Living Speech: Resisting the Empire of Force

Introduction
THE EMPIRE OF FORCE AND THE WORLD OF WORDS
In an important sense this entire book is an extended essay on the single sentence that stands as its epigraph, taken from Simone Weil's wonderful essay on the Iliad : "No one can love and be just who does not understand the empire of force and know how not to respect it."1 For the purposes of this book it is a crucial fact that our knowledge of the empire and our capacity not to respect it--and the opposite of these things--all show up constantly in our uses of language, in what we confirm and what we resist, in what we reveal and what we hide, as we speak and write.
THE EMPIRE OF FORCE AS WAR
Weil wrote her essay on the Iliad during the period of fascism in Europe, just at the beginning of World War II, and saw the ancient poem as speaking directly to the horrible moment in which Europe and the world found themselves. The Iliad is of course about a stage in the Trojan war, which it describes in great and bloody detail. For Weil, this poem at once presents and criticizes the practice of dehumanization that is an inseparable part not only of a war between peoples but also, as we have since discovered, of that other kind of war that a government may wage against its own people. In this poem Homer sees, and brings the reader to see, the equal value and humanity of Greek and Trojan, of the human beings on both sides of this war. That is in fact the poem's central achievement: to identify and to criticize, indeed to undermine, what Weil calls the empire of force--the ideology, the way of imagining the world and oneself and others within it--that is always present in war and required by it, but present also in our lives whenever people deny the humanity of others whom they destroy, manipulate, or exploit.
What Weil says about war is undeniably the case. If one is not a psychopath, one can engage in war only by denying the full humanity of those one is trying to kill. This is true even for a person fighting out of deeply felt idealism, on the side of democracy and decency, say, against tyranny and genocide. Think, for example, of the mentality that would make it possible to participate in the firebombing of Dresden or Tokyo in World War II. The people one is trying to incinerate--children, old people, tram conductors, electricians, musicians, laborers, factory workers, clerks, secretaries, mothers--are themselves of course no threat to our nation or its safety, and one knows this perfectly well. The thought is that if we destroy enough of them, in a hideous enough way, those in charge of the military that does present such a threat will lose their will to fight. We are killing civilians by fire to persuade generals and politicians to surrender.
In purely military engagements the situation is not so very different: the people you are trying to kill, who are also trying to kill you, would in other circumstances be recognized as people--in our own country as tourists perhaps, or as the locals if we were traveling abroad, or even as neighbors and friends if one of us came to live in the other's country. It is through the operation of the military draft, or the work of war fever and propaganda, or by some deep political failure on one side or the other, or on both--by some horrible mistake--that you find yourselves fighting each other to the death. You naturally experience triumph when you succeed, as does the soldier you oppose. Yet whenever anyone dies, on whichever side, a world of possibility dies with him or her, a web of relationships of caring and concern. A part of the fabric of humanity and human community has been torn to bits.
In a sense we know all this, of course. But we cannot allow this knowledge to be present and active when we are engaged in war, whether as a soldier or as a civilian cheering on the troops. It would not be endurable. And the dehumanization of which I speak is present as well in the psychological and political process that leads to war. It is a way of justifying war: you begin to paint "them" as monstrous, superstitious, barbarian, ignorant, savage, inhuman, and then you can go to war against them.2 Think of the Serbians who were married to Croatians in what was once Yugoslavia, or of the Hutu and Tutsi living at peace in Rwanda, all of whom suddenly discovered that there were lines of murderous enmity where before there were none.3
In her essay Weil shows that for Homer, and for us, the dehumanization of others is an inherent psychological cost of war, a denial of truth that corrodes the mind and will. Perhaps it is necessary, if the war is necessary, but it is always present, as an ineluctable cost of the activity. To take an event that occurred during the writing of this book, recall the American effort to kill Iraq's Saddam Hussein by bombing a restaurant in which he was thought to be dining.