Who Chooses Wars for Us?

Note from LeftEast editors: A Romanian version of this article was published on Lumi posibile, a platform for speculative writing, in July 2024.

Spring 2023

“Europe’s military arsenal is not well prepared for war” – I hear on the morning talk show of Finland’s national TV channel – there is a lack of weapons, a lack of cannon ammunition, a lack of chemical industry – which has been moved to poorer countries – a lack of military training, a lack of all sorts, only war is not missing… Because, argues the war expert: “for the last thirty years we thought that war was not coming back to Europe.”

But has war ever left Europe?

The arsenal is not well prepared, but all the national countries in the region are selling arms for other conflict zones, far away from this E U R O P E where peace is maintained by externalizing war. That kind of peace where arms and ammunition are produced on a conveyor belt. That kind of peace that sells arms and munitions by the billions, that sells whatever it can get its hands on, with as much profit as it can, lest production and consumption should once by mistake stop, so that it can keep on selling. Is this peace? Whose peace? And yet surely it is much more peace than when bombs are being dropped on your roof every night. It is much more peace, because the blood flows privately and hidden, on borders on razor-wired fences, in prisons, in factories and shops, in the armchair in front of the television, and it does not siren, it does not explode, it does not annihilate you suddenly and visibly and en masse.

On many occasions it’s much more peace than when you can’t find food or water among the ruins in the free hours between bombings. Much more peace. In comparison, you could say it really is peace. A kind of peace. And we accept that this kind of peace is peace. Because it’s not war with guns and bombing. With guns and bombing – always somewhere else. But as long as there is selling, production, maximizing profit, this peace is not peace for all. As long as there are borders with razor-wired fences lethally cutting the flesh of refugees, it is not the peace for all.

 “For the last thirty years we thought that war was not coming back to Europe…” – continues someone on the morning show from Finland. Really, what would it be like if war never came back? In Europe… what is Europe, by the way, where does it begin and where does it end? Are the Balkan countries in Europe that they talk about in the news in Finland? There had been wars very recently in Europe, between the former countries of Yugoslavia, even the genocide in Srebrenica – it was only 28 years ago, last spring when I listened to the program. And the war in Kosovo, between 1998-1999, definitely less than 30 years ago. Isn’t it that the Europe they referred to in the TV show is mostly Western and Northern Europe?

For war to go nowhere, it can’t really go anywhere. War is not just somewhere far away well isolated from the rest of the world. Keeping war out of that Europe in the first place means keeping E U R O P E out of war elsewhere. And what, if not “we”, others do? The biggest geopolitical FOMO, lest they get left behind with the wars….

But how can there be no more war if it has already been waged through hundreds of years of colonization and is still being waged by sustaining colonial power at the root of global relations? E U R O P E has waged wars in very concrete and violent ways, with the greatest brutality imaginable. And it is still waging them, for oil, for gas^[i], for anything that can be sold. It has waged brutal and torturous wars with slave ships and barrels full of alcohol made from sugar cane production on plantations.^[ii] Through genocide, through rape, through concentration camps, through prisons. Through education. Through education. How much oppression fits into a few years of education? Through art and culture. Through all the paintings, the novels, the poems, the music, the theater, all aimed at the Other.

Everything around us is steeped in wars. Somewhere there is more peace than somewhere else, and somewhere else there is war, so that there may be more peace in another place. History is the history of wars, occupations and systematic oppression. Western humanist art is of torment and exoticization. Western humanist culture is the culture of rape and aggression. Capitalist technology is of exploitation and extraction. Capitalist technology is of war. Western humanist culture and art are of war. Western educational systems are of war – what was it, that we lack military training, according to the expert on the morning show in Finland? From another perspective we really do have too much training, unfortunately…

Wars: colonialism, racism, patriarchy, capitalism.

But really, how would it be for wars to never come back? We keep preparing for War not to come back. We prepare by arms, by selling, by production, by fortified borders and armies. Lest the War slip back through a hand-dug hole under 14-foot fences. Lest the War flow back through the water in the bottom of the rubber boat. Lest… Europe is preparing to stop the War from flowing back through fortified borders, the expulsion and killing of refugees, through bans and restrictive laws, and so on and so forth. With such preparation for peace, there will never be peace. Peace called peace is not really peace. But is there any other kind of peace? But are there ways to prevent wars from returning?

