Where Have All The Flowers Gone?

“War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other.”  - Paul Valery, French poet and essayist.   To render the quote more apt, I might substitute “men” for the second “people.”

The ongoing massacre of women, children and men in Ukraine is unbearable.  The images of desperation and destruction are relentless.  Day after day, newspaper headlines and television news reports amplify the incessant pounding of war and the shattered lives and structures left in war’s wake.

I do not intend to trivialize war or to confess emotional cowardice, but on many evenings my wife and I turn away from the graphic reporting and turn toward our current guilty pleasure on Netflix - the multi-season absurdity of Arrested Development.  I mention this at some peril as the show is puerile and does not represent our highest cultural aspirations.

I confess the entertainment embarrassment because of the aptness of the series’s title to the war.  The war in - or I might say on - Ukraine exemplifies the “arrested development” of the males of our species.  As asked in Pete Seeger’s anti-war anthem Where Have All the Flowers Gone? - when will we ever learn?

More than ever before I’ve been taken by the absurdities that accompany war.  There are constant references to war crimes, as though war itself is not crime enough.   In the midst of bloody slaughter, there are designated evacuation routes through the chaos and violating their sanctity is a grave violation of the rules.  

It seems that civilization has bent to the inevitability of war as though it is a violent game where gentlemen’s agreements as to the rules are broadly stipulated.   Rather like rugby (full disclosure; I played), where bone crushing tackles are appreciated by all, but a forward pass is verboten.  Like rugby referees, the Red Cross and the press are exempt and traverse the pitch with relative impunity, albeit subject to stray missiles, undetected land mines or clumsy props, to extend my rugby analogy.

It is violation of the rules that draws the great outrage.  How dare Putin target “civilians!” - as though the 18 year-old Ukrainian who just yesterday picked up a weapon is now fair game.   I do understand the difference, of course.  Targeting a maternity ward is a horrifying act of indiscriminate sadism, but it invites the inference that obliterating some other structures is just part of the time-honored traditions of war.  The news is filled with fears of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons (which we Americans possess in unfathomable quantity).   The inference to be drawn is that war is a game of honor, and use of such things is dishonorable.  While, once again, I appreciate the distinction, the precise manner of mass murder is of little solace to the victims.

Now before you excoriate me in a comment, I too believe Putin is a singularly pathological male of the species.  And this war is raw, unjustified aggression. And the “rules” violations seem excessive, but not without precedent.  We used chemical weapons in our totally unjustified invasion of Iraq.  That war, like this war, was arguably a man (George W. Bush - man 1) lashing out at a man (Saddam Hussein - man 2) because of a long-simmering grudge resulting from another man (George H.W. Bush - man 3) who hadn’t finished what he started and was allegedly the target of an assassination attempt by man 2.  

Perhaps you think I draw a false equivalence.  Tell that to any survivors of the estimated 7,000- 13,000 Iraqi civilians killed by our ground and air forces in just the first year of that debacle. 

The geopolitical causes of all wars are complex.  But the single identifiable variable is gender, polluted by power, motivated in part by profit, as Valery noted so wisely in my opening quote.  

All others are victims, to include the estimated 7,000 young Russian soldiers who have died in the process of decimating cities where their own relatives may live.

It is a fool’s errand to claim any special wisdom for dealing with man’s inhumanity to man.  I sometimes feel that the only answer to war is radically dangerous peace; like the courageous man in Tiananmen Square; or the reports of similar courage in Ukraine; or Vietnam War protestor placing a carnation into the barrel of a rifle held by a soldier of the 503rd Military Police Battalion in 1967.

Pete Seeger asked where all the flowers have gone.  “To young men in uniform,” “to graveyards every one,” “covered with flowers every one,” “young girls have picked them every one.”

Oh, when will we ever learn?

(Valley News - 3/20/22)