216. HAS WORLD WAR III STARTED? - On Defining Conflict
My students are scared. Hell, I’m scared. We’ve been watching a genocide in Gaza carried out in full sight of the world and no-one besides the protesters - whose outrage at some point just becomes ignorable background noise - seems all that concerned. Russia invaded Ukraine and little was done besides the flying of blue and yellow flags and the welcoming of - some - Ukrainian refugees in countries normally hostile to people (albeit people with darker skins) seeking asylum. A few weeks ago India and Pakistan came dangerously close to nuclear conflict over the long-disputed territory of Kashmir. Why not. It seems we are living at a time when the old international order has fallen and anything goes. Currently, as I write this, Israel has launched missile attacks on Iran. Iran is vowing retaliation. Not only against Israel, but against its allies. Meanwhile, one of those allies, the USA, has its marines deployed against its own people on the streets of LA as its president marks his birthday, dictator-style, with a long-desired military parade. It seems that whenever we turn on the news these days, someone is pointing a gun - or a missile - at someone else. Just like the ever-escalating arguments that dominate our attention online and bleed, insidiously, into our everyday lives, causing division and hatred, culture wars and a crisis of mental health, real world conflicts seem incapable of deescalation and face saving these days. What once seemed like a shared commitment - at least on paper - to strive for some notion of global stability as a collective good, now seems to be yet another former certainty we can no longer rely on.
My students, raised on Remembrance Sundays and Lest We Forgets, are therefore asking me “do you think there’s going to be another world war?”
And I want to assure them that there won’t be, but my initial gut response is to ask instead how sure they are that we’re not already having one?
When did World War II really start? Was it Churchill’s address to the nation? Was it the invasion of Poland? Was it the first Jewish person to have their rights taken away? Was it the election of Hitler? Was it the post-war conditions which led to the election of Hitler? Was it the long history of anti-semitism which preceded even that and made Jewish people a pre-loaded scapegoat? Was it the First World War, which laid the groundwork for what came after? Did it not start until the attack on Pearl Harbour and the participation of America?
When students learn about the World Wars of the past, they often look at all these different aspects and more when asking “what caused the war?” But World Wars, based on an array of treaties and agreements being triggered by events, are like the mythical frog being boiled alive. We don’t really notice the water getting hot enough to kill us until our flesh is already sloughing off into the pan. The war is already on before the troops are deployed. And if the first domino in the precarious line of toppling dominoes that get us to total World War is a seemingly isolated skirmish in an obscure part of the world, when the history books tell the story they do so by pointing out that although the war was formally declared on a certain date, the seeds of war were sown when that first domino toppled.
And dominoes certainly feel like they’re toppling.
Did this World War start with the invasion of Ukraine? Did it start with the election of Trump? The division of Brexit? Is this war a war spawned from the pandemic? Perhaps it is a war that we will one day realise was caused by the erosion of our communities, our ethics, and our epistemologies by our retreat from the real world into a monetised online hellscape? All I know is that much of philosophy is the business of definitions, and the definition of a World War feel like it should be a war, or series of interconnected wars, that garner the involvement of people across the majority of continents. In various capacities, this seems to already be happening. Here in the UK, even though we have yet to commit troops to any particular battlefield, two weeks ago the Labour government essentially produced a Strategic Defence Review which was aimed at getting the country battle ready, committing an increased percentage of public money into the armed forces and prioritising “defence” spending despite years of austerity that have eroded necessary public services and an election promise to tackle the daily “cost of living” crisis. The government certainly seems to be of the belief that if we do not pump more money into the military first, then there might all-too-soon be no living for us to worry about paying the cost of.
I take little stock into the historically fantastical and frequently inaccurate predictions of such reviews, not to mention their function as active propaganda, however it is worth noting the general lack of public opposition to beefing up defence spending despite their many frustrations at lack of spending elsewhere in the budget. Whatever truths or untruths might be in the government review, the public are clearly as worried as my students about the imminent threat of war.
I can’t think of a period of my life when my country wasn’t involved in some war or another. As a dual UK/US citizen, at least one of my national armies have been risking their lives for someone in power’s questionable goals across the globe, whatever the year. What makes the current state of affairs feel different from that general tinnitus of war, is that up until this point in my life these national governments have been restrained by the need to forge a narrative of events which align with reality. As a long time critic of both my countries’ foreign policies, I am familiar with the Orwellian lengths my governments go to in order to make invasions and occupations sound righteous. We’re never the bad guys, only the heroes trying to bring peace to an ugly world…old time colonialism and empire building in a range of different contemporary clothes. But these days we’ve lost any sense of a common shared narrative of what is going on in the world. Things happen, are justified or not, and whoever we pay attention to online will tell us the story of best fit that already conforms to our pre-existing worldview. We get outraged at trivia, but stay silent when it counts. Countries burn, planes fall out of the sky, rights get trampled, dictators get normalised, threats increase, violence becomes unremarkable, and it all falls vaguely familiar from all the dystopian box sets we’ve gorged on to distract ourselves from what is going on outside. We’ve been rehearsing for this moment in every disaster movie and blockbuster about the end of the world. Not rehearsing to act. God no. That’s for the movie stars and superheroes to do. Rehearsing to sit passively and watch, shoving popcorn into our mouths, as the world descends into chaos, assuming someone will come to save us and it will all work out before the end credits roll.
Do I think there’s going to be another world war? There needs to still be a world, I sometimes think, for it to be at war. But whatever this thing is we are currently living in, this sorry excuse for a world, lived at arm’s length through disassociating screens, it feels like it has already been a powder-keg exploding for a very long time.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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