Winter 2024

One place where war left Europe after World War II is the historic territory of Palestine, most of which is now known as Israel. The State of Israel was founded in 1948, at the end of the British Mandate, during which the territory of historic Palestine was under British colonial administration. And a time during which the Zionist administration already in formation in the territory worked together with the British, who granted them various favorable administrative positions.^[iii] Thus, from a territory under a colonial administration it ends up becoming a colonized territory again, now by the Zionist administration, which begins a process of ethnic cleansing of the Arab population through the Nakba in 1948^[iv] – an event called catastrophe in Arabic. The Nakba has resulted in the demolition of hundreds of villages and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of people, some of them abroad, but many of them within the territory of the Gaza Strip, as refugees from the occupied territories.

And the ethnic cleansing and genocide are not even war, they are not just war, at least they are not two equal sides: there are occupiers and occupied.^[v]

“War” has moved out of Europe, and it has NEVER moved out. This Europe, both W E S T Europe, called the West, or at least part of the West , and Eastern Europe, still called O R I E N T A L  Europe in French, sells and buys weapons from Israel. Four factories in Romania produce components for Israeli arms company Elbit’s weapons.^[vi] Among European countries, Romania is second only to Germany in terms of arms export licenses received, calculated in millions of euros.^[vii] And many countries in Europe, including the EU, buy security and surveillance systems from Israel, which are renowned for being tested… that is to say, tested on Palestinians!

This P E A C E, from where we can watch live on social media the genocide in Gaza, how hospitals are being bombed, how premature babies left without power in the incubator are dying. This peace is also being built on Palestinians’ skin – in addition to many other colonial, capitalist, extractive processes in which the West in particular is invested, in many other parts of the world.

The major global powers have economic interests in the Middle East, and such colonial power, built on the ideas of Eurocentric humanism, is the perfect instrument through which to externalize war. This is how genocide comes to be minimized, not accepted as such. For their purposes, the great powers only have to politically support the occupation, vote against recognizing and stopping genocide, sell/buy/produce weapons.

It seems like the blood does not dry on your hands, but in fact it doesn’t dry on the hands of the occupiers either, because they are mostly bombing, shooting and starving Palestinians.

The blood dries on the cracked earth and on the dismembered decomposing bodies.

Colonizers wash their hands… in blood.^[viii]

Wars: colonialism, racism, patriarchy, capitalism.

But are there worlds without wars? Worlds without wars must also be without colonial power and colonialism and occupation. But how to get there when colonialism kills, attacks? When the colonial machine fuels the fires of war?!

Da capo al fine.

*

I keep thinking of Ursula K. Le Guin, who said that it seemed impossible for us to end capitalism, but so did the reign of kings… Then I think of Ursula K. Le Guin and her novel The Word for World is Forest. Once upon a time there was a lush green world with many trees. There they called the world forest. And at some point, at the point where we meet the characters in the novel, another world arrives, with machines and science and weapons, to colonize the forest-world. To cut down the trees of the forest-world and enslave the forest people. To kill the forest people. There was no such thing as murder in the forest-world before.^[ix] No one killed anyone, there were no wars. Once upon a time there was a world without killing, because from the moment the colonizers arrived with machinery, guns, science and death, there was no such world without killing. And for the forest-world itself to continue to exist, the colonizers must disappear. Thus the people of the forest-world kill the colonizers. It’s hard for them, it’s totally unfamiliar, but something they learn in order to survive. That pretty much ends the story. So far this speculative fiction is actually history. Let’s say our own – but it’s always with the question mark, who is that us….

Hence what follows could be something from history or it could be anything. Anything at all, that is, even possible worlds without murder, without wars, without colonialism.

The novel The Word for World is Forest ends with an extremely important remark. A remark that I have thought about almost every day since I read it. One of the main characters observes that 1. killing did not exist before in their world, but 2. now it would be totally pointless and wrong to pretend that it doesn’t exist, 3. because it has existed since the colonizers stepped onto the forest-planet and since they taught the forest people to kill in order to save their lives and their world, and 4. the most important question is, what do they do from now on with this fact that killing exists?

