“Well it’s their fault for bringing their kids to a battle.”[1]
Everyone knows that the first victim of war is the truth. What is less well known is that the last victim of war, any war, is also the truth. Because the truth—defined as what really happened, independent of the political ‘spin’ attached to the events—continues to be brutalized, in a way that is graphically analogous to the way some military corpses are dragged through the streets by their enemies (an act reminiscent of that celebrated in the Iliad, when Achilles dragged Hector’s corpse—the corpse of the noblest of all heroes—behind his chariot, and for twelve days continued to abuse it).
My allusion to events that occurred some three thousand years ago is highly relevant, since it indicates how little the atrocities committed by men during the wars they have continuously waged since then have changed.
But that is not to say that nothing has changed since then.
If we limit our scope to that of living experience, say one hundred years, we can see how much has changed in such a short period of historical time by glancing at a few statistics, and bearing in mind a few technological developments.
It is estimated that for every civilian death during the first World War, nine soldiers died. Today that ratio has become inverted, with an estimated ten civilian deaths accompanying every single death of a combatant.
The turning point for this ratio was no doubt the second World War, during which anywhere between 50 and 70 million people died, most of whom—perhaps 60%, or two out of every three—were civilians.
But it was prior to the outbreak of WWII, when, during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), new technological developments accompanied by pseudo-scientific theories concerning the ‘worth’ of various categories of human lives, ensured that forever after any war would involve more civilian casualties than military causalities.
These technological developments included the Junkers 52s that were used as bombers in raids against a town like Guernica, where there were no real military targets; this was the most infamous, if not the first, example of terror bombings aimed specifically at the civilian population and the morale of the enemy.
By the end of WWII the carpet bombing of the enemy’s cities had become commonplace, with the consequent ‘collateral damage.’
That term, however, did not come into common usage until after the Vietnam War, during which the ratio of civilian to military dead was about two to one.
Simultaneous with these developments in what can only be considered as weapons of considerable destruction were the technological breakthroughs that enabled those who were not actually there to witness the death and destruction, as well as the atrocities. These included the Leica camera, particularly in the hands of someone like David Seymour and the more widely known and remembered Robert Capa.
Anyone my age is familiar with the social and political impact of the televised images from Vietnam, where Capa died, about a decade before the Americans took over from the French. And practically everyone today who has access to a television or a computer has seen even some of the more controversial and highly censored images from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the WikiLeaks film titled Collateral Murder (see footnote).
And it’s a good thing too, particularly for a nation that prides itself on the nature of its democracy—and especially its First Amendment—but it is not enough.
It is a good thing that there are people who are dedicated enough to the ‘truth’ to risk—and sometimes give—their lives for it. But those of us who benefit from the risks they take, their noble commitment and sacrifice, should take a stronger and more vocal stand in defense of their efforts.
The information that Julian Assange has made available through WikiLeaks is immensely valuable, even if it merely tells us—in far greater detail, and with considerable bureaucratic precision—what we already knew or suspected.
I think it’s fair to take issue with the information that was dumped onto the internet last July, information that hadn’t been scrutinized and filtered to shield the lives of those who were acting as informants in Afghanistan (a dangerous task and, assuming you don’t support the Taliban, perhaps even a noble one as well). But the Iraq Papers basically provide us with the Field Reports that the military personal kept on all ‘significant incidents.’ Some of this information may be mundane, much of it we already knew—or suspected—but what Assange has provided us with via the publication of this material are the details of those incidents, and these details matter very much.
In some cases these details enable us to judge events for ourselves, and in others they provide vital information for the people most interested in that information, the family members who lost loved ones as a result of ‘accidents’ or ‘mistakes.’ Even these ‘accidents’ or ‘mistakes’ can be judged more fairly when we place them in the context of urban and modern guerilla warfare. I don’t mean to justify any of the ‘collateral damage’—a euphemism that I regard as loathsome—but the more information we have, and the more honest and accurate it is, the better we can gauge and understand the complex situations that are created by the outbreak of armed hostilities.
In the United States, in particular, there is only one real enemy, and that is ignorance. I say ‘in particular’ because I get the impression that it is in the best interest of some people, even some political organizations, to keep Americans relatively ignorant.
Those will be the people and organizations who protest the release of the Iraq Papers the most. Those people don’t want us to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. They—like certain members of Spanish society today, who oppose the exhumation of the mass graves that date back to the Spanish Civil War, which could provide us with information concerning what really happened then—don’t want us to know. They will tell us that all of this—the names and dates and places of execution of the Spanish dead; the roughly 400,000 documents that WikiLeaks has just released, containing the dates and locations and even the names of some of the estimated 120,000 civilian dead in Iraq since the war began—is old news, and that going over this old news again will only open old wounds and make them bleed again. But even this isn’t true.
The truth about what really happened won’t resurrect the dead, it can’t eliminate the pain of having lost someone you loved, but it can provide the opportunity for those who are still grieving—even seventy years after the event—to come to terms at last with what has happened.
In addition, the more we know about war—about the very real death and destruction that accompanies every war, and the way innocent civilians, including children, are always caught up in the conflict and made to suffer as a consequence; the closer every war we become involved in is brought to home, the more we are allowed to feel it by being privy to what really happens in war, all the mistakes and accidents and stupidities and blunders, and the more all victims of the war are treated and regarded as human beings—the less likely we will be to wage war, or to use war as anything but the very last resort of all.
[1] These words were spoken in the context of the unprovoked shootings of Iraqi civilians—including two children—on July 12, 2007, an incident that resulted in the death of two Reuters journalists (Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen) and an unknown number of others. WikiLeaks said that “Although some of the men appear to have been armed, the behavior of nearly everyone was relaxed.” And no weapons were fired at the Apache helicopter. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0