Farewell to all that

I’m with James on that.

My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor.
No likely end could bring them loss,
Or leave them happier than before.

Beautiful. Thank you.

Mistakes were made, but it is possible to coherently argue that the war in Afghanistan was justified, at least initially.

Unlike Iraq, of course.

JQ @3:

I think you’ve missed something. The cost of 1 Toyota pick-up with machine gun mount, maybe $40,000; the cost of 1 bomber flight to take out said pickup, $500,000. Maybe you might see how the relative “opportunity costs”, since we civilized people value human life so much more than those barbarians, doesn’t favor our imperial-military adventures.

GT @ 9: Oh dear! You’re bordering on a Godwin’s law violation there.

What Colin said. The idea that incommensurable things can somehow be equated is one of our most basic delusions. (It really ought to be obvious, when you think about it. What would be the point of economic exchange if different goods of the same price were actually equivalent in any real sense?)

Thanks for the OP; it really made me pause.

“Living in a modern society while affecting vapours at the concept of costs-benefit analysis”

I’ve never seen a cost-benefit analysis that wasn’t easily manipulable to get whatever result the person doing the analysis wanted to get. The *concept* of CBA may or may not be obscene, but the actual practice of it generally is a way for elite interests with the resources to hire people to do CBAs to override regulatory decisions they don’t like. And in particular, the ventilator / mosquito net kind of comparison used as an example is nearly always trotted out to say that the ventilator has to go, not that we should buy mosquito nets.

The *concept* of CBA may or may not be obscene, but the actual practice of it generally is a way for elite interests with the resources to hire people to do CBAs to override regulatory decisions they don’t like.

Also not really true. Possibly the biggest user of cost benefit analyses and valuations on human life is the National Institute for Clinical Excellence of the NHS. The rhetoric of referring to them as “death panels” where “elites” make life or death decisions is usually only indulged in by people who, for whatever reason, want to support a market-based system (in which, of course, nobody has to do anything as squalid or obscene as put a value on a human life as the rationing takes place at a different stage)

We all are eating and crapping rationalizing machines, aren’t we d-squared?

Yes this was beautiful. But surely part of our reaction to this should be anger at those who made the decision. Power and accountability are supposed to go together, but it is amazing how in practice power means never having to say you’re sorry (Exhibit A: that foul hypocrite Tony Blair). In fact I suspect for many powerful people that is exactly why they seek power so ardently.

And I’m for a CBA here because even a crude one is a good guide to just how angry we should be.

“That’s not my flag and never will be. It’s just something someone I slightly knew died for.”

Very sad.

It reminds me of a chapter in a book on the colonial encounter in Pacific history I once read. I can not remember which book it was, but I will recount the story to the best of my memory.

The Maori people in New Zealand were more of a warrior people than the indigenous people in Australia, and while there was fighting against colonisation. in both countries the Maori were more practiced at warfare I am told.

A Maori warrior chief closely observed the doings of the Pakeha (the white settlers), and watching them for a long time he saw the great rituals that the Pakeha had connecting relations to land and people with the flag they flew. In the Pakeha village there was a most important flag on a very tall mast.

The Maori warrior chief had fought many battles before, and he had a keen mind to plan attacks. And he gathered his men together and told them his observations of the great flag ritual and his plan to capture the flag and therefore have the land returned to the Maori people.

The men were very valorous, and led by the warrior chief they attacked the Pakeha village , and although men died the Maori men captured the Pakeha flag. Once they captured the great honored flag the Maoris were certain the land was once again their own, and the Pakeha would surrender honorably.

But the Pakeha were very cunning people, and although the flag was captured they kept fighting the Maori men. And the Pakeha had many strange strong weapons, and with these weapons they killed many Maori men. For the Pakeha did not associate land ownership only with the flying of their flag, but with what force they could use to overcome any others.

Eisenhower got this right more than fifty years ago

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

“If Afghanistan was justified, it was justified because of the awfulness of the taliban government and its many human rights abuses, right?”

No, it was justified as a war against a group based in Afghanistan who had attacked the US.

> No, it was justified as a war against a group based in Afghanistan who had attacked the US.

It’s a dessert wax and a floor topping.

..although to be honest @28, I didnt really understand your comment (which was pretty cryptic) so am assuming you meant something like ‘it can be two things at once.’

