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“THOSE WERE THE DAYS,” the old rebel told me, reminiscing about the peak period of the Sikh rebellion against the Indian government in the 1980s. I had interviewed some of his fellow militants in the Indian state of Punjab years before, when the movement was still active, and in 2017 I returned to the Punjab to assess how the scars from those years had healed.
In Mejar Singh’s case, they hadn’t. He was still bitter about all that happened following the collapse of the movement and the end of the violence in the 1990s. But when he recalled the glory days of the movement, his face lit up. Clearly those years were the high point of his life.
I met with Singh in the dusty village of Sultanwind, several miles outside the Punjab city of Amritsar. It was where he was raised and had lived most of his life. In the 1980s it came to be known as “Little Khalistan” because it was in the center of the maelstrom of militant activity associated with the movement to create a Khalistan, a separate Sikh state. For over ten years the Indian government and its armed police battled the militant rebels, who were led by several organizations that were structured as military units.
It was a war, and a bloody one at that. The militants kidnapped police, politicians, and journalists and often strangled them or slit their throats. Buses traveling through the region were captured and their passengers attacked and killed. An Air India jetliner flying out of Canada was blown up midflight. A car bomb was set off outside the Punjab state secretariat, killing the chief minister. For their part, the Indian armed police seemed to match the brutality, simply executing suspected terrorists in extrajudicial killings that were often reported as “police encounters.” Over the years thousands were killed on both sides.
All of the young men in his generation were involved in the struggle, Singh told me. His older brother, Kuldip, was a rising star in the movement, and his buddies looked up to him as if he were a football hero. Kuldip joined one of the central organizations in the militant movement, the Babbar Khalsa, as his younger brother Mejar looked on with admiration.
Though he was still a teenager, Mejar began joining Kuldip in some of the nonviolent activities of the movement. They helped to sponsor a protest march against what they felt was Pakistan’s unfair exploitation of water from the Sutlej River, which deprived Sikh farmers in the Punjab their full allotment. Kuldip began listening to the teachings of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the key figure in the Khalistan movement, and spreading his message of the unity of rural Sikhs—mostly from the landowning Jat caste—in opposition to what he described as the oppression of the Indian government.
Although he realized that his brother was secretly involved in suspicious activities, Mejar claimed that he was unaware of the details. The Punjab police, however, assumed that both brothers were engaged in nefarious actions and arrested Mejar along with Kuldip; both were soon released, however, since the police did not have firm evidence against them.
In 1986 the police arrested Kuldip again. According to Mejar they tortured his brother for a month before putting him to death. The police began to pursue Mejar as well, assuming he was equally culpable in whatever crimes they suspected Kuldip of committing. He went into hiding. Later that year, when he was twenty-one years old, he became fully committed to the movement. He joined the Khalistan Commando Force, which was headquartered in Sultanwind, and spent the next six years in the movement, moving from village to village under the cover of night to avoid detection by the police.
Eventually he was captured. It was now the 1990s and the movement was falling apart. Villagers were no longer willing to shelter the rebels, and the Punjab police, under the strong command of Director General K. P. S. Gill, were offering a bounty for any militant who was rounded up, dead or alive. Mejar was captured and for the next eight years waited in prison to stand trial in one case after another. He was accused of having been a hit man who killed police, informants, and their families. The evidence, however, was deemed insufficient for conviction, and eventually he was released. Since then, however, his life has been restricted. His passport was taken away so he cannot travel outside the country; he is unable to receive government loans or benefits; and he continues to be under surveillance.
When I asked why he had joined the movement in the first place, he hesitated before answering. The police treated him as the enemy, he said, so he reacted in kind. He thought he was doing something good for his community. Besides, everyone was joining the movement in those days, and he wanted to impress his brother.
He fell silent, as if he were looking for some other, more basic explanation. “It was what we did,” he finally said, as if there had been no other option.
This response was typical, I was told by Jagrup Singh Sekhon, a political scientist at Guru Nanak Dev University in Amritsar who has studied scores of ex-militants in the Punjab. “They were just caught up in the moment.”
In Mejar Singh’s telling, he did not come to the war as much as the war came to him. The sense of struggle, the war worldview, descended on Sultanwind and other Punjab villages like a dark cloud, engulfing everything. Without quite wanting or asking for it, they were at war.
Understanding What War Is
How can we make sense of what happened to Mejar Singh? When war came to Sultanwind, what was it, and how did it change things? As a professional academic, my inclination is to turn immediately to the literature, to understand how other scholars have framed a subject. However, in the case of war this tactic doesn’t much help.
