Why We Must Be Told That War Is Bad

[Ed. Note—If you couldn’t tell from the title, this article is going to be fairly open about describing the horrors and effects of warfare. If that’s something you don’t want to handle, which is entirely understandable, give it a pass.]

A few weeks ago, when we first heard the morning announcements for McQuaid’s production of All Quiet on the Western Front—which, if you’ll allow me a moment of gushing, may well be the best theater I’ve seen our students put on—someone uttered a question that struck me: “why do we need to be told that war is bad?”

On one level, I understood the frustration behind the question. It seems inconceivable that, less than a century removed from a war that killed a minimum of fifty million human beings (most of whom were Soviet and Chinese noncombatants) and twenty years since the United States military went off on an intentional wild goose chase for weapons of mass destruction, we should still have to learn this lesson.

On another level, the question itself felt frustrating: yes, for the most part, we live in a time of less armed conflict than our ancestors, but it’s not as if war has simply gone extinct. To disabuse you of that notion, and myself, all I have to do is make a list: Ukraine, Syria, Tigray, Gaza, Yemen, Sudan, Myanmar.

All Quiet on the Western Front is about none of these places. The novel and play concern themselves with the horrors World War I visited on German soldiers like Paul Bäumer, from the lurid horrors of the trench—machine guns, bombs, shells, gas, combat by dagger and shovel and bayonet—to the more mundane and consistent annoyances of rats, lice, hunger, incompetent officers, and boredom. Remarque pulls no punches: the descriptions of what the weapons of the twentieth century could do to their victims are memorable, in a way that infuriates you when you remember how excited the generals and ministers of Europe were to use them on each other’s young men, like a pack of particularly violent boys on Christmas morning.

Those weapons have only become more lethal, thanks to decades of scientific progress, and though we are repeatedly told that they are also more precise and cleaner than the landmines and machine guns of our forebears, the fact is that it has never been easier to wage destructive war, to destroy not only an opposing military but everything that sustains life—housing, agriculture, health care, education—and somehow, despite all the technology in the world, it has never been easier for those of us untouched by it to pretend we do not see it.

War, especially for the modern high-tech states of the West, especially for the United States, is cleaner than ever: more sterile in its terminology (“police action,” “use of military force,” “projection,” “task force”), more bureaucratic and corporatized (witness recent United States military engineering triumphs like the plane that had to be told to stop breaking its pilots’ necks or the boat that was allergic to water), more automated (drones and Hellfire missiles launched from halfway around the world), with no draft or conscription that could, in our current environment, create a natural counterweight to a leadership class overly enthusiastic for war: the suffering of the people who actually have to do the shooting, and the anger of those close to them. Our media is rightly concerned with the plight of the men and women who sign up for the Armed Services, and not so much for the plight of the people they encounter, at least not until we reach a national consensus that that war was, in fact, wrong.

The secret we all hold in our hearts, some of us more deeply than others, is that every war is wrong, and a failure, and we dress them up with florid and cheerful language to turn them into something other than horror. Though the theory has existed in some form for so long that it reaches beyond my expertise, in the Catholic tradition, it was Saint Thomas Aquinas himself who most famously put forth the idea of a “just war” (bellum iustum) which adds up to a set of rather vague conditions under which it is fine to visit violence upon other human beings.

This notion, to put it bluntly, is a crock. We do not justify that which we know to be just: we seek to justify that which we suspect is unjust, and we spend thousands of hours and words trying to convince ourselves and everyone else. There have been wars that served just ends, at least in part, and yet none of them manages to cover even their “good” participants in glory.

Aquinas is at least linguistically blameless here: he had even less access to proto-Indo-European than we do, and therefore could not have known that the word bellum itself is an example of the Romans pretending war was anything but. Bellum, the standard Latin word for “war,” was not the original word: perhaps that fell to proelium (“battle”) or pugna (“fight”), or something entirely different that has not survived to us.

Bellum is a diminutive of the word bonum (“good”). It originally meant “beautiful.”

In other words (literally), it was a Roman euphemism. War was no longer an undesirable, or even neutral, thing: it was an accomplishment, an honor, a feat. It was beautiful, and even the fact that bellum was originally confined to women and children—because what man would allow himself to be described with a diminutive?—did not stop the Romans from using it.

Nor did it stop the Romans from pretending that, when they went out to raze a defeated Carthage that had just finished paying its war debt, or roll up all of France in one long self-serving campaign, they were somehow striking a defensive blow against an equal opponent, because even the Romans did not particularly like the idea of being so dominant an empire that no one wanted to play soldier with them anymore.

Almost sixteen hundred years after the last Western Roman Emperor fell, we still feel the need to invent a whole new culture of warfare in order to convince people to kill each other. In the Middle Ages, this was the knightly code of chivalry, whose proponents were fully aware that it was an impossible standard and therefore happily dedicated themselves to only following it when it advantaged them; the average knight did not see his little outbursts of private violence or oppression as a dishonor.

In later centuries, when the privilege of doing violence extended beyond those who could afford horses and mail, it would be through discipline—whether enforced by physical violence or, eventually, the weight of regulated authority—that ordinary men were turned into soldiers, willing to kill to spare themselves the same fate. The knight became the officer and the gentleman; the Roman legionary became the British lion led by donkeys.

Strangely, one of the few things the theatrical adaptation of All Quiet leaves out is that its drill sergeant character, Himmelstoss (ably played by Shield guy Dylan Phannao ’26), actually manages to win over Bäumer and his fellow soldiers with a few simple favors: butter, sugar, and a couple days at the cookhouse, where they peel potatoes instead of facing fire. While reading this, I could not help but remember that Australian general John Monash was famously beloved by his troops not for his tactical genius or independent thinking, but because he did whatever he could to ensure his men always had hot meals at the front line.

For all that talk of honor, and valor, and courage, the truth remains stark: an army is made up of human beings, who are just as susceptible as the rest of us to human wants and needs.

“We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing from ourselves, from our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.”

– All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque (1928); trans. Arthur Wheen (1929)

Meanwhile, for those of us who do not serve, “war” becomes a simple intensifier. Even during “peacetime,” the United States fights capital-W Wars: on Drugs, on Poverty, on Terror, on concepts that have no standing armies, no generals, no flags, because midcentury politicians in the US knew that the only time their people had participated as a society, united in a single overarching goal, was when the country went to war.

I do not remember which character has the honor of this line in the play, but in the novel, it seems to be Stanislaus “Kat” Katczinsky who says:

“Now just why would a French blacksmith or a French shoemaker want to attack us? No, it is merely the rulers. I had never seen a Frenchman before I came here, and it will be just the same with the majority of Frenchmen as regards us. They weren’t asked about it any more than we were.“

– All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque (1928); trans. Arthur Wheen (1929)

In other words, we must come to know that war is bad, and horrible, and unjust, because all of history tells us that we are otherwise tempted to either sanitize it or glorify it, to bubble-wrap it in euphemism or worship it as the end-goal of our culture, and worst of all, to compartmentalize it into something that happens to Other People. That—the refusal to acknowledge that we are all siblings, that every victim of war the world over is an offense against our collective humanity—is how we fall into the trap of letting warmongers and war profiteers dictate the terms under which our societies function.