Min soldat. Uppsala konstmuseum, 2012
Why?
I arrived here from a country perpetually at war with either neigh-bouring states, competing super powers or its own people. The First World War, the Second World War, the Cold War, the Af-ghan War, Star Wars or the information war. Careers in the mili-tary enjoy a high status. The Russians are good at warfare. There is no such thing as democracy there. This is common knowledge.
But now I live in an entirely different country. A country I learned about in school – a neutral country. A country that hadn’t been at war for 200 years. That is what I learned in school, but since then the situation in world politics has changed. Can Sweden truly re-main neutral with regard to armed conflicts today?
I started reflecting on this issue when I read an article in UNT (Uppsala Nya Tidning, a local daily paper) about the Swedish troops in Afghanistan. It featured photographs of soldiers posing with smil-ing children, digging wells, and standing dusty and exhausted next to their cool military vehicles. And in the background, the desert or small, shabby houses with flat roofs. In then struck me that I had seen these same pictures long ago. Also tired soldiers with children, girl schools and wells, also small houses with flat roofs. But those images were in black and white, and published in Soviet propaganda magazines, and we knew then that all of it was a lie.
We shuddered at the thought that our classmates would end up in these photographs. Everyone knew that young men doing their mili-tary service were sent there against their will, and returned either in zinc coffins or as mental cases. It was frightening and incompre-hensible. But then again, that was when I lived in the Soviet Union, and lots of things were frightening and incomprehensible back then.
I have always wondered why anyone would choose a career in the military. What constitutes their driving force? Does it have to do with defending the “Mother Country”? Or perhaps defending the weak and vulnerable? Are weapons really necessary in that case? Is it the prospect of making money? Or is it just happenstance, a twist of fate?
And if one makes a conscious decision to become a soldier and go to war, does one return as a human being? Is it worth it? Is one re-ally aware of the risks before going off to war? As a means of gaining insight with regard to these issues, I conducted together with Mervi Junkkonen several interviews with Swedish soldiers on their way to join the Swedish unit in Afghanistan. I myself also travelled to Moscow to interview various Russians who had fought in Afghani-stan thirty years ago. It was important for me to know if there was any difference between those individuals who engaged in the war all those years ago, often against their will but at times voluntarily, and those who choose to go there now. After all the interviews, I now know that there is not merely one answer as to WHY. If six hundred Swedes join the Afghanistan battalion every six months, then there will surely be as many answers. Everyone has his or her own reasons for going. It is still difficult for me to understand their reasoning, but I have great respect for the majority of them.
These portraits are an attempt at gaining an understanding of whether war is worth it, be it as a means of achieving peace or not.
I arrived here from a country perpetually at war with either neigh-bouring states, competing super powers or its own people. The First World War, the Second World War, the Cold War, the Af-ghan War, Star Wars or the information war. Careers in the mili-tary enjoy a high status. The Russians are good at warfare. There is no such thing as democracy there. This is common knowledge.
But now I live in an entirely different country. A country I learned about in school – a neutral country. A country that hadn’t been at war for 200 years. That is what I learned in school, but since then the situation in world politics has changed. Can Sweden truly re-main neutral with regard to armed conflicts today?
I started reflecting on this issue when I read an article in UNT (Uppsala Nya Tidning, a local daily paper) about the Swedish troops in Afghanistan. It featured photographs of soldiers posing with smil-ing children, digging wells, and standing dusty and exhausted next to their cool military vehicles. And in the background, the desert or small, shabby houses with flat roofs. In then struck me that I had seen these same pictures long ago. Also tired soldiers with children, girl schools and wells, also small houses with flat roofs. But those images were in black and white, and published in Soviet propaganda magazines, and we knew then that all of it was a lie.
We shuddered at the thought that our classmates would end up in these photographs. Everyone knew that young men doing their mili-tary service were sent there against their will, and returned either in zinc coffins or as mental cases. It was frightening and incompre-hensible. But then again, that was when I lived in the Soviet Union, and lots of things were frightening and incomprehensible back then.
I have always wondered why anyone would choose a career in the military. What constitutes their driving force? Does it have to do with defending the “Mother Country”? Or perhaps defending the weak and vulnerable? Are weapons really necessary in that case? Is it the prospect of making money? Or is it just happenstance, a twist of fate?
And if one makes a conscious decision to become a soldier and go to war, does one return as a human being? Is it worth it? Is one re-ally aware of the risks before going off to war? As a means of gaining insight with regard to these issues, I conducted together with Mervi Junkkonen several interviews with Swedish soldiers on their way to join the Swedish unit in Afghanistan. I myself also travelled to Moscow to interview various Russians who had fought in Afghani-stan thirty years ago. It was important for me to know if there was any difference between those individuals who engaged in the war all those years ago, often against their will but at times voluntarily, and those who choose to go there now. After all the interviews, I now know that there is not merely one answer as to WHY. If six hundred Swedes join the Afghanistan battalion every six months, then there will surely be as many answers. Everyone has his or her own reasons for going. It is still difficult for me to understand their reasoning, but I have great respect for the majority of them.
These portraits are an attempt at gaining an understanding of whether war is worth it, be it as a means of achieving peace or not.
