Romanticizing War
by tristero
No doubt David Finkel is an excellent reporter, a good writer, and likely his heart is in the right place. Nevertheless:
Removed from the bonds of their unit — severed from the love of comrades that Finkel calls “the truth of war” — each soldier navigates the postwar on his own…”
Nope. War has exactly one fundamental truth: mass slaughter. All the rest – the bonding, the obscene justifications for war dreamt up by those who stand to gain from mass killing – they are all merely corollaries of that truth.
Of course, Finkel’s remark is just a literary flourish, something we notice, if at all, as simply a sign that the writer is intelligent and thoughtful. But micro-rhetoric matters. Tropes such as Finkel’s serve to romanticize war by locating war’s truth anywhere except in the killing. Often inadvertently, they help validate a pervasive mindset that considers the indiscriminate carnage of war a reasonable price to pay, even when other, more sensible and less bloody alternatives exist.
Robert Fisk is one of the few who understood war’s real truth.
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