ANTHEM FOR DOOMED YOUTH by WILFRED OWEN

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
—Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

The television presenters and even the reporter covering the closing of Camp Bastion are all wearing little paper-and-plastic commemorative poppies.

The poppies are not specifically for the 100th anniversary of WW1, which in any case is almost two months ago now, but for the upcoming Remembrance Day commemoration of war dead in general. The poppies will be almost universal by Remembrance Sunday itself (the closest Sunday to Armistice Day, 11 November) as they are every year. Apologies if you knew this already.

(The idiotic thing about JQ’s ludicrous cost-per-Talib-killed comment 3 is that it assumed that the only objective of the intervention was to kill Taliban.)

#34 ajay

(The idiotic thing about JQ’s ludicrous cost-per-Talib-killed comment 3 is that it assumed that the only objective of the intervention was to kill Taliban.)

That’s an important point. Like for example, how can we put a cost on stimulating the economy?

Now it is not good for the Christian’s health to hustle the Aryan brown,
For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles and he weareth the Christian down;
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear: “A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.”

Is there any reasonable measure by which this has not been a more favorable engagement for the UK than the first three Anglo-Afghan wars? Auckland’s folly killed at least ten times as many Britons; Kipling’s General “Bobs” about the same, and the less said about 1919 the better. Furthermore, they had much less excuse: officers in those days had actually read Alexander the Great’s campaigns.

I coulda sworn somebody above mentioned the Americanization of Emily. The post is indeed quite remarkable.

Leaving aside the intense and enduring admiration and affection apparently engendered at the white-gloved studied professionalism of an assigned escort, the innocence regained and renewed and expressed so clearly in the post was a large part of the point and purpose of the high manners of the Victorian officer and gentleman of the Imperialist patriarchal period. I understand the Prussians were especially dashing and courtly, and sported romantic dueling scars. It wasn’t for each other.

“Oh, I so very much hate war, but you look so very grand in your full dress uniform.”
“Thank you missy, you give me the courage I need to go slaughter the wogs. I’ll remember the look in your eyes.”

@37: true.

Life expectancy in Afghanistan went from 55 in 2001 to 61 in 2013, over a population of 30 million. So perhaps 3 million net lives saved, at a cost of something like 800 billion dollars. Which is something like $266,000 or life, or 1/20 of the value usually used for a US life.

Which is of course massively higher than the amount the US is willing to pay for people on the other side of the planet without any special historical ties. Hence the war’s unpopularity, and why it’s stopping.

Of course, it probably would have improved comparably had the Taliban been left in power, at least given aid and favorable trade terms. Which no doubt is what would have happened with no 9/11.

Thing is, given 9/11 did happen, a more politically realistic alternative would have been destroying the Afghan government and ignoring the resulting civil war. While that would have saved much of the cost of the war, you’d likely end up with a direct death toll of single-digit millions, massive refugee flows, and a general lost decade or two of development.

Can’t really work out the figures in that case, but it’s not particular obvious it is below any other way of spending that much money (you can’t usefully buy $800 billion of mosquito nets).

#42 soru

Life expectancy in Afghanistan went from 55 in 2001 to 61 in 2013, over a population of 30 million. So perhaps 3 million net lives saved, at a cost of something like 800 billion dollars. Which is something like $266,000 or life, or 1/20 of the value usually used for a US life.

It’s hard for me to trust numbers coming out of a war zone. (Of course I do accidentally tend to trust them when they confirm my preconceptions, or when they support my arguments. I’m distressingly normal that way.)

I tend not to trust numbers provided by the Afghan government which is probably not very good at collecting them, or numbers provided by the US military which must consider propaganda against citizens as part of the war effort, or numbers by WHO who being mostly unarmed is not good at getting answers from regions at war where people don’t trust strangers.

But the Afghan economy is optimisticly listed at $20 billion for 2013, and how much of that involves sales to foreign forces, or sales of items pilfered from foreign forces, or items recovered from foreign forces’ garbage? We can’t bomb Afghanistan from local airbases without creating a thriving local economy. How much of that will go away when we quit?

It’s hard to be sure what our $800 billion has accomplished. Probably some of the effects will be strictly transient. But how many, and which ones? The immunizations will last a lifetime, that part is entirely a plus.