I was trained in two different disciplines, political science and theology. Both talk about war, but quite differently. It may seem that I was something of an overachiever, having acquired two master’s degrees and a PhD in addition to my BA. But in truth this was the result of indecision and bad planning on my part. I had initially wanted to become a Protestant minister, so my first choice for graduate school was theology. I chose Union Theological Seminary in New York City, which was and still is a powerhouse of scholarship in religious studies.
It was at Union that I realized I was much more interested in thinking about religion and studying it than preaching it, so my mind turned to other graduate programs. After graduating from seminary, though, I spent two years abroad in India. I became fascinated with the way religion in that ancient culture was intimately intertwined with the social and political aspects of life. So when I returned to the United States, I applied and was admitted to a graduate program in political science at the University of California at Berkeley, to study religion and politics. (The mid-1960s were an auspicious time to be in Berkeley for all sorts of political and cultural reasons, but that is quite another story.)
In the PhD program in political science one much-discussed book at that time was Man, the State and War, by Kenneth Waltz.1 It continues to be one of the most articulate statements about war from a political science perspective. Waltz surveys a wide range of classical theories about war and groups them into three categories, which he calls “images” of war. One is on an individual level, by which he means not only the penchant for fighting, which he thinks is endemic to human nature, but also the ability of individual leadership—a Napoleon, say, or a Hitler—to rally the citizenry and lead a society into war. The second image is on the level of state policy, which posits that wars are started in order for states to acquire something or to make up for some internal deficiency by solidifying social support. The third image is international, the arena of concern that interests Waltz the most. Here he sees the cause of war in the anarchic world system, where there is no global power, nothing to check the impulse of one state to impose its will on others.
There is no question that warfare is often part of the strategy of international politics and can be used and manipulated by skillful political leaders. But if this is all that war is—an extension of political calculations by means of military force—then every instance of war would have to demonstrate that the benefits exceeded the costs, or at least that those involved in the decision to go to war expected that this would be the case. It does not explain why state actors think in war terms even when it does not make rational sense, as when US leaders proclaimed a “war on terror” against an ill-defined enemy after 9/11. And it does not explain why nonstate movements and groups would adopt an attitude of war even when there are overwhelming odds against them.
The Khalistan movement was one of these nonstate movements, so the war that Mejar Singh discovered does not quite fit into any of Waltz’s themes. And the political scientist does not help much in understanding individuals’ perspectives and how they see the world at war. Waltz’s view is largely from the top down, seeing war as a matter of state policy. It is a thoughtful study of the role that war plays in the international relations of states, but it does not help much in understanding the appeal of war to those who are lured into it, even as spectators.
So I turned to theology for answers, thinking it would offer a more sympathetic perspective. In some ways this was true, but only because theology focuses on the moral dimensions of warfare. Traditional theological thinking about war is still, like Waltz, concentrated on the idea of warfare as a matter of state policy.
At Union Theological Seminary I was privileged to study with Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the foremost theologians of the twentieth century. He had been a pacifist in his early years and a socialist, but with the rise of Stalin and then Hitler he realized that the massive violence of powerful state actors such as these could not in good conscience be left unchecked. In a pivotal essay published as a short book, Why the Christian Church Is Not Pacifist, Niebuhr argued that the just war tradition of Christianity applied to contemporary cases where violent powers needed to be contained.2 The just war theory says that killing is bad, war is bad, but there are moments when you have to apply some force in order to keep a greater amount of force from happening. The force applied should be proportional at most, authorized by a just authority, and as swift and sure as “a surgeon’s knife.”3
I greatly admire Niebuhr’s thinking and respect the ethical conundrum that arises when trying to decide the appropriate degree of force necessary to confront the violence of evil forces. When it comes to understanding what war means to Mejar Singh, however, alas, Niebuhr, like Waltz, is not much help. The war between India and the Sikhs was in no way just. The military actions in which Singh took part were not justified by an established political authority. The Khalistan Commando Force was not authorized to order anything, let alone war. Moreover the conditions of proportionality did not seem to enter his mind. According to the accusations leveled against him, he attacked and killed pretty much at random. Yet in his mind he was part of a situation that made sense and was morally justified. Even when I spoke with him some thirty years after the militant struggle, he showed no signs of remorse for what he did (nor for that matter did he even acknowledge that the charges against him were justified). Singh said that he and his comrades were at war, and, as he put it, “it was what they did.”
So my usual sources of scholarly advice were not helpful. But then I found insight in an unusual place: a manual for fighting written by a Prussian soldier in the nineteenth century, Carl von Clausewitz. He is famous for one line from his book, On War, the oft-quoted statement “War is the continuation of politics by other means.”4 If that is all that Clausewitz had said, then we could put him in the category of Waltz and other political analysts and move on.
