Stories from Cananga Tree (6)

"In his court, the judge asked the defendant, 'You say that you had pulled the gun on him yet you didn't fire. Why?'

'Well your honor,' replied the accused, 'when I pointed my gun at him, he said, 'How much do you want for that gun?

Now, I ask you, your honor, could I kill a man when he was offering business?'"

"Defining war is as much about what it excludes as what it includes. War is a form of violence, but there are many forms of violence not commonly classed as war. War is a specific form of violence defined first by its political nature. It can be an existential challenge for a political community, even if only a fraction of society fights or directs the war effort," Cananga went on while looking at the Twilight at the horizon, the time between day and night. After sunset, there is a period in which the sky gradually darkens.

"War occurs when the threat or use of armed force against opponents is met by an armed response. It is a socially sanctioned activity, even if what justifies the resort to war has changed over time and is accepted (at least by those who wage it) as a legitimate activity, even though much of what is done in war violates social norms in peacetime. War is usually distinguished from everyday lifetimes of peace–though what differentiates the two has changed over history and it requires significant social

coordination in terms of organization and planning, even if confusion and disorganization have been a hallmark of conflict throughout history. War is mass murder, says Ian Morris, and yet, in perhaps the greatest paradox in history, war has nevertheless been the undertaker’s worst enemy. Contrary to what the song says, war has been good for something: over the long run, it has made humanity safer and richer. War is hell, but—again, over the long run—the alternatives would have been worse. It sounds like a controversial claim, but Morris explains.

By fighting wars, people have created larger, more organized societies that have reduced the risk that their members will die violently. This observation rests on one of the major findings of archaeologists and anthropologists over the last century, that Stone Age societies were typically tiny. Chiefly because of the challenges of finding food, people lived in bands of a few dozen, villages of a few hundred, or (very occasionally) towns of a few thousand members. These communities did not need much in the way of internal organization and tended to live on terms of suspicion or even hostility with outsiders.

People generally worked out their differences peacefully, but if someone decided to use force, there were far fewer constraints on him—or, occasionally, her—than the citizens of modern states are used to. Most of the killing was on a small scale, in vendettas and incessant raiding, although once in a while violence might disrupt an entire band or village so badly that disease and starvation wiped all its members out. But because populations were also small, the steady drip of low-level violence took an appalling toll. By most estimates, 10 to 20 percent of all the people who lived in Stone Age societies died at the hands of other humans.

The twentieth century forms a sharp contrast. It saw two world wars, a string of genocides, and multiple government-induced famines, killing a staggering total of somewhere between 100 million and 200 million people. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed more than 150,000 people—probably more people than had lived in the entire world in 50,000 B.C. But in 1945, there were about 2.5 billion people on earth, and over the twentieth century, roughly 10 billion lives were lived—meaning that the century’s 100–200 million war-related deaths added up to just 1 to 2 percent of our planet’s population. If you were lucky enough to be born in the industrialized twentieth century, you were on average ten times less likely to die violently (or from violence’s consequences) than if you were born in a Stone Age society.

This may be a surprising statistic, but the explanation for it is more surprising still. What has made the world so much safer is war itself. It began about ten thousand years ago in some parts of the world, then spreading across the planet, the winners of wars incorporated the losers into larger societies. The only way to make these larger societies work was for their rulers to develop stronger governments, and one of the first things these governments had to do, if they wanted to stay in power, was suppress violence within the society.

The men who ran these governments hardly ever pursued policies of peacemaking purely out of the goodness of their hearts. They cracked down on killing because well-behaved subjects were easier to govern and tax than angry, murderous ones. The unintended consequence, though, was that rates of violent death fell by 90 percent between Stone Age times and the twentieth century.

