'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

War's effects on communities (contd.)

Last Friday I wrote a post here about the remarkable study that two Croatian psychology professors conducted into what happened to cross-ethnic personal friendships in Vukovar under the pressure of war, violence, and mounting inter-group polarization.

I meant to mention there, once again, two extraordinary memoirs of life during civil wars that came out in the early 1990s. One was Beirut Fragments, by Palestinian writer Jean Said Makdisi, and the other The Balkan Express, by Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulic. Both these authors are female, and parents, and really gifted at conveying the terrible tensions and strains involved in trying to keep oneself sane and one's family intact, during the horrors and social and infrastructural breakdown that wars inflict on civilian societies.

War from the point of view of "targets", or "consumers", you might rightly say.

As opposed to, "war from the point of view of the armchair generals, or plucky young (male) officers", which is how people who've never actually experienced war inside their own societies generally get to "learn" about it.

If you want to read a review article I wrote about these two books, ways back in 1993, you can find it here. Here's how it starts:

An accident of history, really, that brought this nice young man, untested in foreign affairs, to the Presidency of the republic at a time when the United States is in a position of unequalled supremacy in world politics. Decisions that he makes -- on Bosnia, Somalia, Cambodia, wherever -- can rip apart the fabric of whole nations.

What does Bill Clinton know of war?

Forests of print have addressed this question, and enough electronic wizardry to boost a message to the edge of the universe. But that discourse was always dominated by men -- fighting men in uniforms, political men reading opinion polls, think tank men finetuning the game of grown-up bully-boys called 'deterrence'. But put all of these specialists together in a room, and the picture you get of this thing called "war" is still incomplete. Locked outside, but more deserving of entry than ever before, are people with a different view of war: those who are not its producers but, perforce, its consumers (and who thereby are consumed by it). Themselves products of two great developments of this century of ours -- the inclusion of massed civilian populations in the target sets of warriors, and the spread of mass education -- some of these civilian war-consumers can today describe war in a way that is more complete than any previous description. Especially the women among them.

Move over, Les Aspin. Move over, all you Clausewitz wannabes with your Rube Goldberg 'models' of this or that form of warfare. Move over, the warrior-poets of glory or of anguish. Make room for experts like these: Jean Said Makdisi, a college teacher and mother who chronicled 16 years of war in Lebanon in her 1990 book Beirut Fragments; and Slavenka Drakulic, a journalist and mother who chronicled the first year of the present Balkan wars in her book The Balkan Express; Fragments from the Other Side of War (1993).

These women might both have put into their titles a word, "fragments", that implies a tentativeness of experience or discourse. But each book builds an overwhelming, thoughtful, and undeniably true picture of what war does to societies at the end of our century.

Never mind the generals. Compared with these women, what does Bill Clinton know of war?

Or indeed, I would add today-- even four years into his presidency-- What does George W. Bush really know of war?