The first casualty when war comes is truth.
Senator Hiram Johnson, 1917 In wartime the state seeks to destroy its
own culture.
It is only when this destruction has been completed that the state
can begin to exterminate the culture of its opponents.
In times of conflict authentic culture is subversive.
As the cause championed by the state comes to
define national identity, as the myth of war entices a nation to glory and sacrifice,
those who question the value of the cause and the veracity of the myths are branded
internal enemies.
Art takes on a whole new significance in wartime.
War and the nationalist myth that fuels it are the purveyors of low
culture - folklore, quasi-historical dramas, kitsch, sentimental doggerel, and
theater and film that portray the glory of soldiers in past wars or current wars dying
nobly for the homeland.
This is why so little of what moves us during wartime
has any currency once war is over.
The songs, books, poems, and films that arouse
us in war are awkward and embarrassing when the conflict ends, useful only to summon
up the nostalgia of war's comradeship.
States at war silence their own authentic and humane culture.
When this destruction is well advanced they find the
lack of critical and moral restraint useful in the campaign to exterminate the culture
of their opponents.
By destroying authentic culture - that which allows us to
question and examine ourselves and our society - the state erodes the moral fabric.
It is replaced with a warped version of reality.
The enemy is dehumanized; the universe starkly divided between
the forces of light and the forces of darkness.
The cause is celebrated, often in overt religious forms, as a manifestation
of divine or historical will.
All is dedicated to promoting and glorifying the myth, the
nation, the cause.
The works of the writers in Serbia, such as Danilo Kis and Milovan Djilas,
were mostly unavailable during the war.
It remains hard even now to find their books.In Croatia the biting satires of Miroslav
Krleza, who wrote one of the most searing portraits of Balkan despots, were
forgotten.
Writers and artists were inconvenient.
They wrote about social undercurrents that were ignored by a new
crop of self-appointed nationalist historians, political scientists, and economists.
National symbols - flags, patriotic songs, sentimental dedications - invade
and take over cultural space.
Art becomes infected with the platitudes of patriotism.
More important, the use of a nation's cultural resources to back up the war
effort is essential to mask the contradictions and lies that mount over time in the
drive to sustain war.
Cultural or national symbols that do not support the crusade
are often ruthlessly removed.
In Bosnia the ethnic warlords worked hard to wipe out all the records of
cohabitation between ethnic groups.
The symbols of the old communist regime - one whose slogan was "Brotherhood and Unity"
- 14,'s1s defaced or torn down.
The monuments to partisan fighters who died fighting the Germans in
World War II, the lists of names clearly showing a mix of ethnic groups, were
blown up in Croatia.
The works of Ivo Andrii, who wrote some of the most lyrical
passages about a multiethnic Bosnia, were edited by the Bosnian Serbs and
selectively quoted to support ethnic cleansing.
All groups looked at themselves as victims - the Croats, the Muslims, and
the Serbs.
They ignored the excesses of their own and highlighted the excesses of
the other in gross distortions that fueled the war.
The cultivation of victimhood is essential fodder for any conflict.
It is studiously crafted by the state.
All cultural life is directed to broadcast the injustices
carried out against us.
Cultural life soon becomes little more than the drivel of agitprop.
The message that the nation is good, the cause just, and the war noble is
pounded into the heads of citizens in everything from late-night talk shows to morning
news programs to films and popular novels.
The nation is soon thrown into a trance from which it does not
awake until the conflict ends.
In parts. of the world where the conflict remains
unresolved, this trance can last for generations.
I walked one morning a few years ago down the deserted asphalt tract that
slices through the center of the world's last divided capital, Nicosia, on the island
of Cyprus.
At one spot on the asphalt dividing line was a small painted triangle.
For fifteen minutes each hour, Turkish troops, who control the northern part of
the island, were allowed to move from their border posts and stand inside the
white triangular lines.
The arrangement was part of a deal laboriously negotiated
by the United Nations to give Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots access to several
disputed areas along the 110-mile border that separates the north from the
south.
The triangle was a potent reminder that once the folly of war is over, folly
itself is often all that remains.
. . . War, just as it tears down old monuments,
demands new ones.
These new monuments glorify the state's uniform and
unwavering call for self-sacrifice and ultimately self-annihilation.
Those who find meaning in the particular, who
embrace affirmation not through the collective of the nation but through the love
of another individual regardless of ethnic or national identity, are dangerous to
the emotional and physical domination demanded by the state.
Only one message is acceptable.
A soldier who is abie to see the humanity of the enemy makes a troubled and
ineffective killer.
To achieve corporate action, self-awareness and especially selfcriticism
must be obliterated.
We must be transformed into agents of a divinely inspired will, as defined by the state, just
as those we fight must be transformed into the personification of unmitigated evil.