This was a very elegantly done post, Maria. Every life cut short should mourned in those notes.
But myself, I don’t think your question allows for the ambiguity with which you surround it:
”
Was it worth it? Well if you’ve figured out a workable and not-obscene calculus of human pain and worthwhile profit, let the rest of us know.”

This unfortunately depoliticizes a very political issue. I think the answer should be an unambiguous no. The soldiers, the Afghans, they died in vain. The US should, in retrspect, have negotiated with the Taliban in 2001 over the offer to have Osama bin Laden stand trial in some Islamic country. There was never a good reason to invade Afghanistan, and after occupying the country, to occupy it with maximum vileness, tortures all around, etc. If we are to use children schooled as a measure to obscure children’s parents displaced or killed, our measures are out of whack.
To my mind, that the Coalition troops have been in Helmand province for thirteen years overturns the terms in which you ask your question utterly. It is mad. I can’t imagine that your experience of the gold-tinged dusk of a Wiltshire summer evening would have been the same if the situation were reversed – if Afghan troops were withdrawing from there after thirteen years of occupation, leaving behind 20 ooo plus Wiltshire dead. Somehow, I think there would be a keener anger at it all, there would be more than a little scent of blood in that gold dusk – rather than the kind of exhaustion that gives this event an air of inevitability.
It wasn’t inevitable. And the obscenity to me is that it happened, and happened for a long, long stretch, longer than the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

“#40 – the original post expressed every bit of the self-awareness and irony that you obtusely believe needed to be supplied. And you owe Maria an apology for the implicit insult of the “missy.””

You are completely right Bloix. Bob has been making an ass of himself to female posters/commenters for years and he is unlikely to stop anytime soon.

48: Malicious insubstantial twit, ask Robin and Holbo if I am so selective.

I got fed up with “Big Daddy Warbucks killed my pretty lad and I’ll never ever forgive them” somewhere around the time Obsidian Wings established their permanent sacred Andrew Olmsted Shrine. The memorial was oh so beautifully sad, especially since anger was moderated away. Anger is so ugly, don’t you think? I wasn’t invited since I metaphorically spit on Olmsted as he boarded the plane.

7 goddamn years ago. 13 years since the start of the last war, and who knows how long before the start of the next one. How’s these beautiful sentiments working out?

The goal is to get them to desert as in the threads below, cause it sure don’t look like anybody wants to do what it takes to stop the wars. Best bet is to make it uglier to serve than to desert, and that’s a lot of ugly. “Nothing to come home to” is a good slogan, better than the woman’s “on your shield” I don’t have anything much to bribe or threaten with, but Aristophanes came up with an idea 2500 years ago. Not that anyone cares enough to give it a try. Widow’s weeds and pension ain’t so bad. People give you compliments.

Bob McManus, did you just call MPAV a malicious, insubstantial twit? Nice.

Here’s more Wilfred Owen

Send Off

” Down the close, darkening lanes they sang their way
To the siding-shed,
And lined the train with faces grimly gay.

Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray
As men’s are, dead.

Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp
Stood staring hard,
Sorry to miss them from the upland camp.
Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp
Winked to the guard.

So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.
They were not ours:
We never heard to which front these were sent.

Nor there if they yet mock what women meant
Who gave them flowers.

Shall they return to beatings of great bells
In wild trainloads?
A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,
May creep back, silent, to still village wells
Up half-known roads.”

and from “Disabled”

“It was after football, when he’d drunk a peg,
He thought he’d better join. He wonders why . . .
Someone had said he’d look a god in kilts.

That’s why; and maybe, too, to please his Meg,
Aye, that was it, to please the giddy jilts,
He asked to join.”

But this is a bitter misogynist, so unreliable narrator

“Some cheered him home, but not as crowds cheer Goal.
Only a solemn man who brought him fruits
Thanked him; and then inquired about his soul.
Now, he will spend a few sick years in Institutes,
And do what things the rules consider wise,
And take whatever pity they may dole.
To-night he noticed how the women’s eyes
Passed from him to the strong men that were whole.”

Probably a “nice guy” huh, but not much of a worry without his legs.

bob mcmanus’s contributions here are depressing. You have given the post the most uncharitable reading possible, added your own offensive crap on top (suggesting it’s implicit in the original) and then adopted a self-righteously sarcastic pose and resorted to name calling. It is beyond me what you get out of such a performance.