But that isn’t all Clausewitz said, and besides, the famous phrase is quoted out of context. If you read the whole book, you will see that to say that war is politics by other means is simply to describe the way war tends to be conducted by states in most cases. It is not war in its essence. For that Clausewitz has coined a much more interesting phrase: “absolute war.” This describes how war is imagined more than how it is actually conducted. It is the most extreme form of war, aiming solely to destroy the other side, to absolutely defeat the enemy by whatever means. It is war in the mind before being war on the battlefield.
Clausewitz, who served in various positions with the Prussian and Russian armies, is arguably the world’s best theorist of warfare. He was born Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz in 1780 in Magdeburg, now in Germany, about eighty miles west of Berlin. At that time it was part of Prussia, and Clausewitz’s father had been in the Prussian army (though his grandfather was a Lutheran theologian), so Clausewitz also joined the Prussian military, beginning at the young age of twelve. He advanced through the ranks to become a major general, but because of his scholarly nature he was deemed unsuited for most command positions; usually he was assigned instead to administrative posts, though he often served as an advisor on military strategy. He was on staff during several operations, including the Prussian army’s incursion into France at the time of the French Revolution, and the Prussian involvement in the Napoleonic War. His best-known work, On War, is a bulky manuscript of over four hundred pages that he was still revising at the time of his death. It was published posthumously by his wife. Much of it concerns strategy and how to conduct military operations. But the opening chapters are about theory, about what war essentially is.
It is clear to me that Clausewitz is as puzzled about the idea of war as I am. Having observed war closely, he finds it striking that people can so quickly doff all semblance of civil order and think of themselves as within a sphere of reality where killing other people with impunity makes rational sense. How does one describe the essence of this inverted worldview? Clausewitz came up with the term “absolute war.” It is central to his thought and lies behind everything he says about war; it is the perception of reality that undergirds and morally justifies all military action.
As he continued to edit the manuscript, Clausewitz increasingly excised the term “absolute war,” preferring the phrase “ideal war.” For Clausewitz, all war has at its core a common theme: the application of violence to impose one’s will on someone or something. This is a winner-take-all combat pitting one brute strength against another. Clausewitz calls this core element of absolute or ideal war Zweikampf, “two-sided war,” sometimes translated into English as “a duel” because it implies that there can be no compromise and one side must emerge victorious. Other translations of Zweikampf use the image of a wrestling match, and in my mind I visualize two Sumo wrestlers grunting with exertion while attempting to shove each other out of the ring.
This kind of absolute or ideal war holds “the foremost place” in Clausewitz’s understanding of the nature of war.5 Yet he realizes that war in this extreme, pure form virtually never occurs in real life (although he did accuse Napoleon Bonaparte of coming close to perpetrating it). Limitations are placed on war for all sorts of reasons—some moral and social but, most important, political. The conqueror may have to rebuild the area after it is conquered, for example, and refrains from total destruction for that reason. Or the triumphant side might, as the United States did in the first Gulf War, end the fighting even when it is ahead, because the limited objectives of the military engagement have been reached. Then again, one might want to obey rules of warfare such as humane treatment of prisoners to encourage the other side to respect one’s own soldiers should they be captured. Clausewitz recognizes that absolute war, this pure ideal form of war, never exists in a political or historical vacuum.
It is for this reason that Clausewitz can say with confidence that ordinarily “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” But it is a mistake to think this is his understanding of war. Quite the opposite. For Clausewitz the purest form of war is Zweikampf, the all-or-nothing absolute war. At the same time, because war is almost always shaped by the historical context in which it appears, it is also “politics by other means.” These two ways of thinking about war are at the two extremes of a spectrum, and most warfare falls somewhere in between. The wars that we can observe are almost always, in Clausewitz’s description, “limited wars.” Much of the rest of his book is devoted to the limitations imposed on the strategy, tactics, and goals of these wars. They are the kind of war that states manipulate and about which both Waltz and Niebuhr theorize, war that is an extension of state policy, not war in the mind. But Clausewitz begins his book by stating that the concept on which war is based is Zweikampf, absolute war—a way of thinking about the world in binary oppositions wherein there can be no compromise.
So the idea of war and war as an instrument of statecraft are two different things. It is true that politicians seize on this notion of war and try to use it to further state policies. And it is also true that they may attempt to stoke the images of war in order to gain support for military ventures. After all, young men and women ordinarily will sign up for combat only if they think that there is a war worth fighting, one that is accepted as legitimate by their peers and compels them to act. The actual conduct of war shows the difficulty in trying to contain these images of absolute war.