The process was not pretty. Whether it was the Romans in Britain or the British in India, pacifiers could be just as brutal as the savagery they stamped out. Nor was the process smooth: for short periods in particular places, violent death could spike back up to Stone Age levels. Between 1914 and 1918, for instance, nearly one Serb in six died from violence, disease, or starvation. And, of course, not all governments were equally good at delivering peace. Democracies may be messy, but they rarely devour their children; dictatorships get things done, but they tend to shoot, starve, and gas a lot of people. And yet despite all the variations, qualifications, and exceptions, over the ten-thousand-year-long run, war made the the state, and the state made peace.

While war is the worst imaginable way to create larger, more peaceful societies, it is pretty much the only way humans have found. There isn’t a better way. If the Roman Empire could have been created without killing millions of Gauls and Greeks, if the United States, says Morris, could have been built without killing millions of Native Americans—in these cases and countless others, if conflicts could have been resolved by discussion instead of force, humanity could have had the benefits of larger societies without paying such a high cost. But that did not happen. It is a depressing thought, but the evidence again seems clear. People hardly ever give up their freedom, including their rights to kill and impoverish each other, unless forced to do so, and virtually the only force strong enough to bring this about has been defeat in war or fear that such a defeat is imminent.

As well as making people safer, Morris suggests, the larger societies created by war have also—again, over the long run—made us richer. Peace created the conditions for economic growth and rising living standards. This process too has been messy and uneven: the winners of wars regularly go on rampages of rape and plunder, selling thousands of survivors into slavery and stealing their land. The losers may be left impoverished for generations. It is a terrible, ugly business. And yet, with time—maybe decades, maybe centuries—the creation of a bigger society tends to make everyone, the descendants of victors and vanquished alike, better off. The long-term pattern is again unmistakable. By creating larger societies, stronger governments, and greater security, war has enriched the world.

So, war has produced, Morris argues, bigger societies, ruled by stronger governments, which have imposed peace and created the preconditions for prosperity. Ten thousand years ago, there were only about six million people on earth. On average, they lived about thirty years and supported themselves on the equivalent of less than two modern American dollars per day. Now there are more than a thousand times as many of us (seven billion, in fact), living more than twice as long (the global average is sixty-seven years) and earning more than a dozen times as much (today the global average is $25 per day).

Morris added that war, then, has been good for something—so good that war is now putting itself out of business. For millennia, war (over the long run) has created peace, and destruction has created wealth, but in our age, humanity has gotten so good at fighting—our weapons so destructive, our organizations so efficient—that war is beginning to make further war of this kind impossible.

We humans have proved remarkably good at adapting to our changing environment. We fought countless wars in the past because fighting paid off, but in the twentieth century, as the returns to violence declined, we found ways to solve our problems without bringing on Armageddon. There are no guarantees, of course, Morris suggests, but there are nevertheless tends to reward paradoxical conduct while defeating straightforwardly logical action, yielding ironical results.

Everything about war is paradoxical. In war, paradox goes all the way down. According to Basil Liddell Hart, one of the founding fathers of twentieth-century tank tactics, the bottom line is that 'war is always a matter of doing evil in the hope that good may come of it.' Out of war comes peace; out of loss, gain. War takes us through the looking glass, into a topsy-turvy world where nothing is quite what it seems. Morris's argument is a lesser-evil proposition, one of the classic forms of paradox. It is easy to list all the things that war is bad for, with killing coming at the top of the table. And yet war remains the lesser evil because history shows that it has not been as bad as the alternative—constant, Stone Age-type everyday violence, bleeding away lives and leaving us in poverty.

According to Francis Bacon, three novelties brought modernity in their wake: gunpowder, ocean navigation, and the printing press. And if the first of these was directly related to war, the other two affected it no less decisively. Historians of technology and economy, says Azar Gat, have revealed the steady improvement in agricultural technique, horse harnessing, ironwork, and mining, the advent and spread of the watermill and windmill, the compass, and the lateen, triangular sail, and advances in water damming and canal building—all resulting in a continuous growth in productivity and population throughout the landmass.