There is little room for individuality in war.
The effectiveness of the myths peddled in war is powerful.
We often come to doubt our own perceptions.
We hide these doubts, like troubled believers, sure
that no one else feels them.
We feel guilty.
The myths have determined not only how we should speak but how we should think.
The doubts we carry, the scenes we see that do not conform to the myth are
hazy, difficult to express, unsettling.
And as the atrocities mount, as civil liberties are stripped away (something, with
the "War on Terror," already happening to hundreds of thousands of immigrants
in the United States), we struggle uncomfortably with the jargon and clichés.
But we have trouble expressing our discomfort
because the collective shout has made it hard for us to give words to our thoughts.
This self-doubt is aided by the monstrosity of war.
We gape and wonder at the collapsing towers of the World Trade Center.
They crumble before us, and yet we cannot quite comprehend it.
What, really, did we see?
In wartime an attack on a village where women and children are killed,
an attack that does not conform to the myth peddled by our side, is hard to fathom
and articulate.
We live in wartime with a permanent discomfort, for in wartime
we see things so grotesque and fantastic that they seem beyond human comprehension.
War turns human reality into a bizarce carnival that does not seem
part of our experience.
It knocks us off balance.
On a chilly, rainy day in March 199& I was in a small Albanian village in
Kosovo, twenty-five miles west of the provincial capital of Pristina.
I was waiting with a few thousand Kosovar Albanian mourners
for a red Mercedes truck to rumble down the dirt road and unload a cargo
of fourteen bodies.
A group of distraught women, seated on wooden planks set up on concrete
blocks, was in the dirt yard.
When the truck pulled into the yard I climbed into the back.
Before each corpse, wrapped in bloodstained blankets and
rugs, was lifted out for washing and burial I cti"ecked to see if the body
was mutilated.
I pulled back the cloth to uncover the faces.
The gouged-out eyes, the shattered skulls, the gaping rows of
broken teeth, and the sinewy strands of flayed flesh greeted me.
When I could not see clearly in the fading light I flicked
on my Maglite.
I jotted each disfigurement in my notebook.
The bodies were passed silently out of the truck.
They were laid on crude wooden coffin lids placed on the floor of
the shed.
The corpses were wound in white shrouds by a Muslim cleric in a red
turban.
The shed was lit by a lone kerosene lamp.
It threw out a ghastly, uneven, yellowish light.
In the hasty effort to confer some dignity on the dead, family members,
often weeping, tried to wash away the bloodstains from the faces.
Most could not do it and had to be helped away.
It was not an uncommon event for me.
I have seen many such dead.
Several weeks later it would be worse.
I would be in a warehouse with fifty-one bodies, including children, even infants, women, and
the elderly from the town of Prekaz.
I had spent time with many of them.
I stared into their lifeless faces.
I was again in the twilight zone of war.
I could not wholly believe what I saw in front of me.
This sense that we cannot trust what we see in wartime spreads throughout
the society.
The lies about the past, the eradication of cultural, historical, and religious
monuments that have been part of a landscape for centuries, all serve to
shift the ground under which we stand.
We lose our grip.
Whole worlds vanish or change in ways we cannot fully comprehend.
A catastrophic terrorist strike will have the same effect.
In Bosnia the Serbs, desperately trying to deny the Muslim character of
Bosnia, dynamited or plowed over libraries, museums, universities, historic monuments,
and cemeteries, but most of all mosques.
The Serbs, like the Croats, also got rid of monuments built to honor their
own Serb or Croat heroes during the Communist era.
These monuments championed another narrative, a narrative of
unity among ethnic groups that ran contrary to the notion of ancient ethnic
hatreds.
The partisan monuments that honored Serb and Croat fighters against
the Nazis honored, in the new narrative, the wrong Serbs and Croats.
For this they had to be erased.
This physical eradication, coupled with intolerance toward any artistic
endeavor that does not champion the myth, formed a new identity.
The Serbs, standing in flattened mud fields, were able
to deny that there were ever churches or mosques on the spot because they had been
removed.
The town of Zvornik in Serb-held Bosnia once had a dozen mosques.
The 1991 census listed 60 percent of its residents as Muslim Slavs.
By the end of the war the town was 100 percent Serb.
Branko Grujic, the Serb-appointed mayor, informed us: "There never were
any mosques in Zvornlkl' No doubt he did not believe it.
He knew that there had been mosques in Zvornik.
But his children and grandchildren would come to be taught the lie.
Serbs leaders would turn it into accepted historical fact.
There are no shortage of villages in Russia or Germany or Poland where
all memory of the Jewish community is gqne because the physical culture has been
destroyed.
And, when mixed with the Strange nightmarish quality of war,
it is hard to be completely sure of your own memories.