And I think most readers here will know their Wilfred Owen, whose humanitarian outlook is far more present in the original post than in mcmanus’s comments.

bob mcmanus’s contributions here are depressing.

Depressing, goodness, how inappropriate for this subject matter.

Well, I teared up a little on first reading, but after skipping the idiotic cost-benefit comments, noted all the comments saying “Beautiful beautiful beautiful” and wondered if the aestheticization of war grief death and guilt was implicit in the OP to garner such reactions. I can only presume that those saying it was beautiful were honest and insightful.

And Wilfred Owen was many things (including possibly misogynist, but hell, even the Pankhursts…) but if anything was his theme, a rage against the aestheticization of war might be central to his matter and form. He made an effort to be not pretty. And never self-serving.

bob @57, would you agree that sometimes in relentlessly seeking to discover a deeper political dimension to every human interaction, we can miss important elements of reality? I say this without seeking to draw you into an argument as to whether you’ve done so here and have thereby dismissed unintentionally something important. I’m simply raising the possibility for your consideration, and won’t engage with you further on the matter.

One of my poems.

I’ll just say that I can see were bob mcm is coming from.

It was easy to feel good about the Afghan adventure for about the first year. I remember all those predictions back in 2001, about the probable death-toll from the combination of drought plus Taliban miss-rule (a couple million if I remember properly). So at first, I have to think we saved quite a few people. But then our almost absolute incompetence, I think I’d like to call it anti-competence as occupiers began to shine through. We just couldn’t overcome the cultural differences, and would misinterpret celebratory gunfire at weddings, as an attack, with deadly consequences. And we were completely gulible to whomever would deem to give us information about our eneimies, oftentimes we were dupped into attacking/imprisoning/torturing those who had been on our side, but for whom someone wanted us to do their dirty work for. Did anyone think to research and instruct everyone we sent over there on the proper way to treat the Quran? Instead we would just let contractors follow their instints, with tragic consequences.. And on and on and on. So the whole thing just went south, but we never wanted to admit any mistakes, so we would pretend everything we did was for the better and done heroically. With such self-deception comes the inability to recognize that we are doing no one any good over there, so we stay and stay and stay….

Now obviously we didn’t go over there for humanitarian intervention. It was really the emotional/ hence political need to bomb someone for 9-11. But at first it looked like we would do the Afghans a lot of good.

Lovely post Maria. I can’t add more than a few random thoughts. Cost Benefit? As D2 notes, it’s an inescapable part of life. We would be fools not to site the ambulance stations where they did the most good, as far as we could determine. But even there, it’s only the start. We would be fools to simply go with the stats, and greater fools (and knaves) to tell the paramedics to give up at a measured dollar threshold. On war? Owen and Sassoon had it right, but so too did Rupert Brooke. It’s simultaneously the most primitive and most sophisticated thing we humans do – from fighting with sharpened spades in sewers to the complexities of D-Day. Squalid death is part of it, but so too is the manic elation of Nelson’s band of brothers and the desperate resolve of Rodimtsev’s guards.

Here in Canberra there’s a large War Memorial with a map of all the places Australians have fought. Not too many empty spots. Almost all represent tragic waste to me, but they often didn’t to those who went, even when they did not come back. So I won’t speak for your dead acquaintance.

Farewell, indeed. The thing about a land war in Afghanistan and poetry is not only their inseparability, but the inevitable Auf Wiedersehen. It never is complete. See you again, soon.

Bloody chests are full of land-love-affair
Youths sacrifice heads, and call it only fair.
Relief comes to me when I come to you
Anxiety snakes in my heart when I am far from-you.
No matter the increase in lands I capture
It’s the beauty of your gardens I’ll never forget.
Discard I the magnificent throne of Delhi
When I remember the summits of Afghan mountains.
The legacy of Hamid and Farid times returns
When I run victorious all around.
Ahmad Shah will not forget your legacy
Even if he conquers the world in whole.
If the universe comes into either hand
I’ll prefer your bare and naked deserts.

That leads to a comment on the other discussion on CT. No more polyglots in America. Or apparently the Unite Kingdom, even.