Military power is a key component of state power. Yet for all the attention statesmen, soldiers, and scholars give to military power, it remains a loose concept, says John A. Gentry. An actor has military power if the actor, firstly, accurately identifies exploitable vulnerabilities in a targeted adversary in any dimension, and secondly, successfully exploits one or more of the target’s critical vulnerabilities, leading to physical military defeat or disruption of power production processes, leading to a decision to forego or to stop fighting, which concedes the point of contention.

Wealth is usually needed to underpin military power, and military power is usually needed to acquire and protect wealth, says Paul Kennedy. If, however, too large a proportion of the state’s resources is diverted from wealth creation and allocated instead to military purposes, then that is likely to lead to a weakening of national power over the longer term. In the same way, if a state overextends itself strategically—by, say, the conquest of extensive territories or the waging of costly wars—it runs the risk that the potential benefits from external expansion may be outweighed by the great expense of it all—a dilemma which becomes acute if the nation concerned has entered a period of relative economic decline. The history of the rise and later fall of the leading countries in the Great Power system since the advance of Western Europe in the sixteenth century—that is, of nations such as Spain, the Netherlands, France, the British Empire, and currently the United States—shows a very significant correlation over the longer term between productive and revenue-raising capacities on the one hand and military strength on the other.

According to Kennedy, the relative strengths of the leading nations in world affairs never remain constant, principally because of the uneven rate of growth among different societies and of the technological and organizational breakthroughs that bring a greater advantage to one society than to another. For example, the coming of the long-range gunned sailing ship and the rise of the Atlantic trades after 1500 was not uniformly beneficial to all the states of Europe—it boosted some much more than others. In the same way, the later development of steam power and the coal and metal resources upon which it relied massively increased the relative power of certain nations and thereby decreased the relative power of others. Once their productive capacity was enhanced, countries would normally find it easier to sustain the burdens of paying for large-scale armaments in peacetime and of maintaining and supplying large armies and fleets in wartime.

Let's finish our discussion about War, in the next episode, we will continue with the topic of the Islamic Calendar, bi 'idhnillah."

Afterwards, Cananga then sang,

Oh! There is fire in the air that I'm breathing

There is blood where the battles rage

These are faces I will not remember

Will I fight for the Queen or the Slave?

A treacherous part to play with our heart of courage *)

Citations & References:

- Azar Gat, War In Human Civilization, 2006, Oxford University Press

- John A. Gentry, How Wars Are Won and Lost: Vulnerability and Military Power, 2012, Praeger

- Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, 1989, Vintage Books

- Ian Morris, War: What Is It Good For?, 2014, Profile Books

*) "Battleborne" written by Nick Phoenix & Thomas Bergersen

[Episode 7]

[Episode 5]

Bahasa

Stories from Cananga Tree (5)

"A school student was asked by his teacher to tell a story in front of the class, he said, 'I'm not kidding. I was going to tell a joke about time travel. But you guys didn't like it!' and then went back to his seat."

"Wars, by their very nature, tend to be relatively short. They use resources, consume manpower, and weaken the nations involved," said Cananga while looking at the iconic 1945 photograph of six Marines raising a flag on top of Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II, taken by Associated Press combat photographer, Joe Rosenthal. The flag-raising also was recorded by Marine Sergeant Bill Genaust, a combat motion picture cameraman. He filmed the event in color while standing beside Rosenthal. Genaust's footage established that the second flag raising was not staged. On March 4, 1945, he was killed by the Japanese after entering a cave on Iwo Jima and his remains have never been found.

Upon first seeing the photograph, sculptor Felix de Weldon created a maquette for a sculpture based on the photo in a single weekend at Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland, where he was serving in the Navy. He and architect Horace W. Peaslee designed the memorial. Their proposal was presented to Congress, but funding was not possible during the war. In 1947, a federal foundation was established to raise funds for the memorial. The United States Congress approved the Memorial and the commission for the memorial was awarded in 1951, after it was approved and accepted by the Marine Corps League who also selected De Weldon as the sculptor. De Weldon spent three years creating a full-sized master model in plaster, with figures 32 feet (9.8 m) tall.