In the Vietnam War the “best and the brightest” of the Kennedy administration, as David Halberstam called them, initially made rational calculations, regarding a limited US military engagement in that part of the world as a sensible political option. But to sell the war to the American people it was presented as a great moral conflict from which there was no easy retreat. Later, when the idea had been accepted and the mentality of war had seized the public imagination and many lives had been lost, one presidential administration after another found itself faced with an intractable problem. The logical assessment now—that the war was not worth the terrible cost in lives—was powerless against the momentum of war. Neither victory nor immediate withdrawal seemed possible. “Peace with honor” was the goal, which meant finding a way to disguise a withdrawal as a victory. Something had happened in those years after the first US military advisors set foot on Vietnamese soil, and it had happened not in Vietnam but in the United States: the idea of war had descended into the public consciousness, a mindset from which there was no easy retreat.
Even in warfare conducted as state policy there are distinctions between ordinary war and conflicts that are extensive in scope, in degree, and in kind. Erich Ludendorff, a general in the German army in World War I, wrote a memoir titled Total War (Der Totale Krieg). In it he implies that the First World War was different from other wars both because of the scale of the military operations and because it was an all-or-nothing combat that targeted civilian populations as well as military positions.6 Ludendorff’s “total war” became the label for the kind of war that is waged not only against an enemy’s combatants but against enemy civilians as well. In the Civil War in the United States civilians were also targeted. Union General William Tecumseh Sherman described it as “hard war.” Sherman regarded as enemies not only the soldiers in combat on the battlefield but also civilians who provided those soldiers with food and military supplies.
Total war and hard war come close to Clausewitz’s ideal type: the imagined absolute war. If he had witnessed the destruction of whole German cities in the carpet bombing of World War II or the atomic bomb blasts that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he might have admitted that they came close to absolute war. If he had observed the destruction of Raqqa in Syria, Mosul in Iraq, and Marawi in the Philippines, in the attempt to liberate them from ISIS, he might have viewed those battles similarly. He might also have seen the way that ISIS and Christian groups such as the White Aryan Resistance have viewed their battles and their easy ability to maim, torture, and kill, and described them as engaged in absolute war. And he might have told Mejar Singh that his Khalistani warfare was near the ideal type. Most important, he might have understood Singh’s view of the world and realized that he was not articulating a political strategy but speaking about a way of life, a worldview that was radically different from the ordinary template of civil order in which most of us conduct our affairs.
It seems to me that Clausewitz was speaking about an idea of war that was the product of a distinctive worldview, a war worldview. War, or at least absolute war, is an alternative reality. It provides an alternative way of understanding the essential elements of civic order. It upends our view of ordinary reality and replaces it with a way of thinking that is fundamentally shifted in another direction. It is related to our own reality and yet so radically unlike it. To enter into the mindset of warfare is to walk through Alice’s looking glass into a vastly different world. In the world of war, everything is upside down. It is a world of chaos rather than law, death instead of life, disorder over order. Yet it is strangely reassuring in that it replaces the common markers of civil order with its own alternative.
War’s Alternative Reality
It might seem odd to think that war can provide a view of reality that is comforting and reassuring, but it is precisely the view that is promoted in advertisements for the video game Fortnite. This popular game gives players the opportunity to work in teams to combat a horde of zombies that has taken over the world. At the outset, Fortnite presents a world of chaos where civil order has been turned upside down. Zombies roam freely and threaten the basic civilities of life. What to do?
This is where gamers can take charge. Epic Games, the company behind Fortnite, presents the basic premise of the game in a four-and-a-half-minute online promotional video. The first few moments show a devastated city overrun with revolting zombies. Enter the defensive squad, marching down the center of an empty street. They are a young and gender and racially diverse team of warriors, all in the kind of peak physical condition that only months in the gym can produce, clad in warrior-like outfits with leather straps and shoulder pads. They quickly get to work, thinking of ways to combat the undead horde, creating zombie-proof fortresses, and dispatching legions of the zombies with awesome superweapons. The video shows that Fortnite not only portrays a world gone awry—and more than that, a world in chaos—but one in which valiant fighters can take charge and set things right.
Most of the rest of the video focuses on the features of the game and what the player will achieve by entering the war world of Fortnite. In bold letters (the only words superimposed on the action images), the video proclaims that in this game you can “make discoveries,” “make forts,” “make weapons,” and, perhaps most interesting, “make friends.”7 With snappy narration and dramatic action footage, Fortnite advances the claim that its version of war offers opportunities for creativity, leadership, and community. It allows players to take control of a world gone crazy, to identify the enemies (how can one miss them, they are zombies, for heaven’s sake), and to triumph over numerous obstacles placed strategically in their path by the game designers. All of the elements of a secure world—authority, identity, social order, and agency—can be created anew out of the rubble of a zombie-ravaged world. But first the zombies themselves need to be subdued. “All we need is a leader,” the video narrator says, “and that’s you.” What’s not to like?
