“Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared—this must someday become the highest maxim for every single commonwealth too.”–Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow
The hypocrisy of the current military strategy of all nations was pointed out by Friedrich Nietzsche as early as 1880, when The Wanderer and His Shadow was published as an addendum to his first aphoristic work, Human, All-Too-Human: Every military erected as a means of self-defense presupposes that those against whom the military has been erected (i.e. the other nations) are on the offensive, since no military would be erected for self-defense if there were nothing to defend against.
A military as self-defense presupposes the malice of the “others”, the other nations and nation-states, while it implies (with ludicrous, myopic self-regard) that it itself is well-meaning, existing only for the defense of its people. But if every nation’s military exists only for self-defense, then no nation’s military does; under these international conditions, nations provoke one another to self-defense, leading to bad faith, hypocrisy, and the growing distance between peoples amplified by words such as “God” and “Country”.
This state of affairs is the precondition of all wars, a kind of “pathology of nations”, and it characterizes the twenty-first century just as it did the twentieth as well as the nineteenth. Add nuclear weapons to the mix, and you get a bleak picture of the history (and the future) of humankind. “We must abjure the doctrine of the army as a means of self-defense just as completely as the desire for conquests,” writes Nietzsche in the same passage. How to do this was Nietzsche’s special insight, in keeping with an important aspect of his concept of the “overman”.
Asking a nation to abolish its military is of course a non-solution, as is cutting back on the military budget (as many so-called liberals espouse); the only viable solution is that a nation must eradicate its military when it is at its strongest, its least vulnerable: “The tree of war-glory can only be destroyed all at once, by a stroke of lightning: but lightning, as indeed you know, comes from a cloud—and from up high.” For the survival of the species, the military (and its portentous nuclear arsenal) must die; but what is most necessary is at the same time unlikely, preposterous. That “stroke of lightning” is out of reach, if it is even visible.
A fundamental pessimism underlying all the great strides of human cooperation is therefore the only reasonable response to all international affairs. The immense goodwill and hope that one feels at the most sanguine moments of that platitude of “the brotherhood of man” always occur beneath a sword of Damocles; the world teeters on the brink of destroying itself.
As a reader of philosophy, I drew out these nuggets to give a philosophical context to Grave of the Fireflies, an animated Japanese film in which the moving story of two children, Seita and Setsuko, plays out against a backdrop of war, firebombs, death, destruction, and the utter loss of innocence. This is a story in which children, wartime victims, are crushed by distant, unseen forces that they are not even mature enough to understand; like many others of their age, hailing from the many countries engulfed by the Second World War, Seita and Setsuko exist as victims within an adult world that has engulfed them, and they suffer before at last succumbing to the excesses of that world. If every act of war is a reversion to barbarity, then the murdering of children is one of the worst consequences of this barbarity. Declaring war kills—not just the enemy, but the enemy’s children, and many others as well.
The story of Seita and Setsuko is almost fabulist in that its stark simplicity, and its animation, give it an abstracted veneer like that of a pond’s tranquil surface beneath which a few coy fish fight over a piece of food; the whole chaos of war is zoomed out, and it imparts remarkable clarity. Seita and Setsuko, a boy and his younger sister, escape a firebombing that destroys their house in Kobe, Japan. Their mother dies from severe burns, and since their father is a captain of the imperial Japanese Navy, the children are left parentless, and they go to live with an aunt. She is a wartime harridan, a cruel woman; what sympathy she has for the children becomes resentment as soon as the rations (to which Seita, out of his own naïve kindheartedness, has contributed) start to diminish, and her own next-of-kin come to the fore. Meanwhile she doles out the meager servings of rice, bought with money from Seita’s mother’s silk kimonos.
The children soon leave the house, feeling unwanted and despised, and move into a bomb shelter hollowed out of a hill. It is here that their lives begin weakening from malnutrition, and Seita is forced to scrounge for food as a thieving urchin, running around farms and empty houses during air raids like a rat pursued by a stampede. Setsuko dies first, and Seita cremates her and then puts her remains in a tin of Sakuma drops (which plays a prominent motif in the film); by the end of the story Seita, who dies in the first frames, joins his sister before their spirits mingle with the fireflies.
This kind of story would be a terrible tragedy in any era, be it the twentieth century or the tenth; but the sheer carnage of the twentieth makes it a bitter taste of what was so rampant, so unremitting and twisted, that it defies the imagination. Aggregating the pain and agony of the many that died as victims and bystanders—no one can reckon what that amounts to. The collective pain of tens of millions screaming as in a hellfire? That is beyond conception.
But it was, it existed, and its statistical outcomes are undeniable. The dead bodies of the twentieth century, lined up end-to-end, would encircle the earth multiple times. And a sizable portion of these bodies were those of children who, if they didn’t have happy, vibrant lives as children, at least had a lifetime of things to be done, memories to make, and decades to live. Grave of the Fireflies is a moving film that looks without sentimentality at these consequences, giving a strong dose of fable that is as horrific as it is silent and tranquil.
No one would admit that he wants to massacre children as he runs headlong into a war; the massacring of children is just by the way, an inevitable consequence of this war we had to enter, almost in spite of ourselves. And here again is the pertinence of Nietzsche: no one starts a war, because everyone is on the defense; each is only doing what he has to, the world be damned (along with the enemy’s children). But a species that lies to itself in this way, and carries on into the years and decades of a future that has already passed, so that the twenty-first century is like every century that came before it and will come after it—that is a sick species. It is a species that in its very nature is sick.
Man is a twisted animal—that should become obvious to those in doubt as to the terrible destructiveness of humankind. But hasn’t this same humankind created as much as it has destroyed? Any balancing of the scales would be dubious, at best; one can only conclude that our state of affairs, our beautiful cities and the art and culture of civilization, science, technology, medicine that has saved countless lives—all of this lives next to a towering mountain of corpses, and atop just as many that, like rats pullulating in the dark, scurry along beneath the floorboards.
But doesn’t this all point to an unbearable misanthropy? It just might—but then one returns to the point that is stomach-churning, terrible, terrific, absurd: I am also one of these humans—I’m saddled with it all over again. This must be a sickness that can’t be cured.