"Most countries simply cannot sustain wars for extended periods. World War I lasted for four years, World War II lasted for six, and both conflicts had devastating consequences for all the combatant nations. However, during what has become known as the Age of Chivalry, one series of conflicts between two of the most powerful nations in Europe continued through five generations of kings and for more than one hundred years. What has become known as 'the Hundred Years War' was a conflict between the House of Plantagenet, the ruling dynasty in England, and the House of Valois, rulers of the kingdom of France. The war began in 1337 and did not finally end until 1453. This was the most notable and protracted war of the Middle Ages, and it contributed directly to the creation and emergence of the national identities of modern England and France.

Before going on our discussion about 'war', perhaps you and I would like to know, 'Why do we fight?' or 'What is a war for?'

'These weren’t questions I’d ever expected to ask or answer', says Christopher Blattman. 'But once you witness the cruel extravagance of violence, it’s hard to care about anything else. Even when you see it from a position of safety with the privilege of distance. Everything else fades in importance.'

'I learned a society’s success isn't just about expanding its wealth,' Blattman added. 'It is about a rebel group not enslaving your eleven-year-old daughter as a wife. It is about sitting in front of your home without the fear of a drive-by shooting and a bullet gone astray. It is about being able to go to a police officer, a court, or a mayor and get some semblance of justice. It is about the government never being allowed to push you off your land and stick you in a concentration camp. Another economist, Amartya Sen, called this 'development as freedom.' It is hard to imagine something more important to be free of than violence. As it happens, fighting also makes us poor. Nothing destroys progress like conflict—crushing economies, destroying infrastructure, or killing, maiming, and setting back an entire generation. War undermines economic growth in indirect ways as well.

Most people and businesses won’t do the basic things that lead to development when they expect bombings, ethnic cleansing, or arbitrary justice; they won’t specialize in tasks, trade, invest their wealth, or develop new techniques and ideas. A large literature has shown how wars collapse economies. Take civil wars, for example, like Uganda’s. The second half of the twentieth century saw more internal conflicts than ever recorded. They were devastating, causing incomes to collapse by a fifth. For more on how wars affect health, schooling, and other outcomes, looking across all countries and wars, Mueller and other economists have also shown that each year of war is probably associated with 2 or 3 percent lower national income violence on the American economy, but simply based on what people seem to be willing to pay in home prices to avoid violence.

The economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith predicted as much over two and a half centuries ago, 'Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism,' he wrote in 1755, 'but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice.' Clearly, if I cared about prosperity, equal rights, and justice, I had to care about war,' says Blattman.

'War' in Blattman's view, it doesn’t just mean countries duking it out. He meant any kind of prolonged, violent struggle between groups. That includes villages, clans, gangs, ethnic groups, religious sects, political factions, and nations. Wildly different as these may be, their origins have much in common. We’ll see that with Northern Irish zealots, Colombian cartels, European tyrants, Liberian rebels, Greek oligarchs, Chicago gangs, Indian mobs, Rwandan genocidaires, English soccer hooligans, and, according to Blattman, American invaders.

One of the most common errors people make is to confuse the reasons a contest is intense and hostile with the reasons that a rivalry turns violent. You see, acrimonious competition is normal, but prolonged violence between groups is not. Wars shouldn’t happen, and most of the time they don’t. The fact is, even the bitterest of enemies prefer to loathe one another in peace. That’s easy to forget. Our attention gets captured by the wars that do happen. News reports and history books do the same—they focus on the handful of violent struggles that occur. Few write books about the countless conflicts avoided. But we can’t just look at the hostilities that happen any more than a medical student should study only the terminally ill and forget that most people are healthy.

Political scientists, says Blattman, have tallied all the ethnic and sectarian groups in places like Eastern Europe, Central Asia, South Asia, and Africa, where riots and purges are supposedly endemic. They counted the number of pairs that were close enough to compete with one another, and then they looked at the number that actually fought. In Africa, they counted about one major case of ethnic violence per year out of two thousand potential ones. In India, they found less than one riot per ten million people per year, and death rates that are at most sixteen per ten million.

