It feels like there’s a lot of war going on. Whenever that happens I really feel my ignorance; it seems like if thousands of people are dying about something, I should understand what that something is. So here’s what I’ve been reading lately about war.

I didn’t start reading Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte because of the present wars but because it was recommended to me by a friend. However, it’s been instructive. Malaparte was a fascist, which gave him access to all kinds of people during WW2 who I haven’t really seen close up before. Kaputt is a brilliant book by a narcissistic, self-aggrandising, lying piece of shit. It’s about war, its perpetrators, its victims, and the people who are callously advantaged by it. Reading the article, I was also reminded of this quotation from a profile of Graham Greene, who spent a lot of time in the halls of power watching politicians fail to avert disaster.

“I shall always associate balconies and politicians—plump men with blue chins wearing soft hats and guns on their hips. They look down from the official balcony in every city all day long with nothing to do but stare, with the expression of men keeping an eye on a good thing.

Greene wrote about a world we still live in, where horrible crimes are committed every day by beaming politicians with good teeth, aided by their government-conscripted thugs.

The London Review of Books published this essay about the history of Hizbullah, their inception, their relationship with the rest of Lebanon, with Iran, with the West, and their endless struggle with Israel. It all culminates in the precarious present situation, with everybody waiting to see whether Hizbullah ignite a broader regional conflict in retaliation for Israel’s actions. This article from Seth Anziska in the New York Review of Books zooms in on the First Lebanon War as a single episode of that history, and makes direct appeals on the state of Israel to stop the killings.

For a perspective from the other side: The New Yorker published this short but provocative interview with a leader in the West Bank settler movement, which includes some outrageously genocidal quotations. This has to be at the more extreme end and I’m sure there are moderate voices in the country, but they don’t seem to be found in the government. For a perspective from a settler that seems less of a thug, there’s a discussion of The First Man by Albert Camus wanders around topics like his feud with Jean-Paul Sartre and his status and comments as a pied noir: a descendant of French settlers in Algeria. When attacked by Sartre for failing to support the Algerian liberation movement in their aims of removing French settlers from their country:

Camus boldly affirmed that his family, “being poor and free of hatred”–and Camus really was raised in abject poverty–“never exploited or oppressed anyone. But three quarters of the French in Algeria resemble them and, if only they are provided reasons rather than insults, will be ready to admit the necessity of a juster and freer order.” It should, then, be possible to give the proper rights and freedoms to Algerian Arabs without condemning and destroying the pieds noirs indiscriminately, or forcing them out of the only country they had ever known.

I don’t know enough about anything to know if Sartre was right to make the criticism or if Camus was right to defend his family. All it does is point to the intractability of a situation where after a people have forcibly settled somewhere: a new generation is born there and naturally feels that place is their home. Very few people would volunteer to have themselves or their families uprooted from the home they’ve known, and the result is brutal violence and death.

The panacea, which seems to be nowhere in sight in the Levant, is peaceful co-existence or even integration. This article about self-identification in Anglo-Saxon England analyses what the archaeological and written record can tell us about who the people in what we now call England thought they were through the turbulent periods of occupations and invasions. The archaeological record elides the true scale of the brutality of the past so I’m not suggesting that there was and could once again be a totally peaceful integration of different peoples in a single territory, but it’s just a case of the gradual evolution of a people’s self-identity through waves of movement. If that seems a facile comparison to draw, I’m sorry. I’m just reading as much as I can.