Appeals for recruits for real wars are strikingly similar to the advertising for Fortnite—though without the zombies, of course. The Pentagon has studied these games and provides its own version of participatory war games as recruiting devices. Jihadi groups have also created video games.8 In one produced by the militant Lebanese movement Hezbollah, players can resist Israeli occupation and practice their sniping skills on Israeli political leaders. The game, called Special Force, has sold tens of thousands of copies since it was released in 2005.9 The Islamic State has also entered the video game business. In addition to the presentation of glorious battle in its glossy online magazine, Dabiq, it has created online games in which one can vicariously wage jihad on behalf of the caliphate.10 The Islamic State’s 2015 instructional manual for its Western supporters, “How to Survive in the West,” includes references to video games as a method of training for those interested in joining the group. According to an investigative article in The Atlantic, an American jihadi who joined the Islamic State was recruited by another gamer whom he met online through a shared video war game.11 Other terrorists have received online training through video games as well. Brenton Tarrant, who attacked worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, claimed, “Fortnite trained me to be a killer.”12 For would-be soldiers like Tarrant their acts of terrorism gave them the opportunities to engage in real-life games.
Like the imagined wars in online gaming, the real wars of militant movements provide alternative worlds in which participants can deal with the chaos and anomalies of life. In my interviews over the years with activists engaged in these wars, I have been impressed with the consistency with which they affirm that their participation was itself meaningful, regardless of the outcome. “It is the excitement and power of being part of something important” that draws them, Jagrup Singh Sekhon told me, explaining the lure of the Khalistan movement for Mejar Singh and the many hundreds of other young Sikh men who joined the struggle.13
Though they engaged in acts of violence that their victims and those who observe them might label terrorism, neither Mejar Singh nor any of the other activists thought of themselves that way. They were soldiers, they told me. Their struggles were acts of war. Mahmud Abouhalima bristled when he heard that the charges against him in the conspiracy to blow up the World Trade Center involved terrorism, which he regarded as a pointless exercise. His explanation gave his response more meaning: “We are soldiers for God.”14
This view of war as moral struggle gives otherwise ethical people the license to kill with impunity. It explains why persons feel victimized and why they need to take revenge for their perceived oppression. It also provides a large worldview, a template of meaning in which their acts of vengeance make sense and receive moral approval. In the context of war, ordinary people can be impressed into service as soldiers, and great confrontations occur in which noncombatants are considered part of the enemy to be destroyed.
When Sekhon said that the allure of the struggle was a sense of empowerment, I think he touched on something that is critical to warfare. After all, it is a participatory activity. Even those who vicariously cheer on the fighters or provide the supplies are involved in the enormous drama of the war worldview. You do not have to simply endure the chaos and disorder of the world; you can actually do something about it.
One reason why the experience of war can be empowering is that it justifies acts of violence. Ordinarily one thinks of violence as a result of warfare. Confronted with an enemy who will destroy you if you don’t attack it first, you have the right to slay it—unless you find some other way of getting out of the predicament. In the famous Chinese manual The Art of War by Sun Tzu, the most adept forms of warfare are those in which a clever response to an enemy makes actual violence unnecessary. Still, once war has been declared, violence is acceptable.
But the reverse can also be the case: a desire to be violent can create the need for an image of war to justify it. The many Sunni Arab activists who joined the Islamic State were eager to achieve a sense of power, to hold the reins of leadership in their regions of Syria and Iraq. This meant having the ability to control, having the weapons of power. They were not granted that power by civil authority, but adopting a war worldview in which they were a righteous force could give them moral authority.
Wielding the instruments of violence is in itself empowering; leaders or groups who want their roles as arbiters of violence to be justified might well want an excuse to wield such weapons. Images of war stand ready to provide excuses, and for many they are ready at hand within the repository of cultural symbols of their religious community.
When Abouhalima told me that he was not a terrorist but was simply “defending Islam,” he was articulating a position that I have heard from many activists who have been involved in militant movements. I interviewed Ashin Wirathu, the anti-Muslim Buddhist monk, in Myanmar shortly after he was pictured on the cover of Time magazine next to the words “The Buddhist Face of Terror.”15
“Do I look like a terrorist?” Wirathu asked me, grinning cheerfully, as if he expected an immediate and resounding negative response. I wanted to tell him that he looked like most of the terrorists I had interviewed, which is to say totally banal.
Such people see themselves as morally pure: they are simply soldiers in a defensive war against a demonic enemy. Wirathu talked about Burmese Buddhism as being under a life-and-death challenge from the forces of global Islam. He asserted that his followers were justified in defending themselves, by violence if necessary, against what he regarded as an insidious threat.
