Amador Fernández-Savater: To rethink war

From Lobo Suelto! (15/03/2022) …

To rethink war, what does it mean? To learn to look at the world strategically. The news, rights, the laws, the speeches, the images… To take them as operations, as forces (of occupation or resistance): not only what they say, but also what they do (with us).

Is it exaggerated? Don’t we live, here in Europe at least, in peaceful societies? Societies pacified rather, in a truce. But the truce is not peace, but the continuation of hostilities by other means.

What war is it about? The war to dominate the entire earth in the name of economic benefit: to subject life, knowledge and bodies, the countryside and the city, to calculation, to conquer in extension and intensity, to demolish everything that – inside or outside of ourselves – does not fit, to make a desert of it all.

War, said a German philosopher who understood this for a while, is a test of both strength and translation. What did he mean? On the one hand, it is a matter of violence: fear, repression, threat of physical destruction. On the other hand, it is a matter of meaning: to win is to convince, to install the categories of the dominant in the dominated.

Does thinking about war makes us soldiers? That only happens if we think of war as a mirror, war as defined by the other, the strong. But we can be deserters, practice guerrilla warfare, think defensively and not offensively, take on war without losing our tenderness, fight to live and not to die, to make a forest.

What is the war of those who do not have or want power, the war of those who do not want war?

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