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Andrew Delbanco: Teaching About War

[Andrew Delbanco is director of American Studies at Columbia University. His most recent book, Melville: His World and Work, has just been published in paperback by Vintage.]

It's a peculiarity of academic life that, every fall, I find myself a year older facing students who somehow remain the same age. This poses a problem for anyone who takes seriously John Dewey's dictum that "knowledge of the past and its heritage is of great significance when it enters into the present, but not otherwise." It's a problem because, with each passing year, I know less about the present in which the students live. I rarely venture into the blogosphere or get through a graphic novel. I know nothing about the music they listen to and not much about how they organize their private lives. So I decided last spring to teach a class on a subject that I figured might bring us together over a matter of common urgency. The subject was war.
For many in my generation (I'm pushing 55), the word "war" is nothing more than a degraded metaphor. I've known it all my life, mainly in slogans like "war on poverty," "war on cancer," and, most recently, "war on terrorism." The word recalls Ralph Waldo Emerson's remark that, when "words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections," the "fraud is manifest." One of my aims in teaching the course was to try to expose the fraud.

We began with Max Weber's essay "Politics as a Vocation," which argues, with frightful salience for recent events in Lebanon, that "a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory." Since my students had read The Iliad in Columbia's core curriculum (which began as a "War Issues" course during World War I), we moved on to Simone Weil's essay on that poem, in which she describes the giddy confidence of the Greek invaders: "At the outset ... their hearts are light, as hearts always are if you have a large force on your side and nothing but space to oppose you. Their weapons are in their hands; the enemy is absent." It's impossible to read those lines, first published in Paris in 1940, without recalling the early days of the present war in Iraq, when embedded reporters crowed on Fox and CNN that Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard had melted away before the "shock and awe" of U.S. force. No one, as I recall, said much about their coming back to fight another day. Weil writes as if she had foreseen not only their return as murderous insurgents but also the crimes perpetrated by the "liberators" at places like Abu Ghraib: "We see men in arms behaving harshly and madly. ... We see them triumph over a dying man by describing to him the outrages his corpse will endure. ... Thus it happens that those who have force on loan from fate count on it too much and are destroyed."

Leaping over nearly 30 centuries and a thousand wars, we arrived at modern times via John Keegan's The Face of Battle, which contains a mind-boggling account of "long docile lines of young men" at the Somme, "shoddily uniformed, heavily burdened, numbered about their necks, plodding forward across a featureless landscape" into machine-gun fire that killed most of them. For World War II, we moved on to John Glusman's Conduct Under Fire, a remarkable book about his father's imprisonment during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines. Before the surrender of Corregidor, Murray Glusman, a young Jewish doctor from Brooklyn, performed surgery by flashlight in a cave amid the roar of bombers and moans of wounded men to whom he could not tend even as they bled to death. Sixty years later, his son wrote an account of the siege and the infamous Bataan "Death March"--a book filled with blood and horror. Yet my students and I were particularly struck by one intimate detail: two toothless POWs sharing a single set of dentures so they could take turns eating. ...
Read entire article at New Republic