To think of oneself as a soldier can be empowering, and it can also be thrilling in a dangerous way. The possibility of facing life-and-death situations can be one of the more enticing characteristics of war, especially for young men and women who have a penchant for dangerous activity. ISIS, the Islamic movement that for a time maintained a reign of terror in eastern Syria and western Iraq, promoted an enticingly romantic image of warfare for potential recruits from around the world. Their sophisticated media campaign on the internet portrayed a war to defend Islamic civilization and defeat imagined enemies of Islam. It was like an enormous video game that young men and quite a few women could actually join in real life. The recruitment videos and websites give the impression that joining ISIS would be a great adventure and challenge the young recruits to live up to their abilities. Alas, most of them became cannon fodder, cynically used by ISIS commanders eager to control cadres of young foreigners willing to waste their lives in suicide attacks on military targets. But for a time the volunteers were able to act out an exciting life in an imagined alternative world.
Inventing Enemies
Without enemies there would not be war. Without zombies, for instance, there would be no point to Fortnite. The scenario that the game projects is that the zombies take over the world, then mess it up, and righteous people begin to fight back. It is a scarcely veiled analogy to the Nazi takeover of Europe, or perhaps the Islamophobic vision that many Americans and Europeans have of being overcome by waves of Muslims.
No one would care much about a zombie takeover if zombies were nice. If they simply went about their lives in normal ways, opening up florist shops and serving as greeters at WalMart, we would not object to their fictional existence. And if the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, the Nazis, had stuck to their campaign promises of a better economy and national pride, they might not have been greatly admired but they would not have been despised. Once non-Muslims get to know Muslim people as friends and neighbors it is hard to dehumanize them. Our attitudes toward others are shaped by the degree to which we think they will actually threaten our existence. After all, like zombies, it is not so much who the others are but what they can do. Absolute enemies are subhuman, capable of destroying the civil order around them.
This is Mejar Singh’s view of the Punjab police. I assume that, like most people, ordinarily he grudgingly accepts the need for a police force. He may have been wary of them when he thought they suspected him of committing some infraction but grateful to them when his house was invaded or he was caught in traffic that required police assistance to get things moving again. But when Singh suggested that the Punjab police were one of the reasons he began to think of the world as being at war, what he meant was a pattern of arrest and torture for what he saw as no reason at all, an abuse of power whereby the normal respect for authority in a civil society was turned on its head.
So the idea of an enemy is relative. It depends on how devastated the world has become, and who is blamed for the devastation. Often it is immediately clear who is responsible. If zombies show up, you know you are in trouble. And in many instances of real warfare the enemies boldly present themselves as martial foes. On December 7, 1941, after a massive air attack on US naval vessels stationed at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, there was no agonized wondering who might have done such a thing. Every American knew at once that it was the Japanese air force: you could see the insignia painted on the sides of their planes. The very next day the US Congress declared that the country was at war.
But sometimes the enemy is not obvious. At times there is an inchoate sense of discord for which there is no obvious origin. In order to make sense of the situation and to wage war against the source of the problem one has to imagine someone or something capable of filling the role of the evil foe. The idea of war is inconceivable without it; war requires enemies. If we sense that terrible things are happening in the world and need the idea of war to explain it, an enemy has to be created even if there is no convincing evidence that there is one, or that the chosen enemy is in fact at fault. The idea of war is the prerequisite to thinking in terms of enemies, and enemies are essential ingredients of war.
In the case of September 11, 2001, the enemies were to some extent obvious. Within days authorities had identified the individual members of the suicide missions that flew commercial aircraft into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But it was not clear exactly who the enemy should be. If the perpetrators were only a small band of disgruntled jihadis coordinated by a ragtag organization in the caves of Afghanistan, they would not be much of an opponent. They might not be sufficient to support the concept of war, certainly not a global war. But because war was in the air, the opponents were imagined to be a much grander force of Islamic militancy, involving the collusion of established political rule, not only in Afghanistan but also in Iraq.
The war on terror cast a wide net that encompassed a varied set of possible opponents, though exactly who the enemy was remained fuzzy. Often commentators in the American media identified the enemy with Islam, and the phrase “radical Islam” came into common usage to denote the collective enemy in the war on terror. It was not at all clear what this meant, and some uses of the term seemed to implicate all of the Muslim world. For this reason, President Barack Obama resisted using the phrase, as did his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. In the 2016 presidential campaign use of the term became a political issue. Opponents of Obama and Clinton accused them of shying away from taking a hard line against America’s enemies by refusing to characterize them by that phrase.16
In other cases of social insecurity the enemies have been even less obvious. In the case of the Aum Shinrikyo movement in Japan, which unleashed nerve gas in the Tokyo subway system in an act of imagined war, the mélange of their suspected enemies was quite remarkable. It included the Japanese government and the United States, perhaps understandably given the continued presence of American military installations in Japan. More improbable was the inclusion of Freemasons and Jews. It was thought that Freemasons were trying to bring about Armageddon because, in the words of the leader of the movement, Shoko Asahara, “they think the reign of Christ will not come unless the final war is fought.”17 Jews were seen as enemies because of conspiracy theories alleging them to have designs on global economic and political control. Indeed books on the so-called Jewish threat have been popular in Japan.18 Added to these foes was a vague, generic enemy, a sort of inchoate force of evil, represented by the Japanese police, the news media, and virtually anyone the movement thought might be opposed to it.
