared to discuss it as it affected them, for it is easy to call other people primitive, and difficult to acknowledge that we may be so. Surely they would have been very much more efficient; indeed, as they had all expected, vainly, to happen, the working masses of Europe might have refused to go like lambs to the slaughter.

      When I was in Zimbabwe in 1982, two years after Independence, and the end of that appalling war that was very much uglier and more savage than we were ever told, I met soldiers from both sides, whites and blacks. The first obvious fact – obvious to an outsider, if not to themselves – was that they were in a state of shock. Seven years of war had left them in a stunned, curiously blank state, and I think it was because whenever people are actually forced to recognize, from real experience, what we are capable of, it is so shocking that we can’t take it in easily. Or take it in at all; we want to forget it. But there was another fact and for the purposes of this discussion perhaps a more interesting one. It was evident that the actual combatants on both sides, both blacks and whites, had thoroughly enjoyed the war. It was a fighting that demanded great skill, individual bravery, initiative, resourcefulness – the skills of a guerrilla, talents that through a long peace-time life may never have been called into use. Yet people may suspect they have them, and secretly long for an opportunity to show them. This is not the least of the reasons, I believe, that wars happen.

      These people, black and white, men and women, had been living in that extreme of tension, alertness, danger, with all their capacities in full use. I heard people say that nothing could ever come up to that experience. The dreadfulness of the war was too near for them to be saying, ‘The best time of our lives’, but they were, I am sure, beginning to think it. I am talking of course of the actual combatants, certainly not the civilians, who had a miserable time of it, with both the white government troops and the black guerrillas making use of them for their own purposes, treating them brutally.

      Now that war has gone away into the past, and has become formalized in sets of words, images of heroism. The young people will probably have a small unconscious hankering after what they hear in their parents’ voices as they talk about it; if they were soldiers, that is. The civilians who lived through it will not talk about it much, having learned the impossibility of conveying the awfulness of it. But the black soldiers, most of whom were taught war as they came out of childhood, and the white soldiers, will be talking with nostalgia. The great war of liberation, the glorious war, which did so much psychological damage to the country, and to its people: damage which, after a war, we simply do not want to look at. Perhaps we cannot look at it, precisely as a result of that damage. This heroic and glorious war was quite unnecessary in the first place and could easily have been avoided by the use of only a minimum amount of common sense on the part of the whites. They were, however, in the grip of all kinds of primitive emotions. ‘I shall pick up my rifle and fight to the last drop of my blood.’ I quote. I go on to quote the first half of this sentence, ‘If you think that Reds like yourself and the British Government are going to give our country to the blacks, I shall pick up my rifle and fight to the last drop of my blood.’ And he did.

      I heard precisely this sentiment recently from a white South African.

      Yes, indeed it does seem that against passions as primitive as these, the small voice of reason is not likely to succeed. Let us look at South Africa, where the experiences of Kenya and white Rhodesia have taught them nothing. But perhaps, and we must hope it, tucked away among the fanatics are reasonable men and women who have taken a long cool look at Kenya and Rhodesia and learned. Perhaps. It does not look like it now.

      This word ‘blood’. It is always being used by leaders to raise our temperatures.

      ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.’ That is Thomas Jefferson.

      ‘The blood shed by our soldiers will inspire us in the time of peace.’

      Only through blood can we be reborn!’

      ‘The way to a glorious future lies through blood.’

      ‘The blood of our martyrs shall be our inspiration: never shall we forget the blood that has been shed for us all.’

      It is not too much to say that when the word blood is pronounced, this is a sign that reason is about to depart.

      All this blood business of course goes back to ritual sacrifice, the thousands of years during which priests slit the throats of first humans, then animals, to let blood flow out to please some savage deity. It goes very deep in us all, blood sacrifice, the sacrificial victims, scapegoats. When a leader invokes blood to arouse us to support him and his cause, it is time for us to be on our guard, to think of those long millennia when our ancestors’ lives were safeguarded by blood and sacrifice. But our lives do not need blood; we only regress to the use of it when we are forced to. To reflect that it is nearly always those leaders who claim to be in the forefront of progress, enlightenment, etc. who are the most ready to invoke blood, does offer the pleasures of irony. Well – the pleasures of irony, one sometimes has to think, are the only consolation when contemplating the human story.

      ‘We will drown the Enemy in seas of his own blood.’

      Ah yes, the enemy …

      There was, not long ago, a very interesting experiment in a certain American university. This was in a small university, near a small town, which had close ties with the university.

      One day, representatives of the psychology department invited the townspeople to come up to the university campus and take part in an experiment. It was a nice day, the university was a pretty place, townspeople and university people were used to trying to please each other, and several hundred people arrived at the campus at the time appointed. And then … nothing whatever happened. Nothing. The psychologists were nowhere to be seen. No explanations. No announcements. The visitors stood about waiting. Then they began to seek out acquaintances and friends, and still nothing happened. Discussing this, that they had all come up and nothing further was offered to them, they began to argue. Quite soon, there were two camps among them, with strongly opposing views. Next, the crowd had separated into two, and spokespeople had emerged. Debates ensued. Then quarrels. Much more was being discussed than the question of their being invited up here to their university (the townspeople thought of it as theirs) and then ignored. All kinds of issues were being aired and disagreed upon.