War

 

“That nations should not be oppressed, and that there should be none of these useless wars, and that men may be indignant with those who seem to cause these evils, and may not kill them – it seems that only a very small thing is necessary.” This is Aylmer Maude’s translation of words in a pamphlet by Count Leo Tolstoy [‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ (1900)] that was prohibited in Russia, while its German version was seized and all copies destroyed as “insulting to the German Kaiser.” What is necessary? “It is necessary that men should understand things as they are, should call them by their right names, and should know that an army is an instrument for killing, and that the enrolment and management of an army – the very things which kings, emperors and presidents occupy themselves with so self-confidently – is a preparation for murder.” Tolstoy argues that people go along with their leaders because they are hypnotized by what is going on. Men are stupefied into becoming “instruments for murder”. It’s not one particular person who causes oppression and wars. The misery of nations is caused “by the particular order of Society under which the people are so tied up together that they find themselves all in the power of a few men, or more often in the power of one single man: a man so perverted by his unnatural position as arbiter of the fate and lives of millions, that he is always in an unhealthy state, and always suffers more or less from a mania of self-aggrandizement, which only his exceptional position conceals from general notice.” Tolstoy concludes by saying “we may help to prevent people killing either kings or one another, not by killing – murder only increases hypnotism – but by arousing people from their hypnotic state.” ‘How much land does a man need?’ is the title of one of Tolstoy’s short stories (1886). A peasant woman says to her sister, “All may be well one day, the next the Devil comes along and tempts your husband with cards, women and drink. And then you’re ruined. It does happen, doesn’t it?” The husband hears this and complains that his only grievance is that “I don’t have enough land. Give me enough of that and I’d fear no one – not even the Devil himself!” But the Devil has been listening the whole time and decides to play “a little game” with the husband.  The husband finds more and better and larger deals for acquiring land, sowing crops, building impressive homesteads, and all the time the land deals get more outrageous, and further away from his home in distant provinces. Until finally he is tempted by a land claim that brings about his own demise. Without spelling out the moral, Tolstoy’s concluding sentence records the peasant’s workman digging his grave, “six feet from head to heel, which was exactly the right length – and buried him.”