Achilles dominates the Iliad from the first verse. Homer tells us about his pernicious anger and his fatal anger, which are the cause of infinite evils. This rage ends up pushing him into a fight that, in principle, he did not want, but it is there, in the battle for the conquest of Troy, where the pain transforms into glory and this into death.
The transition from pain to glory, as well as the glorification of death, are deeply rooted in the culture and religion of many civilizations besides our own, and it is from here that all wars and atrocities can be justified. A cause or a prayer is enough.
It is not easy to live with the idea that good can come from evil, but that is what generals, kings and presidents have done and continue to do.
Henry Kissinger, for example, was “a war criminal admired by the American ruling class,” according to Rolling Stone magazine, which this week buried him with a harsh obituary. At the head of American diplomacy, he ordered more than 3,000 bombings on Cambodia that caused between 150,000 and half a million deaths, and he fought communism by supporting bloody dictatorships. He also opened China’s doors to the West, brokered the American surrender in Vietnam, and forged peace between Israel and Egypt. He won the Nobel. He was respected as the architect of a world order that, above all, avoided a nuclear war, although millions of deaths had to be put on the table.
Today there are no such complex, ambiguous and amoral leaders, leaders capable of saving one man after having killed hundreds, and the world today is a more unsafe place.
Defense spending has been increasing for eight years. Humanity has never spent so much on weapons. Last year the record of 2.2 trillion dollars was reached, a mark that will now be surpassed again.
Countries fight. The oldest ones, like China and Russia, in wars of conquest. The newest ones, like Israel, in existential wars. Ethnic conflicts and religious insurgencies proliferate, clashes between warlords and clans of all kinds, between drug, gambling and prostitution mafias, trafficking in men and weapons, fighting for a mine in Tanganyika. , through a neighborhood in Port-au-Prince, through a town in the Sierra Madre del Sur, through a piece of jungle in Moskitia and another in Darien, through a safe passage on the Hari Rud River, the border between Iran and Afghanistan, where Russia and the United Kingdom measured their imperial forces in the 19th century – a struggle they called the Great Game – and which today is one of the main opium routes to Europe.
There are also armed conflicts beyond Gaza and Ukraine, inside Burma, for example, across the Sahel, in Sudan and Ethiopia, in places now as far from the headlines as Tigray, Oromia, Afar and Amhara. They are endless conflicts, with tens of thousands of deaths, the vast majority not from enemy fire but from hunger and the diseases caused by wars, men, women and children who die without having heard of Achilles.
The soldiers return, if they ever left, and peace does not concern them. An army is not a peace corps. Victory is what gives the military the most meaning and perhaps that is why blue helmets have rarely been effective.
War is an aspiration, but it is also a mistake. It was the United States’ war against jihadist terror, Russia’s against Ukraine and Israel’s against Hamas. Mistakes, however, are not mistakes until they are made. Only then are the alternatives that could have avoided them evident. Bush was wrong in 2001, Putin in 2014 and, again, in 2022, just as Netanyahu has been wrong now.
I wonder where the societies that admire their armies, their shock forces and their terrorist organizations are going. Where are the United States, Russia, Israel, Iran and China going, where are Syria, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine and Palestine going?
I am surprised by India, perhaps the country that has best faced the 21st century, a geographical, demographic, industrial and technological power that suffers the constant scourge of terrorism, whether jihadist or Maoist, of separatists in Kashmir or Assam, of tribal confronted in Manipur. Bombay, the most cosmopolitan city, a showcase of economic success, was attacked in 2006, 2008 and 2011. Pakistani military intelligence supported the armed groups that planted bombs and murdered tourists. India did not respond with a military offensive against its great enemy, Pakistan, but with a reinforcement of internal security. He created a federal intelligence agency and terrorist violence, although inevitable, is much less today.
Man always has an alternative, even if destiny denies it to him. Another thing is that he is wise to choose well and die without the glory of combat.
The God of the Old Testament, for example, spared Nineveh when the city underwent fasting and penance, but then man destroyed it many times, most recently in 2017, when it was called Mosul. No Achilles fought there then, nor does he fight there today on any other front. There is no epic that frees us from the evil we cause.
