The tyranny of politics and the dwarfing of war
Why did the war between Russia and Ukraine take place, why did the armies, defense systems, aircraft and missile systems move, does Russia want to defeat Ukraine and end that country? Is the second really indifferent to challenge the first? Or does she just want to defend herself? Could each of them not have achieved their goals and objectives with other, less disastrous tools? Would it not have been possible to avoid this devastating war and its woes if they had resorted to the voice of reason or the Logos? Also, what does the West want from that war, which in turn pushed for it in one way or another, and still supports Ukraine in order to prolong the war? Again, do they want to end Russia? Are any of the parties prepared
? for victory
I spoke on previous occasions and articles about the fact that “victory” in its traditional sense, like war, has ended in our contemporary world, and there are no winners and losers in wars, not only in terms of the great losses that must be incurred by both parties, but also because of its transformation – That is, victory - to a relative concept, especially in light of wars that take place between a state and a sub-international entity. Who is victorious in the July 2006 war between Israel and "Hezbollah"? Who is victorious in the US war with the "Taliban" and "Al-Qaeda" in Afghanistan? Similar examples are many and varied.
The absence of the concept of "final victory" or "decisive" or "supportive" ... is not a good thing at all, because it makes war, which should be the last medicine, and the last solution that is used only when all other solutions have been exhausted, a mere tool Ordinary, like other policy tools, may succeed or fail, and it can be easily continued afterwards as if nothing great had happened. This means that entering the war has become similar to entering negotiations, a round fails, and the politicians continue, or start over, simply like this.
Politicians and leaders are aware of this fact, and I don't think that either side of the Ukrainian war today, for example, really thinks about victory. All they think about is deterrence and attrition of the other. War, despite all the destruction, casualties and calamities it bears, has become more like an ordinary instrument of politics, only a means that is supposed to be justified by targeted ends, but the ends behind today's wars are no longer sufficient to justify all this growing amount of mutual violence.
Reflecting on these ideas brought me back to an old pamphlet of the German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt entitled "On Violence", which was issued in the form of a lengthy article whose topic was inspired by the author's topic from the great political transformations that occurred during the twentieth century. Arendt says in the introduction more than half a century ago: “The situation is that the tools of violence have developed so technically that it is no longer possible to say that there is a political purpose commensurate with their destructive power, or justify their use today in armed conflicts.” Therefore, Arendt described the events on the scene. The world is described as "disastrous chess games" between the great powers that play on the basis of "whoever wins the conflict will bring the end of the two", a game, as the German philosopher says, "whose "rational" goal is not to achieve victory, but to deter the other side. As for the arms race, it is based on the fact that more deterrence is the best guarantor of peace.”
Here begins my disagreement with Arendt, who also saw in the same book that “the technical development of instruments of violence has now reached a point where no political goal can be conceived that corresponds to their destructive potential or justifies their actual use in armed conflict,” and made this hypothesis the permanent conceptual line of her book. On the basis of it all, I expected that “those who made efforts to develop means of destruction, have finally reached a level of technical development with which it is certain that their very end, that is, war, is on the verge of disappearing by the same available means.”
Arendt's "prophecy" has not been fulfilled, and as everyone knows, wars are still and continuing and steadily increasing as well, and their theaters are no longer confined to the "backward" state or the countries of the so-called "third world", but are now on the doorstep of Europe, the heart of the "civilized world".
On the other hand, all the incidents that followed the publication of Arendt's book showed that violence is a "magic" concept, and that states will not abandon it as easily as they expected. Perhaps it is very true to say that the development and possession of nuclear weapons by the two blocs (capitalist and socialist) contributed to discouraging the threat of a nuclear war or a third world war for the duration of the Cold War, and shortly thereafter, but this does not necessarily mean that the era of violence is over or that the use of Violence has actually decreased.
All that has happened are minor changes that do not touch the essence of violence or its depths. On the contrary, when you make it an easy option, and this makes matters more dangerous, the “dwarfing” of the war to become like any other mere tool of politicians is an unprecedented tyranny of politics throughout history.
Even the concept of deterrence, of which Arendt spoke, is no longer, in any way, "the best guarantee of peace", and I do not think it was before, the absence of the threat of war during the Cold War - in my opinion - was due to the agreement to share hegemony among the great powers , in order to preserve and maintain the bipolar system, the Soviet Union has its surroundings in Eastern Europe, and Europe, which is relatively weak, has Africa. George Kennan expressed the United States’ lack of interest in Africa at the time and that it should be left to the Europeans if they wanted, as he said: “Western Europe will take over jointly the economic development and exploitation of the colonial and dependent areas of the African continent,” and the rest of the world was America’s share!
