Por Jean Wyllys
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Netanyahu and Trump at the White House. (Screen capture from video posted to YouTube.) |
According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), the United States’ and Israel’s war against Iran has brought the number of armed conflicts in which states are involved to more than sixty. In this regard, it is pertinent that both Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are at the centre of serious controversies and accusations of various kinds that are widely reported in the international press, and are also embroiled in ugly, far-reaching legal and political disputes. The attack on Iran increases the number of the planet’s armed conflicts to almost two hundred, if civil wars, tribal conflicts, and fighting among criminal gangs are counted. If we add to these the cold wars, or social media dis(information) wars that fuel the hot wars, could we say that a third world war has already begun?
History doesn’t repeat itself but I looked to a past that echoes in the present when trying to answer this question. Just before Carnaval in February this year, I found in a second-hand bookshop in downtown São Paulo A Guerra e a Paz na História (War and Peace in History – 1940) by the Italian socialist Antonio Piccarolo (1863-1947) who had settled in Brazil. This essay, published in 1940, a year after the outbreak of the Second World War, is an intellectual and pacifist exercise in analysing the conflict that was ravaging Europe. That I should have found it precisely when I was trying to understand what was happening with all these armed conflicts can probably only be explained by Jung’s concept of synchronicity or meaningful coincidence.
A Guerra e a Paz na História was Piccarolo’s response to a challenge posed by a woman reader of one of his columns in O Estadão in 1938. The result was this book, his review, both accessible and profound, of the notion of war as seen by history’s predominant peoples.
“Wars are not only an evil because of their immediate effects, the deaths, the injuries, and the material devastation in countries where they are fought but also, and perhaps even more so, because of the moral damage they wreak in people’s minds”, he writes. The wars of Russia against Ukraine and Israel against Palestine and Lebanon, whose monstrous details we’re watching in real time are the most recent confirmation of his insight.
When setting out to give examples and to analyse western philosophers’ notions of war, Piccarolo attempts to revive the ideas of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) while also identifying Thomas Hobbes as the most reactionary of the philosophers of war. This is where his study projects a disturbing relevance onto the present. As presented by Piccarolo, Hobbes’ thought reads like a how-to guide for understanding several geopolitical actions of Trump and Netanyahu.
Hobbes’ most famous work, Leviathan (1651) takes its title from the Book of Job. He starts from the premise that human beings are by nature equal. When two individuals want the same thing and both can’t obtain it, they become enemies. Piccarolo draws attention to his theory that the best way out of this “state of mutual distrust” is to pre-empt the potential adversary, and use force and cunning to subjugate as many men as possible until attaining a position of inviolability vis-à-vis any other power. Hobbes finds in human nature three main causes of war: rivalry, mistrust, and ambition. Rivalry leads to wars of conflict, mistrust to wars in the name of security, and ambition to wars of glory. From this supposed natural predisposition arises a state of general war, “a war of every man against every man”.
How, then, would it be possible to escape from this violent “state of nature”, this state of universal war? The answer for Hobbes is the absolutist state. In his view, any attempt to limit this absolute power, including by means of a constitution, would constitute rebellion. He wants all powers, including those of the spiritual realm, to be concentrated in a single individual or, in other words, a tyrannical sovereign unhampered by any division of powers or parliament.
This is where Piccarolo is more than a historian of ideas because he becomes a commentator on the present. Doesn’t this conception of the state look like a blueprint for dictators and theocratic tyrants like Khomeini and also for far-right populists like Trump and Netanyahu?
It’s no accident that Hobbes called his absolutist state Leviathan. Not founded by divine decree but by human volition, it was the “mortal god”. But it seems that Hobbes misread the Book of Job, where Leviathan appears in Job 41 (verses 1–34), and briefly in Job 3:8. Here, Leviathan is the monster of primordial chaos. What we are now witnessing is Leviathan in the form of far-right leaders who are dragging us into the chaos of a third world war.
Piccarolo demonstrates how craving for dominance, ambition for glory, religious fanaticism, whims of rulers, trivial slights, and false pride are causes of war and, going deeper into the question, he concludes that “the true cause is always one, the economic cause which, depending on the circumstances of time and place, adopts various forms”. Colonial wars and conquests are frequently waged in the name of religion or “civilisation”, thus disguising their material causes.
For Piccarolo, schools and especially the press cover up the real motives of tyrants. He laments that, “The press seems to have shed its true role, one of the noblest of all, to put itself on sale and become an instrument of hatred and discord among peoples. All modern wars are preceded by press campaigns, which seem to have the single aim of stirring up discord and fanning the flames of hatred.”
He was, of course, referring to the printed press, radio, and cinema. He couldn’t have imagined how the evolution of these media outlets via satellite TV, the internet, and Big Tech would produce instruments of war even more odious than those of the mass media of his times.
From my reading of A Guerra e a Paz na História, I would say that Leviathan could lead us into a declared Third World War if we’re not already in the midst of a veiled version of it, contained to some extent by the diplomatic skills of the BRICS nations.
We need to resist as pacifists. I adopt as my own the words of Piccarolo. “A people doesn’t hate other peoples. No people wants war. On the contrary, all peoples regard war as the worst of all misfortunes. Were it not for the instinctive revulsion that peoples have towards war, the world would be drenched in human blood. It is those who hope to profit from war, the salaried tabloid journalists who, distorting the truth and spreading lies, create a psychology of war in naïve, easily deceived people.”
Jean Wyllys is a Brazilian lecturer, journalist, and politician.
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