The vagueness about who the enemy is in cases like this calls into question one of our usual assumptions about how war comes about. Common sense might suggest that we go to war because we have enemies to fight, but it is often the other way around: the idea of war comes first. War is what humans need in a situation of deep fear about the loss of social order. In order to make that idea of war convincing, there must be enemies. If enemies do not exist as real threats in life, they have to be invented. One has to imagine that there are enemies—people of a different ethnicity, for instance, or distant political powers—who are more threatening than these people actually are.
Most Americans who witnessed the devastating attacks on 9/11 seemed mystified that their country could be regarded as an enemy, regardless of how irresponsible some of its international policies might have been in the past. But from the point of view of the jihadi activists who were looking for the cause of their problems, America was a hidden source of Middle East misery. Peering at the “far enemy” behind the dictators in Saudi Arabia and Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East, Osama bin Laden and his colleagues found a clear enemy to target. America fit the bill.
Enemies are essential to war. War makes sense only if we see the world as caught within a conflict between absolute opponents. These enemies represent two ways of maintaining order and control in a chaotic world. One leads to clarity and resolution of the disorder; the other leads to more chaos and destruction—indeed it is the source of that discord. The two sides can never be seen as morally equal. It is necessary to the scenario of warfare that one is seen as good and the other evil. No one engaged in a battle thinks both sides are right—at least at the beginning of a conflict. Later, like the protagonist in For Whom the Bell Tolls, the participants may see war itself as the enemy of both sides, but this subtlety is lost on the fervent soldiers at the outset of militant confrontation. For them, war is a matter of good guys versus bad guys, a way of defeating evil and bringing the world justice, freedom, and peace.
I think any useful definition of war has to include this ethical component. Perhaps the most basic way of thinking about war is simply this: the moral absolutism of social conflict. It is moral in that it distinguishes between a side that is right and one that is wrong; it is absolute in that the conflict is envisioned in nonnegotiable extremes; it is social in that it is a shared response by a social group to a life-threatening provocation. By “life-threatening” I mean not only an assault that might threaten a people physically but also an existential threat, something that challenges to the core their whole structure of social meaning. Wirathu, the activist monk in Myanmar, claimed that the Muslims in his country threatened the very existence of their traditional culture. “Burmese Buddhism is in danger of being destroyed forever,” he told me, “and that is why we must fight to defend it.”19
The World of War
To see the world at war is to adopt a special lens on reality. It turns everything upside down. But it also provides an all-encompassing worldview. It identifies the sources of good and evil in the world, explains why things occur, gives moral justification to those who lead the battle against evil, and promises victory in the future. It empowers the powerless and gives agency to those who feel marginalized and discarded. It offers a view of ultimate order and a template of social reality that embraces virtually every aspect of life.
Such a totalizing worldview may descend upon a region gradually, the way it appeared to do for Mejar Singh. But it can also be accepted quite suddenly. It is difficult to hold onto two versions of reality—ordinary civil order and a state of war—at the same time. For this reason, some people have described their acceptance of war in a way that sounds much like religious conversion. “That was the most marvelous experience of my life,” explained Richard Butler, describing his first encounter with the Christian Identity theory of war. “The lights started turning on, bang-bang-bang,” said Butler, the dean of the Identity movement, to a reporter for the Los Angeles Times.20 “Wow, this is it,” Denver Parmenter exclaimed, telling how the movement’s ideas about ancient and continuing warfare between the races led to a sudden awareness that revealed “the reason things are going wrong.”21 This grand scenario came to him as an epiphany. Kerry Noble, a member of a militant Christian group called the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord, described the moment he embraced the group’s vision of a religious war as an “aha experience.”22 The template of war provided a framework of meaning that enabled him instantly to make sense of the world around him. Noble said it was as if he were viewing the world through the fuzzy lens of a camera that suddenly clicked into focus. Now he knew. He knew what had caused the discomfort in his life, what he could do about it, and how the story would end—victoriously, he thought, because the struggle was in God’s hands.
To those who experienced them, these conversions to the war worldview were epiphanies; they suddenly were illumined in an entirely new way and began to see everything in the world differently. They felt they finally understood what was really going on in the world, a knowledge that other people did not have. Abouhalima told me that he now had the “real knowledge” about the hidden forces in the world around us. It was, he confided quietly, a war between good and evil, and the US government was the enemy.23 Abouhalima told me this with the confident satisfaction that he knew something that most people do not. It gave him a powerful and commanding sense of the world. The nineteen hijackers of the airplanes that brought down the World Trade Center and struck the Pentagon on 9/11 most likely also had an exhilarating sense of secret knowledge and a confidence that their act would change the direction of history.