We see this at the international level too. There was the long confrontation between America and the Soviets, who managed to divide Europe (indeed the world) into two parts without nuking one another.

Somehow, however, we tend to forget these events. We write tomes about great wars and overlook the quiet peaces. We pay attention to the gory spectacles, the most salient events. Meanwhile, the quieter moments of compromise slip from memory. This focus on the failures is a kind of selection bias, a logical error to which we’re all prone. The mistake has two important consequences. One is that we exaggerate how much we fight. You start to hear things like 'the world is full of conflict,' or 'humanity’s natural state is war,' or 'an armed confrontation between [insert great powers here] is inevitable.' But none of those statements, says Blattman, is true.

To find the real roots of fighting, or to answer 'why do we fight?', we need to pay attention to the struggles that stay peaceful. When it comes to war, we’re prone to the opposite kind of selection—we pay too much attention to the times peace failed. It’s as if the US military engineers looked only at the bombers that went down. Those planes are covered in gunfire from tip to tail. When we do that, it’s hard to know which shots were fatal because we aren’t comparing them to the planes that survived. The same thing happens when you take a war and trace it back to its so-called roots. Every history of every rivalry is riddled with a barrage of bullet holes, like poverty grievances and guns. But the aggrieved seldom revolt, most poor young rabble-rousers don’t

Overlooking all the conflicts avoided entails a second and greater harm, however; we get the roots of war and the paths to peace all wrong. It doesn't mean happy and harmonious. Rivalries can be hostile and contentious. The groups may be polarized. They’re often heavily armed. They disparage and threaten one another, and they ostentatiously display their weapons. That is all normal. Bloodshed and destruction are not.

When people focus on the times peace failed and trace back the circumstances and events to find the causes, they often find a familiar set: flawed leaders, historic injustices, dire poverty, angry young men, cheap weapons, and cataclysmic events. War seems to be the inevitable result. But this ignores the times conflict was avoided.

From Jack McDonald's perspective, what characterizes war in the present day is a tension between uniformity and diversity. On one hand, contemporary wars take place in an international system that is more uniform than ever. That system consists of sovereign territorial states that recognize and legitimize one another as the primary political units in international politics and they also share a single common set of rules—international law—that provides a global standard for regulating war and warfare. On the other hand, there is more diversity in contemporary war than ever: states find themselves fighting transnational insurgent movements that leverage the Internet to their advantage. Wars are waged with technology ranging from basic firearms to stealth jet fighters using satellite-guided missiles. Old ways of war such as murdering, terrorizing, and starving civilians for strategic effect coexist with Western ways of war that utilize precision weapons to minimize civilian harm, and in many cases eliminate the possibility of harm to their own combatants by using remote-piloted drones.

Wars and warfare have caused death and destruction throughout human history, says McDonald. Wars have ranged from prehistoric settlement raiding to the industrialized slaughter of the Second World War and selective killing with precision-guided weapons in the present day. Wars destroy humans, property, and the environment alike as it’s usually impossible to restrict the consequences of a war to its armed participants. This potential for death, destruction, and escalation is why the prospect of war weighs heavily on the minds of political leaders and civilian populations alike.

War serves a political purpose, as in some circumstances military force has political utility for the leaders of states or armed groups. The nineteenth-century Prussian soldier and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz defined war as ‘an act of force to compel our adversary to do our will’. Wars in history have ranged from highly ritualized activities between similar political groups to no-holds-barred slaughter between groups seeking to eliminate each other. Clausewitz explains war as being akin to a duel, albeit on a large scale, which captures the fact that war is fundamentally adversarial: it involves an opponent who threatens physical harm. It’s also strategic, in the sense that governments cannot ultimately dictate or control their opponent’s actions. Given that wars often feature more than two warring parties, McDonald defines war as ‘the use of organized armed force between two or more sides for political purposes’, emphasizing the necessary criterion of organized violence by social groups.