On this basis, violence was globalized and transferred from the "civilized world" when most and fiercest wars were taking place on the European continent, to all other parts of the world. Deterrence did not end violence or war, but rather globalized "hegemony", another blatant example of the tyranny of politics. Today, when the balance based on power-sharing was slightly disturbed, when Ukraine began to lean more west, and NATO could reach the borders of Russia, the war immediately broke out, and all the traditional great powers became involved, and no longer A nuclear threat is absolutely excluded, even though both warring parties possess such weapons that they could end all of humanity.
Despite their logical consistency and coherent structure, Arendt's ideas cannot be applied to what the world is experiencing today. They do not cover the contemporary concept of violence, and this is largely justified. The book is primarily directed at two primary audiences, the first being the authorities who sought corrective measures to restore calm to the universities American; The second was the students who caused upheaval across the country and in other parts of the world throughout the 1960s. Arendt held that the authorities had the capacity to resist violence if they used their powers appropriately, and mentally rejected the "new left" view of violence as an end in itself or even as a means to effecting a transformation of the power structure. Arendt condemned the failure of the New Left to understand Marxism, and showed that it bases its ideas on disturbances and emergencies. Instead, Heidegger's student argued that strength is the ability of a social entity to act in concert that provides individuals with the possibility of working together.
It is not surprising that Arendt searches in her writings for the "happy ending." The philosopher, who refused to be classified as a philosopher but as a political theorist, was greatly affected by the events and woes she lived through, and she was a Jew who loved her philosopher teacher, who later turned out to be a supporter of Nazism, and who had to flee To France and then to the United States, leaving her country Germany to languish under the yoke of Hitler, which made Arendt's biggest concern to fight all totalitarian thought, and to try to establish a world political order in which freedom first prevails, as well as respect for human rights.
All of the foregoing justifies Arendt's thought drifting towards an "optimistic escape", so to speak, in which she finds a refuge and believes that war will one day cease, and that the liberalism she has found in her new homeland is the supreme and will prevail in the end.
Undoubtedly, his observations do not diminish the importance of Arendt's book and the novelty of what she was thinking. The book represented a leap in its time in terms of redefining basic concepts such as power, power and violence, in addition to terrorism, and researching the relationships between them. According to Arendt, “Power and violence are opposites: when one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears when power is in danger (...) Violence can destroy power, and is necessarily incapable of creating it. Presumably it would be a shift in the direction of a more violent world.”
Arendt's statement shows the extent of the dilemma she was in, created by what she saw as a contradiction between the disadvantages, dangers and threats of violent action, and humanity's insistence on sticking to it, on the one hand; On the other hand, she believes that technological development, and consequently the increasing costs of wars, will lead the world to move away from it. But what happened, and always happens, is its continued outbreak in many parts of the world. Despite the politicians’ rejection of violence and their always disavowal of it, violent practices still permeate the world arena in all its joints between individuals, entities and states. Dealing with violence and its abusive nature still shows it as a normal and attainable thing in politics, or as Engels defines it as “the accelerator of economic development”; Politicians still treat war as a marginal phenomenon, and it is in this respect that Karl Clausewitz correctly describes it as "the continuation of politics by other means."
Unfortunately, this dilemma (rejecting violence in theory and insisting on it in practice) still exists to this day, and I do not think that any proponent of non-violence has not suffered from it. Primarily by creating something new” in the words of Arendt, the former destroys and the latter builds, and perhaps that is why the world still clings to the former, despite all the tragedies it brings. In it, and all of this happens under the famous pretext “This is the olitics,” ! and that “the end justifies the means”
One last time I say what Arendt said earlier: a political action does not necessarily produce an “end product” that can be considered a certain stable and concrete thing in the world, and therefore this “action” cannot be judged by its ends, for it may never reach them. Action is war... What is happening today in other parts of the world is not politics, but rather "the tyranny of politics", and it seems that its continuation will have catastrophic consequences for all of humanity.
What I would like to detail in the end, in a way that goes beyond the complexity of Arendt’s philosophical method, is that her criticism of politics’ control over wars is the main reason for their continuation (of course the continuation of wars), that is, contrary to what the philosopher expected, who said from the beginning: “From here we find that the wars that Since time immemorial it has been the final and merciless arbiter of international conflicts, but it has lost much of its effectiveness and almost all of its glorious glory.” Possible options, as for the war with all its “prestige” to turn into a mere choice among several options in the hands of politics, and it was sometimes waved from the beginning, this dwarfing of the war will not eliminate it, but rather will increase it, and this has been achieved and is still, as if it is another face of truth The prophecy of the Greek philosopher
! Heraclitus when he said that “war is the father of all things”
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