“It was easy to feel good about the Afghan adventure for about the first year.” That was the year of the Kunduz airlift which flew the Taliban’s leadership to Pakistan. The year of Bagram Prison filling up, the year the CIA first started its program of torture, and the year in which Guantanamo filled up with random Afghans that the Americans believed were bad guys, on the word of random war lords.
I remember Osama bin Laden magically getting away on his little pink pony. I remember that at Tora Bora, even though they had clear evidence of the kind of heat in the mountain passes behind Tora Bora that indicated camp fires, they refused to bomb cause they didn’t want to kill “shepherds” – which must have been news to the shepherds who were having the shit bombed out of them in front of Tora Bora. By happy accident, our Osama disappeared, which made him a valuable figure of terror whenever votes had to be drummed up. But I’m sure everything was done to track that tricky guy down! For instance, massively opening the email of US citizens by the NSA – who knows what clues you could find there.
But what I remember perhaps best about the first year is Bush’s pledge of a Marshall plan for Afghanistan. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/19/opinion/afghanistan-s-marshall-plan.html
That was of course followed by… zilchypoo. As Peter Bergen pointed out, aid per capita to the Bosnians was about thirty times more than the aid given to Afghans during the entire Bush administration. The latter worked out to about 1.75 billion per year, and, of course, given the way the Bush’s spent money, who knows how much of that went to the Afghans at all. Typical of the Bushites was the fact that they cut the 150 million dollar request of the US Agency of International Assistance to 40 million dollars right after Bush’s Marshall plan speech.
In fact, the first comprehensive aid bill to Afghanistan was authored by Chuck Hagel as a reproach to the Bush administration, which subsequently chose to disperse the money otherwise.
It was lousy, this war, ab ovo. One of the worst the US has ever fought – or the UK, for that matter.

^ heroin use and abuse has been on a rise in the US since we started the War in Afghanistan, and has especially grown since 2006 when the levels of poppy cultivation spiked upwards. Reflexive anti-drug ideology is certainly problematic, but cheap heroin flowing into the US via both illicit channels and via American soldiers is not something to merely brush off as a non-issue. Heroin usage has also risen in Afghanistan itself.

Calling concerns over increased heroin use, here and abroad, ‘nonsense’ is ignorant of the real challenges facing a number of US cities due to the increased supply of cheap heroin on the streets.

Very moving OP, many thanks, Maria.

As the 70-odd comments to date have amply demonstrated, war and its soldier-victims arouse a multitude of emotionally-charged responses. It seems to me possible that one can be opposed to war, or at least some wars, and still feel profoundly moved by soldiers’ sacrificing their lives.

Similarly, it seems possible to me that one can accept the logic of CBA and yet recognize that while CBA works in the aggregate as a decision tool, those who die in war are the sons, brothers, husbands, cousins, and friends (or daughters, sisters, wives…) of those left behind to mourn their passing. To them, the lost life has no price; it is price-less.

As I read the OP and was overcome by the understated sentiment underlying it, I recalled a film I saw some years ago called Taking Chance (HBO 2009). I would highly recommend it (despite mixed reviews, which I suspect had more to do with the political persuasions of the reviewers than the film’s quality) to those interested in … well, war and its consequences for comrades-in-arms, strangers, friends, family… everyone, really.

Just out of curiosity, a question for Bob McManus: was your point that because war is evil, its foot soldiers should not be mourned by those who loved or knew them? There isn’t much to admire about recent/ongoing (maybe, any) war, but I don’t see why one cannot grieve for those lost–or wounded, or maimed, psychologically or physically–in war.

Junkies who overdose are victims of the Drug War, killed by the enemy. It’s perfectly OK to mourn them.

Why not soldiers just as much? They are victims even if they volunteered. The junkies volunteered too.

Each premature death, each wasted life, is worth some mourning even if the victim did some evil.

79: only those with no other options become its foot soldiers.

The OP as far as I can tell, was about officers. Andrew Olmsted was I think a captain or major when he volunteered for a combat role in Iraq. The grunt is romanticized, if less than the officer, but rarely in the romantic or sexual way of the officer.

There has always been respect even admiration for the Conscientious Objecter, pacifist, Quaker to little or no effect. Seemed to me that this was given much greater force in the early seventies when military service, soldiering, officers were explicitly devalued and de-romanticized and possibly had even some actual effect in ending the draft and Vietnam war. Part of a more general anti-establishment movement, of course.

