Warcries of the Anthropocene

War Man

background photo Andreas Brunn on Unsplash

You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.

〰 Leon Trotsky 〰

War Before PIE

The etymological dictionary offers the evolution of the word war according to the PIE (proto indo european) system. While this is informative and interesting, it doesn’t tell us what happened to the word before PIE was invented. 〰 Let’s find out.

From their research on Pre Indo European vocabulary Mariam Krajnc and Michael Smith share interesting additional insights into the word we now call |wôr|:::

“*Wor or *war is a root that can be connected to the Finnish word for mountain, vuori, and the Afro Asiatic word *war- which means to grow or increase. This word has symbolic connotations and seems connected to the Neolithic beliefs about the dead and the way that they nourished the land.” *

The Neolithic period (7000-1700 BCE), aka New Stone Age, marks the beginning of a settled lifestyle. In other words, our Neolithic ancestors were busy learning to grow vegetables and domesticating wild animals.

Hunting and gathering were no longer primary strategies for survival. The New Stone Age called for collaboration, and fighting each other was presumably not high on the agenda.

“The meaning of *war- could simply mean 'mound' or 'hill', but 'increase' is also implied, and we can link this root to the English words 'warp' and 'wart', referring to a non typical growth and twisting.” *

The Neolithic word war gave no indication of the meaning we have associated with the three letter formation ~ w•a•r ~ in English for the past millennium or so. Having said that, there is a connection with dead bodies, as Kranjc explains.

“We also find *war associated with chambered cairns, … which actually came from earlier Mesolithic and Palaeolithic cultures in Western Europe where the dead were buried underground.” *

* Quotes from: Pre Indo European vocabulary, the mass comparison of Indo European, Afro Asiatic, Dene Caucasian and others

War, Worse, Worst

“To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.” This popular quote, attributed to George Washington, is often used to defend boundless streams of resources to subsidize the war industry.

Given the continued military conflicts all over the world, 'being prepared for war' ~ unfortunately ~ doesn't prove to be as effective as Washington predicted. On the contrary. Preparation, as the word suggests, is a preliminary act or operation done before another intended activity.

To prepare and preparation are derived from the Latin prae- (= before) + parare (= to make ready) and/or parire (= to produce, bring forth, give birth). Pre-paring, per definition, is pregnant with the expectation of the activity for which the preliminary measures are taken.

To suggest that war preparations are ‘one of the most effective means of preserving peace’ is like claiming that foreplay is one of the best strategies to avoid sexual intercourse.

Having devoted his twenties to a colonial military career, Washington surely knew what he was talking about. On January 8th 1790, during his first Address to Congress, he connected the continuation of the “peace and plenty with which we are blessed” with the need for establishing a standing army.

In this context, the assertion “to be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace,” means that in G.W’s experience, ’having a strong regular army is one of the most effective ways of deterring attacks from potential enemies.’

Deterrence against aggressors, however, is strictly speaking not the same as peace, or preserving peace. What is called ‘peace’ here is effectively a form of ‘truce’. A temporary ceasefire 〰 with the sounds and echoes of war rumbling on in the background.

When the word war was born into English, its form was closer to the French guerre (the initial ‘gu’ pronounced as a ‘w’), the Old English werre an adaptation of the Anglo Saxon werran.

In Old German, werran produced several variations ~ weren, werran, wehren ~ with a range of meanings:::

to protect, guard
to cover, shield, hide
to preserve, maintain, look after
to defend, hold onto one’s position through resistance
to confuse, confound, cause chaos and confusion
to save lives
to make a declaration of war

All these definitions can still be associated with the contemporary English war. While war-preparations may have had peacekeeping functions to a certain degree, the evolution of the word tells a different story.

The verbs worsen (= to make worse, aggravate) and worst (= to damage, inflict loss; defeat in argument) as well as worse and worst (= comparative and superlative of bad) are close cousins of war. All three words ~ war, worse & worst ~ started life in the English language in the 12th century.

Since then, the meaning of war ~ along with our experience of it ~ has consistently moved further away from peace.

The following (incomplete) timeline of words related to war gives an impression of this development:::

Before 12th century weapon = instrument of fighting and defense, sword; penis
1200 admiral (= Saracen commander or chieftain)
1281 kamikaze = divine wind, referring to a typhoon that dispersed a Mongol invasion threatening Japan
1300 battle
late 14 c. martial (= warlike, pertaining to war, attributed to Mars the God of War)
15th century bombard (noun) = late medieval cannon to hurl large stones
15th century military (adj.) = relating to soldiers
1530s martial law (= military rule over civilians)
1533 civil war
1545 troop (= group of soldiers)
1580s battalion

1580s militia (=system of military discipline)

1600 militarist (= soldier)

1610 missile = an object (e.g. rock) thrown or projected to strike something at a distance

1620s militate (= to serve as a soldier)

1686 bombard (verb) = to attack especially with artillery
1737 military age (= 17-35 years old)
1748 war cry
1756 rifle = shoulder weapon
1757 military (noun) = soldiers generally

1777 militia = (U.S.) the whole body of men declared by law amenable to military service, without enlistment, whether armed and drilled or not

1794 battleship
1800s guerilla warfare
1812 battlefield
1817 warmonger
1824 sniper (= concealed sharpshooter; one who shoots from a hidden place)
1827 military police

1841 militarism
1867 machine gun
1890 land mine
1894 trauma (= psychic wound, unpleasant experience which causes abnormal stress) in the context of war experience

19c. militia = (U.S.) all men of 'military age' "under control of the states, enrolled and drilled according to military law, not as regular soldiers, but called out periodically for drill and exercise and in emergency for actual service."

