Painted Shrapnel, Ukraine.
Daniel Benshana
War is haunting us again. It never left the world but Europe has been quiet for nearly eighty years. They say the numbers killed in conflict today, in historical terms, are not that great but then the wise in the world tell us that when one person dies it is the end of the universe for that person so it isn’t about numbers. Though victory is very often about numbers and waging a war is always about the troop numbers. We are so used to the horrific numbers from WW2, 400,000 dead in Syria lone since the civil war stared is not even considered, 11 million made homeless in Sudan, 150,000 threatened with famine in Yemen. And that’s before racism rears its ugly head and we can dismiss them as ‘backward’ nations that have not been touched by modernity – except in their weaponry.
But it is timely to once again remind ourselves through this issue how artists down the centuries have investigated and handled the savagery of wars. The complete butchery, the absolute degradation of any and all thoughts of ethics in the determination to defeat the enemy. In the instigation of a war, invading and empire building of which we are all guilty. The wars are long over that created the UK or France or Spain and China or India. All created through massive conflicts over hundreds of years.
We should remind ourselves how we create ourselves as enemies and not allied human beings. How we divide ourselves off by religion, by class, accent, language, borders, wealth and customs. Add to this the fact we have been doing these things for thousands of years and you have history in the mix with its demands for revenge and domination. And once we can accept we are animals, which seems very difficult for some people, we realise hormones have more to do with wars than any strategy generals have ever designed.
Art has always been about beauty in the ugliness of life and as such it is also about pain: the pain it portrays and the pain in the creative spirit that is the inheritance of artists across the arts. We must not and cannot ever walk away from sorrow or pretend it isn’t there. The day we attempt to forget every death in wars across of the ages is the day we begin preparing for the next war and the day we cease to care.
The Romans bled Europe dry. The Persians bled the East the Chinese bled the Far East. And all their neighbours bled them. And in so doing we all bled the animal kingdom to the bone. This is what being human means until our times.
