"...it
needs to be said that...the intellectual community has not been silent
on the problem of war... Never as on this occasion have people felt all
the horror and ambiguity of what was happening. Apart from a few
lunatics, no one had ideas in black and white. ...What has happened to
war is what has happened to crimes of passion or the lex talionis:
people still do these things, but the community
now considers them to be evil, where it once judged them to be a good
thing. ...There is a more radical way of thinking about war: in merely
formal terms, in terms of internal consistency... the conclusion being
that you cannot make war because the existence of a [modern and global]
society...has made war impossible [to win] and irrational [to wage]. War
is in contradiction with the very reasons for which it is waged. ... The most likely outcome of war is [further] 'tilt'. ...
Modern warfare is...an autophagous game...in our century it is the
politics of the postwar period that will always be the continuation (by
any means) of the premises established by war. No matter how the war
goes, by causing a general redistribution of weights that cannot
correspond fully with the will of the contending parties, it will drag
on in the form of a dramatic political, economic, and psychological
instability for decades to come, something that can lead only to a
politics 'waged' as if it were warfare. Have things ever been
different?.. To conclude that classic wars produced reasonable
results—the final equilibrium—derives from a Hegelian prejudice,
according to which history has a positive direction. There is no
scientific (or logical) proof that the order of the Mediterranean after
the Punic Wars, or that of Europe after the Napoleonic Wars,
corresponded perforce with a state of equilibrium. It could have been a
state of imbalance that would not have occurred had there been no war.
The fact that for tens of thousands of years humanity has used warfare
as a solution for states of disequilibrium has no more demonstrable
value than the fact that in the same period humanity learned to resolve
states of psychological imbalance by using alcohol or other equally
devastating substances. ... we have perhaps reached the point in which
humanity has become aware of the need to proclaim war a taboo. ... It is
therefore compatible with intellectual duty and with common sense to
announce the necessity for a taboo... It is an intellectual duty to
proclaim the inconceivability of war. Even if there were no alternative
solutions. What struck some as the silence of intellectuals about war
was perhaps their fear of talking about it in the media in the heat of
the moment, and this for the simple reason that the media are a part of
war and its paraphernalia, and so it is dangerous to think of the media
as neutral territory. ... However, even when [intellectual duty] opts
for tactical silence, in the end reflection on war requires that this
silence must eventually be articulated. ...our first duty is to say that
war today annuls all human initiative, and even its apparent purpose
(and someone's apparent victory) cannot stop what has become the
autonomous game of weights caught in their own net. War cannot be
justified, because—in terms of the rights of the species—it is worse
than a crime. It is a waste."
—Umberto Eco, "Reflections on War" (published in 1991, in protest of the Gulf War) in Five Moral Pieces [Cinque Scritti Morali, 1997], Alastair McEwen, transl. (Harcourt, 2001) p5-6, 14-17.
—Umberto Eco, "Reflections on War" (published in 1991, in protest of the Gulf War) in Five Moral Pieces [Cinque Scritti Morali, 1997], Alastair McEwen, transl. (Harcourt, 2001) p5-6, 14-17.
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