Retrogressive Little Wars: Honor Forgotten

The last half of the twentieth century has been an era of civil wars in Africa, the Middle East, Central America, East and Southeast Asia, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Balkans. From the Greek civil war of 1944-49 until recently, most such conflicts were proxy wars between the United States and the Soviet Union. For Americans, the life-or-death issues involved in the Cold War were overriding, often causing them to lose sight of the interests and objectives of the local parties to the conflict. Today many in America seem surprised that the forest fires of war continue to flame out of control around the world. Communism is discredited and the Soviet Union has vanished; the United States sails an untroubled sea under a cloudless sky; so why are these people killing each other?

What Americans find not only surprising but shocking are the atrocities that peoples who were neighbors, friends, even members of the same family commit against each other. Similar gruesome episodes occurred in wars in which the United States participated-for example, in Central America. But Americans felt that these were isolated episodes, and believed hopefully that they were not sanctioned by the U.S. government. Besides, the other side, they were told, did things that were as bad or worse. As for family members battling one another, terrible though it was, it was comprehensible. After all, the central episode in American history was a civil war animated on both sides by the belief that brother must kill brother if the cause be just and of sufficient importance. So Americans of the 1990s are struck less by the spectacle of various peoples on other continents driven from their homes, starved, mutilated, and slaughtered than by the apparent absence of any cause that might justify such brutality.

A FIVE-PART SERIES

Michael Ignatieff, who has journeyed to the battlefields of some of today's mini-wars, has made them the focus of his inquiries. In an earlier work, Blood and Belonging (1994), he compared six trouble spots: the former Yugoslavia, Ireland, Kurdistan, Germany, Ukraine, and French Canada. In his slender new volume, The Warrior's Honor, he returns to what was once Yugoslavia, but also reports from Afghanistan and Central Africa and refers to insurgencies in Sri Lanka, Algeria, Chechnya, and elsewhere. About 50 such wars are being waged today, he says-in what Americans regard as a world at peace.

Ignatieff is not only a writer but a broadcaster. Indeed, Blood and Belonging was also a six-part BBC television series, each part devoted to a particular trouble spot. The book and series had much of interest and value to say. Their weakness was the lack of a common theme, gamely though the author tried to discover or invent one. The Warrior's Honor has similar strengths and weaknesses. It is less a coherent book than five essays circling around various aspects of the civil wars of the 1990s. To the illumination of dark deeds on the killing fields Ignatieff brings a poetic sensibility and a lyrical style that many will find beguiling. His individual insights often succeed brilliantly. His leaps at synthesis, however, usually fall short. He is impressionistic rather than systematic, suggestive rather than explicit. What eludes him is the unifying vision, the explanation that makes sense of it all. It may not exist.

TELEVISION CREDITS (AND BLAME)

Ignatieff introduces Warrior's Honor by asking anew the much-discussed questions of why, when, and how Americans and other peoples of the West should involve themselves in today's mini-wars. "My concern here," he writes, "is with [our] moral obligation" to the alien peoples caught up in these struggles and with "that impulse we all feel to do something when we see some terrible report on television from Bosnia or Rwanda or Afghanistan. Why exactly do some of us feel that these strangers are our responsibility?" The feeling of responsibility began, in his opinion, with our shame over the century's mass murders and evictions of entire peoples. No ties of family, business, or class, we realize, sufficed to save the victims. What happened to them could have happened to anyone, to you or me.

Television, Ignatieff suggests, is the "privileged modern medium" for conveying this sense. But the medium has built-in contradictions and ambiguities. Television trivializes history's triumphs and tragedies, giving them equal time with gossip, fashion news, sports, the weather, and elections to the local school board. Television captures the imagination, bringing the world into viewers' living rooms and bedrooms with an air of immediacy and urgency. It can have the impact of a blow to the stomach, but then it moves off in another direction, tugging our attention with it. Ignatieff writes, "The medium's gaze is brief, intense, and promiscuous. The shelf life of the moral causes it makes its own is brutally short." To embattled causes in need of publicity, television gives and television takes away. Insofar as Ignatieff draws a conclusion, it is that television journalism ought to be more responsible and show more respect for the dimensions of the dramas it sometimes has an opportunity to portray.

Television as a medium is better suited to conveying images than thoughts. Simply and graphically, it shows the suffering of the losers, but it tends to be less effective at inquiring into causes. That, according to Ignatieff, makes the audience watching reports of a conflict impatient with the issues at stake; none of them, we feel, justifies the horrors we see on the screen. We come to believe that all causes are fraudulent or worse. In Ignatieff's view, we are eventually so angered by both sides that we turn against the victims too, on the grounds that they are fighting under banners every bit as bloodstained as their oppressors'. He urges us not to give way to this reaction.

IS THE HOUSE HAUNTED?