Of course people can mourn their loved ones. But why are the rest of us invited to the wakes but not the weddings?

@79: “only those with no other options become its foot soldiers.”

I don’t mean to be rude, but this is simply not true.
I teach at Harvard, and have been fortunate to have had several students who have served in Afghanistan and/or Iraq.
They are truly, without sarcasm or snark, among our best and brightest, and had plenty of other options. They *chose* to serve, knowing the risks and opportunity costs.
We owe them our gratitude, and our support — but hardly our pity.
You may have had it right the first time, when you said “many” had limited or no good prospects other than the military. But that does not mean that “only” such “volunteers” make up our fighting forces.

@82
Unless of course you mean ‘best and brightest’ in the sardonic, Halberstam sort of way.

An example is the sainted Elizabeth Warren, D-MA (US Senate)

One of her first acts as senator was to vote on the nomination of J Brennan to be DCIA

I wrote to Senator Warren, saying that Brennan was complicit in the torture policys of the Bush admin, and therefore she should not vote for him
She replied,insultingly late, that the POTUS deserved deference in his nominations…

Can you imagine what “liberals” like E Warren would say if a Republican president nominated Brennan

(if you are furious that I attack Warren, I assert
a) Warren’s chief claim to fame is that she is an advocate for the view that the rapacious policys of hte 0.1$ are destroying the middle class.

b) his is *not* liberal; it merely appears so in an era when a person like J Ernst can have a shot at being a US senator (re read thinking fast and slow; we judge people based on context, not an absolute scale)

If warren were in fact a liberal, would she have voted to confirm one of Bush’s chief torture architects ? I think not.

Epic is the second important form of writing in the Western canon I think (at least in the basic chronology of genres).

It has been remarked that Hesiod’s Catalogue of Women has a pattern where a God rapes a mortal woman, and the child she subsequently bares will be a hero.

Ovid changed the pattern to the woman undergoing metamorphosis. The episode where Nestor tells to Achilles and others the story of Caenis/Caeneus is moving: she is the most beautiful woman in Thessaly and is desired and raped by Neptune , she asks to be turned in to a man so it never may happen again, she is turned to a man and becomes a warrior. Much later there is a wedding ; centaurs try to rape the bride and then a battle ensues. Caeneus is impervious to weapons but a centaur derides him for having been once a woman – they centaurs are enraged they cannot kill him with their weapons and throw tree upon tree upon him – some say he died then and descended to the underworld, but Mopsus saw a bird fly from the great pile of trees and asserted it was Caenis again transformed.

@88
Saint-Exupery once wrote, “War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.”

Meredith: “Why DO we aestheticize war? Is it in every way a bad impulse? Certainly in many ways it is, but in every way?….
And really — those women and girls marching around in pictures I have viewed recently, … all of them, north and south, supporting “the boys” going off to fight in WWI — does that make WWI the women’s doing?”

Val “The aestheticisation of war, the romanticisation, the fascination with it – it’s all misguided … it’s hard to say this, but war is wrong. The deaths are tragic, there’s nothing wrong with saying that, but war is misguided, and romanticism only aids that.”

J Thomas “If in fact the wars are necessary…. If in fact the wars are not necessary…”

After letting some time go by Meredith has summed up the debate in the thread very well, and very sensitively brought up the issue of what women’s relation is to warring. I hope you will forgive a rather lengthy comment.

My grandfather was a soldier in World War 2, he met my grandmother when he was shell shocked between tours of duty and she was a nurse. Her father and his brother had been soldiers in WW1.

I don’t agree that aestheticising war is the same as romanticising it. Many commenters wrote that Maria’s post was beautiful — although appreciating Maria’s post as always being well written and full of feeling, I thought it better to comment on the sadness of the topic, rather than the writing.

Bob McManus’ first complaint seems to be that commenters noting the beautifulness of Maria’s writing must then think war is beautiful too — but I do not think he shows that the one necessarily follows from the other .

His second complaint (rather unfairly I think) implicates women in men’s going to war: ““Nothing to come home to” is a good slogan, better than the woman’s “on your shield” I don’t have anything much to bribe or threaten with, but Aristophanes came up with an idea 2500 years ago. Not that anyone cares enough to give it a try.”