1910 chemical warfare
1914-1918 (WWI) bunker = a fortified chamber mostly below ground often built of reinforced concrete for use as protection against bomb attacks
1914 trench warfare
1914 atomic bomb
1914 war zone

1921 biological warfare

1935 paramilitary (= military units but not professional, S.A. and S.S. in Nazi Germany)

1937 blitz, blitzkrieg
1938 germ warfare
1941 area bombing
1945 kamikaze = suicide bombing
1945 guided missile = a missile whose course may be altered during flight
1947 nuclear weapon
1950 ballistic missile
1950 assault rifle = any of various intermediate-range, magazine-fed military rifles that can be set for automatic or semiautomatic fire
1950s nuclear deterrence
1950s Man-portable air-defense systems (MANPADS = portable surface-to-air missiles)
1968 laser-guided bomb (LGB)
1975 assymmetric warfare
1986 irregular warfare
1989 warfighting
1993 humanitarian corridor
1994 cyber warfare
1998 network-centric warfare
2001 war on terror
2006 hybrid warfare
2011 switchblade drone (= compact, portable aerial drone equipped with explosives)
2018 drone warfare

Bloody Incoherent War

In her recent article The Compass of Mourning , American philosopher Judith Butler asks, “Why can’t we condemn morally heinous acts without losing our powers to think, to know and to judge?”

Butler’s question ~ presumably rhetorical ~ has been answered by two former presidents of the United States.

“I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.” Dwight D Eisenhower wrote after WWI.

"Total war makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.” John F. Kennedy said in a speech in 1963

War itself makes people ‘lose their powers to think, to know and to judge’. War is neither rational nor logical. If something as brutal, futile, stupid, and senseless as war triggers non-rational, emotional responses, it’s because humans get drawn into the vortex of war.

“Every war is a defeat to the human spirit,” wrote Henry Miller (1891-1980). “Man kills through fear.”

While fear is understandable in the face of violence ~ fear is closely entangled with our powers to think, to know and to judge ~ or the loss of those powers, as the case may be. 

One of the meanings of the rootword werran is confusion. War has a long and surprisingly successful history of confounding the human mind. This has been known for over 2500 years, and yet it hasn’t sunk in.

“In war, truth is always the first victim,” the Greek poet Aischylos wrote in the fifth century B.C.

“The causes of war are always falsely represented,” Vera Brittain confirmed in her best-selling memoir Testament of Youth, written after WWI = the ‘war that was supposed to end all wars’.

Why do generations after generations of young people buy into the sham glorification of a cruel activity which has a well documented track record of claiming human lives in most horrendous ways?

War doesn’t only devour the soldiers who never return home, the casualties, the uncounted millions of dead civilians treated as ‘collateral damage’. Every human who has experienced a war is stuck with their traumatic memories. Even those who survived ‘the trenches’ have lost a most vital part of themselves.

“We are all haunted by war long after the war has ended,” Shirley Williams writes in the preface to the 1989 edition of her mother’s book Testament of Youth. “The First World War refuses to fade away.”

Williams refers to the war trauma suffered by the ancestors of her own generation. Her observations come around the same time as trauma researchers began to discover and understand the concept of intergenerational trauma.

“I think it is because of the terrible irony of the War;” Williams speculates, trying to make sense of something that is ultimately senseless. “The obscenity of the square miles of mud, barbed wire, broken trees and shattered bodies …; and the total imbalance between the causes for which the war was fought on both sides, as against the scale of the human sacrifice.”

This summary applies to all wars. The trauma caused by war ~ once known as shell shock ~ may never be fully processed by those who have witnessed the atrocities. Even if they return from the battlefields to a temporary peace in one piece, their hearts and souls, their youth and dreams were shattered, torn apart, for reasons ultimately unknown.

War leaves its survivors with a broken spirit, which they pass on to their children and children's children because they don’t have the resources, time, energy or means to recover, because war, or whatever they call war, has entered their bloodstream like an evil spirit. Because trauma is a wound that doesn’t heal simply through the passage of time.

So why did people go into war in the first place?

Presumably because they were/ felt threatened. Like George Washington.

Or in Vera Brittain’s words,“I perceived danger to be infinitely preferable when I went after it, instead of waiting for it to come after me.”