And it did, in a way. The world has not been the same after 9/11, in part because the attacks triggered another view of war in response, the war on terror. US policymakers and the general public latched onto the notion of war as the appropriate way of understanding 9/11. It was not quite a conversion experience, but it did come as a sudden insight; Americans had been naïve in their view of the world and had not realized the magnitude and power of the enemies that would like to take them down. This was an understanding that vastly exaggerated the threat of global jihad, but the events of 9/11 seemed to make it credible. As President George W. Bush described it, it was a battle between good and evil, a dichotomous struggle about which no one in the world could be neutral. They were either for us or against us.
Bush framed the war on terror as a fight for freedom. Like the jihadi ideology of the perpetrators of the attacks, Bush’s image of a war on terror had the effect of clarifying what had happened. It put the cognitive anomaly of an attack on the tallest buildings in New York City into a social context, a scenario of warfare that gave the public confidence in a leadership that could identify the enemy and engage in a battle for righteousness that would ultimately succeed. Like all images of war, it was on one level an imagined battle, linked in this case to real acts of military might, including the invasion and occupation of two Muslim countries. The military incursions were vital, for they provided images of power and control to a public that felt confused and weakened.
Such threats to the fundamental structure of one’s existence cause desperate minds to seek to make sense of confusion in ordered, though often extraordinary ways. This is where the idea of warfare comes in, entering as a hopeful epiphany. It provides images of enemies behind the chaos, enemies that can be engaged, conquered, destroyed. It necessarily involves ultimate confrontation because it is about ultimate things. The encounter may lead to death. Yet those who engage in this way of thinking, in this war worldview, are uplifted by the notion that the sense of social order and meaning for which they struggle will be redeemed. In a curious way, then, all images of warfare and their awful encounters with chaos end with a hope for peace.
Notes
1.Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959).
2.Reinhold Niebuhr, Why the Christian Church Is Not Pacifist (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1940).
3.Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Scribner’s, 1932), 134.
4.Carl von Clausewitz, On War (1832), trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 87.
5.Clausewitz, On War, 80.
6.Erich Ludendorff, Der Totale Krieg (Munich: Ludendorffs Verlag, 1936).
7.Fortnite gameplay trailer, Epic Games, accessed July 24, 2018. https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/en-US/home.
8.Miron Lakomy, “Let’s Play a Video Game: Jihadi Propaganda in the World of Electronic Entertainment,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism Journal, October 23, 2017, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1057610X.2017.1385903.
9.Rebecca Armstrong, “Jihad: Play the Game,” The Independent, August 17, 2005, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/jihad-play-the-game-5347294.html.
10.Abdel Bari Atwan, Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015).
11.Seamus Hughes, Alexander Melagrou-Hitchens, and Bennett Clifford, “A New American Leader Rises in ISIS,” The Atlantic, January 13, 2018.
12.David D. Kirkpatrick, “Massacre Suspect Traveled the World but Lives on the Internet,” New York Times, March 15, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/world/asia/new-zealand-shooting-brenton-tarrant.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage.
13.Author’s interview with Jagrup Singh Sekhon, professor and head of the Department of Political Science, Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, Punjab, November 27, 2016.
14.Author’s interview with Mahmud Abouhalima, U.S. Federal Penitentiary, Lompoc, California, September 30, 1997.
15.Author’s interview with Ashin Wirathu, Mandalay, Myanmar, 2015.
16.Max Fisher, “When a Phrase Takes on a New Meaning: ‘Radical Islam’ Explained,” New York Times, June 16, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/17/world/when-a-phrase-takes-on-new-meaning-radical-islam-explained.html.
17.Shoko Asahara, Disaster Approaches the Land of the Rising Sun: Shoko Asahara’s Apocalyptic Predictions, trans. and ed. Aum Translation Committee (Tokyo: Aum Publishing, Shizuoka Japan, 1995), 281.
18.See, for example, Hirose Takashi and Akama Takashi, The Structure of Japan and the Jewish Conspiracy (Tokyo: Tokuma Press, n.d.); Uno Magami, If You Understand the Jewish Situation, You Can Understand the World Situation (Tokyo: Tokuma Press, n.d.).
19.Author’s interview with Wirathu.
20.Kim Murphy, “Last Stand of an Aging Aryan,” Los Angeles Times, January 10, 1999, A15.
21.Quoted in Turning Point, ABC, October 5, 1995, Journal Graphics Transcript no. 150, 2.
22.Kerry Noble.
23.Author’s interview with Mahmud Abouhalima.