The political and strategic goals of warring parties don’t entirely explain the actual impact of wars. At minimum, we also need to consider what kinds of entities the parties are—be they states or non-state armed groups [‘non-state armed groups’ refers to the myriad social groups that pose military threats in international politics and which are not formally part of a state’s armed forces. They range in size from small militias up to organized armed forces able to conduct sophisticated military operations. The importance of non-state armed groups is that, while they may lack formal recognition and legitimacy in the eyes of the state, they use organized physical violence and so must be taken seriously by their state opponents. Often non-state armed groups conflict with one another or form alliances with states that intervene in civil wars]—as well as their social capability for violence, and the degree of restraint that political elites and military leaders are able to exert over their forces. It is for this last reason the relationship of opposing sides in war in part dictates the ferocity and limits of conflict. Civil wars, in which societies are split by two or more warring factions, are often especially brutal due to the way they tear communities apart along lines of ethnicity and religion, but also create conditions in which loosely organized armed groups prosper.

Wars in the contemporary world vary hugely in terms of their scope and consequences. Consider that the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war between Armenia and Azerbaijan resulted in the deaths of over five thousand service personnel. Compare that to the Tigray war (2020–2022) in northern Ethiopia, which has already killed up to half a million people—mostly civilians—through a mix of fighting, starvation, and lack of access to healthcare, or to the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian war has created over 5.6 million Ukrainian refugees and internally displaced a further 7.1 million people.

Contemporary wars also vary considerably in terms of who is fighting, and how. Long-running, low-intensity conflicts, such as the multiple ongoing conflicts in the Sahel region, exist alongside devastating civil wars like those in Syria, Libya, and Myanmar. The sheer range of means and methods of warfare contributes to the diverse character of contemporary warfare. Some conflicts involve states attacking one another directly; others involve indirect attacks via proxies.

'War plays in the contemporary world', probably could be the answer to our worries, 'What is a war for?' In particular, McDonald says, it’s about why war is still useful to many governments and non-state armed groups. Despite international legal constraints on war, the use of military force remains a latent possibility in international disputes and internal conflicts—and sometimes that latent possibility becomes a reality. Such are the destructive consequences of war that even the threat of it can be a useful bargaining tool. To rebels and insurgents seeking to control or create a state, military force may appear the only way to achieve their political goals.

States often struggle to explain and legitimize the use of military force to their citizens and other states. How wars are waged often bears little relation to the popular image of war, which is shaped by the industrial wars of the twentieth century that killed tens of millions of people. Another reason they struggle, McDonald argues, is that there is a gap between how wars are fought in practice and the way war is framed and regulated in international politics. That gap can be manipulated for strategic reasons to gain an advantage against a law-abiding opponent. Understanding how and why this divergence has come to exist, and what can be done about it, is key to understanding how war works and what it is used for today.

We will still discussing about the topic of 'war', in the next episode. Bi' idhnillah."

And before stepping into the next fragment, Kananga sang,

Jejak kaki para pengungsi bercerita pada penguasa

[The footprints of the refugees tell the story to the authorities]

Bercerita pada penguasa tentang

[Telling stories to the authorities about]

ternaknya yang mati, tentang temannya yang mati

[their dead livestock, about their dead friends,]

tentang adiknya yang mati, tentang abangnya yang mati,

[about their dead younger brothers, about their dead elder brothers,]

tentang ayahnya yang mati, tentang anaknya yang mati,

[about their dead fathers, bout their dead sons,]

tentang neneknya yang mati, tentang pacarnya yang mati,

[about their dead grandmother, about their dead girlfriends,]

tentang istrinya yang mati, tentang harapannya yang mati *)

[about their dead wives, about their dead hopes]

Citations & References:

- Christopher Blattman, Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace, 2022, Viking

- Jack McDonald, What is War for?, 2023, Bristol University Press

- At Hourly History, The Hundred Years War: A History from Beginning to End, 2019, Hourly History

*) "Puing II" written by Virgiawan Listanto

[Episode 6]

[Episode 4]

Bahasa