The story of Caenis/Caeneus I briefly recounted above is a highly aesthetic work, but this does not mean that it tells of events in a way which makes one feel enthusiastic for them.

I know the story because of a subject where you had to look at the same story or character told in different genres (myth, epic, romance, modernism). I looked at Nestor in Homer and Ovid. Of the Greeks, Homer is usually thought of as concerned with the masculine epic, with Hesiod being concerned with the more feminine myth. Of the Romans, Virgil in The Aeneid is thought to be consciously following Homer, while Ovid is thought to counter this in his Metamorphoses by following Hesiod.

In both Homer and Ovid the figure of Nestor is a very long lived man who ‘in winning words’ tells tales of battles and heroes past. In The Metamorphoses Achilles requires Nestor tell the story of Caenis in epic form “…let us hear (We all have the same wish) who Caeneus was, And why his change of sex, in what campaign, What battle line you knew him, and by whom He was defeated if he met defeat”, Ovid interjecting “What else indeed should be Achilles’ theme?” But Nestor recounts it more as a myth, except as narrated in a more sophisticated manner and including some knowing asides “So the tale ran” “But Mopsus disagreed… A Prophet’s words! And we believed”.

In the tale of Caenis the pastoral wedding is interrupted by epic as the centaurs try to take possession of the bride and “what girl each would or could” — the pastoral and epic coexist in the battle to absurd effect with wine bowls, antique goblets, jars, bowls, and dishes all being turned to use as weapons.

The human agency shown in the ancient epic form is an agency constrained both by their bodily mortality which confers great risk to battle, and also by the gods “the will of Zeus was moving towards its end.” But later the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution gave men much more knowledge, control and power over the world than in the ancient world. And we see the advantage this gave to Europeans who colonised formerly strange and far off parts of the world through use of their knowledge of the world and inventions.

The US civil war is thought to be the first modern war, due to a particular technological improvement in gunmaking. The total war of World Wars 1 and 2 were beyond the scope of human agency envisioned in epic. Oppenheimer said when the atom bomb was dropped he felt like Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods — but the scope of destruction provided by the atom bomb is far greater than that by fire.

We also had to look at modern interpretations of a figure or tale in the light of older ones, and I chose Orpheus – in Ovid, in the Sir Orfeo where ‘Herodys’ is rescued from the underworld and Orfeo returns to his kingdom as a beggar in disguise, and in John Ashbery’s Syringa.

Ashbery is more a formal than confessional poet — and in Syringa he tells of Orpheus as if elliptically , the title referring instead to Syrinx who in Ovid is a nymph who escapes Pan by turning into reeds — reeds which are then used by Pan to make panpipes.

While Ovid’s Nestor makes asides like “So the tale ran” Ashbery makes this sort of thing much more prominent in his subject of the tale of Orpheus. Orpheus’ desire to return Eurydice from the Underworld is likened to a wish to escape history (“… That’s where Orpheus made his mistake. /Of course Eurydice vanished into the shade;/ She would have even if he hadn’t turned around.No use standing there like a gray stone toga as the whole wheel / Of recorded history flashes past, struck dumb, unable to utter an intelligent/ Comment …”) which is likened to Syrinx as a reed: “… to ask more than this / Is to become the tossing reeds of that slow, / Powerful stream , the trailing grasses / Playfully tugged at, but to participate in the action / No more than this.”

Maybe in a sense eulogies, like the spare one given in the OP, are similar efforts to Orpheus’ in how the try to bring something back, to re-membering a person, or passed events. But in trying to re-member a now historical person or event they do not have to give their approval to it, so they are also acts of participation rather than silence. Maria’s OP shows little or no enthusiasm for the war, but reading the comments Bob McManus

“wondered if the aestheticization of war grief death and guilt was implicit in the OP to garner such reactions. I can only presume that those saying it was beautiful were honest and insightful. … Wilfred Owen was many things…. but if anything was his theme, a rage against the aestheticization of war might be central to his matter and form.”

But I would think Wilfred Owen’s writing counts as modernism. I think literary modernism was highly aesthetic formally, although many authors utilised unusual sorts of aesthetics to make their points. Bob McManus’ quoting of Wilfred Owen’s writing shows an aesthetic consciousness rather than one which is clumsy and unformed:

“Down the close, darkening lanes they sang their way
To the siding-shed,
And lined the train with faces grimly gay.

Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray
As men’s are, dead.”

J Thomas’ comment gives us two options — if wars are necessary, or if wars are not necessary. But we do not confine our writing and talking to matters that are necessary, and unfortunately many unnecessary bad things happen in our world. And as Wilfred Owen’s poems show, aesthetics or form can work to bring out the senseless tragedy or absurdity in historical events.

Aesthetics can also add an order that may have been missing from the event, and perhaps this is more objectionable — but Maria’s post alludes to this in her account of the ritual form of the funeral which controls the mourning behaviour of those present:

“walking slowly through a seated congregation to a reserved pew at the front, next to a coffin with a Union Jack on. The gloves and belt were the hardest to look at. No one cried. Not obviously, anyway.”

which is followed by her account of breaking down afterwards in informal coincidental circumstances:

“Later, driving through the gold-tinged dusk of a Wiltshire summer evening, I rounded the corner of B-road to see the flag again, flying in someone’s garden. I had to pull over.”

Aestheticising something can also allows for a conscious distance between the thing itself, and the writing or the telling of the thing. Ashbery’s poem has Orpheus replying to Ashbery that “no matter how all this disappeared, / Or got where it was going, it is no longer / Material for a poem. Its subject / Matters too much, and not enough, standing there helplessly / While the poem streaked by”

For a private tragedy there is usually a sense that discussion of it must respect the privacy of people affected and be limited to what is in the public interest. In a way our modern wars make of men public property , in that they are asked or made to realise their own mortality or that of other men by killing and taking the risk of being killed for the sake of the state or the country. But not withstanding the public numbering and notices of the people killed, or physically or psychologically injured, on both sides of the recent wars, there still remains the private tragedies and mourning in the domestic and community spaces.

And rather than aesthetics, it seems to me this is Bob McManus’ real complaint : that men who have died or been injured in these wars which many of us see as wrong are not deserving of being remembered in their personal capacity, even by slight acquaintances like Maria was to the officer.

Of course there is bitterness that despite much public opposition to the wars our governments went ahead with them, and now are going back to war with this further tragedy of ISIS. And while this is certainly a reason to think public opposition to war needs to be stronger and more persistent, I think this complaint I perceive hidden in the overt complain about ‘aesthetics’ is related to Bob McManus’ second complaint that women have failed by not implementing Aristophanes solution.

Both complaints draw no distinction between public life and private life, and both dismiss the domestic or feminine sphere and ask that it be even more subordinated to public life.
And this reminds me of Caenis/Caeneus and the centaurs denying her/his equalness to them on account of her feminine origins, and not being able to wound her/him smothering her/him with tree upon tree : “Must I endure you? You, always a wench, Always Caenis to me”.

Is the problem aestheticization as such, or is it deciding which aesthetic is appropriate to apply to which war? The aestheticization may be inevitable (it’s what we do), but is it epic or satire (pastoral is right out)? Homeric or Kafkaesque? Pre-Raphaelite or punk?

Here’s a sad note for a poignant post:

On November 2, 2000, in a hotel room in Germany, representatives of the Clinton Administration met with representatives of the Taliban government of Afghanistan. They came to an agreement that the Taliban would assist the U.S. government in the covert assassination of Osama bin Laden. The method agreed to was that bin Laden and his followers would be restricted to an abandoned CIA-built base in Darunta, and that the Taliban would give the U.S. the exact coordinates of the building housing bin Laden for a cruise missile strike.

In case you are wondering about the Taliban’s motivation, it has to do with internal schisms, religious and ideological differences with the Arab Wahabbis, and the desire for international recognition. They couldn’t be seen publicly as responsible for bin Laden’s death because of factional opposition and bin Laden’s street cred among their supporters.

Of course, two days later came the election, Bush vs. Gore, hanging chads, and Bush taking office. The Clinton administration handed off the negotiations. The Bush administration maintained contact with the Taliban through the summer of 2001 but never pursued the project.

In 2007, after reading an article about this in Counterpunch, I interviewed the Afghan-American translator/go-between who was present at these negotiations, Kabir Mohabbat. He noted the strange reluctance of the Bush administration to push forward on this opportunity.

As with so many wars, and so many deaths, it was utterly preventable.