What do we do with this fact, that wars exist? Should we pretend that they do not exist where we are, but they exist elsewhere? All histories are steeped in war, so pretending would be useless and wrong. I mean… it is wrong, but not useless for those who gain money and power from wars…

Very serious questions for these possible worlds without wars: what do we do with all the histories of all the wars? What do we do with all the sciences and arts and cultures of wars? What do we do with the people, animals, fungi and plants killed? What do we do with the killers? What do we do with all the technologies of war, all the bombs, cannons, guns, factories, drones, surveillance cameras? Because these objects and technologies exist, we cannot pretend they don’t. We cannot PUFF them into non-existence in a second. And since all these objects and technologies exist, how can we not have wars? Sounds like a very didactic and moralizing lesson from kindergarten: just because you can do anything, doesn’t mean you have to do that. And out of all the anything’s in the world, we choose these, wars and colonialism and capitalism. We just don’t all choose them equally. We really don’t all choose. Not at all. Who chooses wars for us?

So it’s clear that we cannot have worlds where there have never been any wars, because in our worlds there have been and there are at the moment a lot of concrete wars, and there is oppression, there is colonialism, there is racism, patriarchy, capitalism. And the worlds of these wars eat everything that is against it, swallows and dissolves resistance, protest, insurrection and utopia. And then what are we left with?

[???]

To imagine possible worlds without wars and colonial capitalism. And with this impossible thought for the worlds of wars, to protest. To protest so much that it becomes indigestible to the worlds of war. So that it passes through the greedy mouths of war, our worlds. Let them remain for a while in the greedy mouth and bother the greedy mouth. To bother, to tickle, to squeak, to cut, to sting, to prick, to pinch, to nibble, to pierce so much that the greedy mouth can’t swallow anything else, but neither can it cough our world up. It gets stuck. Fine.

[000]

And then the worlds of wars and colonial capitalism shatter, into great big pieces and smaller and smaller little pieces. And our possible worlds without wars grow. They grow big and fluffy, initially like a bubble of chewing gum, then like cotton candy, a whole carpet of puffs and puffy snacks. Out through the remains of the mouth that couldn’t swallow us.

o . o . o .. O .. O .. 0 … OOO … oooo .. 0 .. 0 .

The pieces of the worlds of war and colonial capitalism are scattering into our possible decolonial worlds like meteors. And very important to remember: we cannot pretend that these pieces do not exist. These painful pieces, these injuries and wounds, need tending, gardening and comforting. From here any story can follow, even one without wars, but always with the traces of wars already there.

[…]

Once upon a time there was a world of wars. There was.

…

---

^[i] https://www.newarab.com/analysis/israel-sets-its-sights-gazas-offshore-gas.

https://diem25.org/is-natural-gas-the-real-reason-for-the-genocide-in-gaza.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas_in_the_Gaza_Strip.

^[ii] Anna Tsing, ”Mushrooms as Companion Species”, Environmental Humanities, 2012, 1:1, 141–154. Online: https://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article/1/1/141/8082/Unruly-Edges-Mushrooms-as-Companion-SpeciesFor.

^[iii] Fayez Sayegh, “Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (1965)”, Settler Colonial Studies, 2012, 2:1, 206-225. Online: https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Truth/CallLegacyColonialism/CSO/Al-Haq-Annex-3.pdf.

^[iv] Nada Elia, Greater than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Intern/nationalism and Palestine, (Pluto Press, 2022).

^[v] Zionist thinking is a Eurocentric and colonialist type of thinking, born out of 18th century humanist, Enlightenment, nationalist, imperialist and colonialist ideas. See the Zionist thought of Theodor Herzl and Ze’ev Jabotinsky, e.g. in English with many texts translated from German and Russian into here: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/quot-the-jewish-state-quot-theodor-herzl, respectively here: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/quot-the-iron-wall-quot. From these quotes translated into Romanian can be found in the book Queerș pentru Palestina, collected by the Pink Bloc: https://pagini-libere.ro/carti/queers-pentru-palestina-luari-de-pozitie-eseuri-si-poeme/.

^[vi] About the factories in Romania producing armaments for Elbit, see the Instagram post of the Solidaritate Romania-Palestina and Palestine Solidarity Cluj groups: https://www.instagram.com/p/C7Oh2qzI4R6/?img_index=1.

^[vii] See the post on Instagram at Transnational Institute: https://www.instagram.com/p/C7yR0wBM0Qm/?img_index=3.

^[viii] Quote from the poem Silence Creates Consensus for Genocide by Nóra Ugron, Literature and Feminism: https://literaturasifeminism.wordpress.com/2024/05/28/tacerea-creeaza-consens-pentru-genocid-poem-pentru-palestina-libera-de-nora-ugron/, see the video subtitled in English.

^[ix] However non-human animals have been killed, but a discussion of that is beyond the scope of this essay.