This War and That War: Four Incompatible Hypotheses
The catastrophic instances of the past are traumatic because their interpretations are incompatible: “now” and “then” are the same, and not the same, always the same and never the same all at the same time. But witnessing and witnessing for the witness, we still can achieve at least a share of memory and justice, both for the “then”, and for the “now”.
Irina Sandomirskaia
Irina Sandomirskaja, b. 1959 in Moscow. PhD in Theoretical Linguistics, collaborative partner in feminist art projects in Russia, USA and Sweden, Professor of Cultural Stud-ies at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies at Södertörn University. Special-izes in Russian Culture History, Language Philosophy, Art and Critical Culture Theory.
Is it possible to make sense of one war by superimposing it onto the experiences of another? On the one hand, each war has a unique framework of historical, political, ideological, and economic cir-cumstances, and it is hardly possible to expect that this framework could reproduce itself again in a new time/space. On the other hand, the structures of human experience – fear and hope, hatred and comradeship, sorrow and enthusiasm, -- are recognizable eve-rywhere, irrespective of geographies, technologies or ideologies.
Instead of comparing (a scientific operation that objectivizes and alienates), Natasha Dahnberg suggests a project of translation. She offers the space of her artwork for her characters to talk to each other and translate one’s intimate experiences and expectations into the terms of the other. Is it possible to interpret the realities of the USSR’s Afghan war (1979-89) and to translate them into the realities of the on-going operation of the Swedish military in Afghanistan? Is it possible to make a back translation, from the “now” of the Swed-ish operation into the “then” of the Soviet invasion? Would such a transfer of experience in any way affect either future choices or past memories? Or are the two wars -- that one and this one – forever doomed to remain impenetrable and incommunicable, their dialogue nothing but a utopian fantasy of an artist?
Do they understand each other? Do we understand what they say to each other and – which is probably even more important – what they are saying to us? What are identities and differences?
It’s not the same war
According to Uppsala Conflict Data Program, there has been only one war in Afghanistan, the Afghanistan – Russia (Soviet Union) war. What is done by NATO’s international security assistance forces (ISAF) is not war, but preventive activity. [1] As compared to “that war”; “this” one has acquired a constructive purpose, a mission to “facilitate improvements in governance and socio-economic devel-opment in order to provide a secure environment for sustainable stability that is observable to the population”.[2] The database does not contain data on the parallel campaign, Operation Enduring Free-dom by the US-led international coalition. This is a campaign for freedom, not domination, “protecting local Afghans and reducing violence”[3] (even though the sovereignty of another country has been violated), and also a case of prevention, not war.
We are all used to the Orwellian language of war: peace standing for war, democratization for cleansing, construction for destruction. The air force mix life and death in one delivery when they drop food packages together with bombs. At our age of digital wars, “horrors of war” provide no longer an adequate representation. An excel-file from the UCDP database of armed conflicts illustrates it much better, with its rows and columns of figures and its rubrics of un-decipherable abbreviations. It is a perfect allegory of “this war” as a new war: a calculable abstraction fully alienated from any human experience. [4]
The difference between “that war” and “this war” is the difference between analogue and digital war. “That war” with its disasters and horrors was indivisible from the reality of human life and death and looked like this: [5]
As opposed to “that” one, “this war” is guided by an imagination of an ever increasing sophistication of technology. Its rationale is that of a mathematical game War and Peace. It is best represented not by an image, but by a matrix (of a typical playoff for two players). “This war” looks like this: [6]
It’s the same war
According to the Russian Wikipedia, Afghan losses in ”that” war lie be-tween 700 000 and 2.5 mln (killed, wounded, handicapped, etc.). The interval between these two figures is astounding and shows how indif-ferent the world is towards the Afghan losses. Russian losses are 15 000 killed. [7] Such a striking incommensurability between incurred and inflicted damages clearly speaks of the overwhelming technical advantage of the Russians and their total loss of mercy for civilian lives. Still, Russian public discourse demonstrates hardly any remorse. Instead, it is a universal feeling of having been manipulated. The war had been a mistake, as they were told when it was over. The role of the individual in the war remained obscure, as well as the measure of individual re-sponsibility. The experience of the war was not possible to appropri-ate, nor to express in words. It is only in an explosion of post-traumatic insanity, that the other persona inside, the one who is responsible for the killings and knows that he is responsible, bursts out onto the sur-face from his hiding place in the depth of the memory. The internal stranger, the murderer, the other “me”.
There is nothing to be obtained in war but memories of torn-off heads and madness. This is the message that the veterans of “that” war try to convey to the new soldiers in that imaginary dialogue that Natasha Dahnberg stages for them. The subjects of the post-communist world, they come from the place where they witnessed and participated in a collapse of a utopia. They see the present-day world as if from the future, as if they have already witnessed the end of history. [8] The Afghan War was one instance of the Communist Apocalypse. From this eschatological point of view, all wars are one and the same war -- always, everywhere, forever. Their history is full of violence, and so are their stories. Their speech is not about war -- it is war.
It is always the same war
It is a fact well known -- and quite easily forgotten -- that wars are fought by children. This is what makes any war always the same war: a children’s crusade. Over 90% of the generation of Soviet boys born in 1923 -- the generation conscripted in 1941 -- never came back from the war: they died at the ages between 18 and 23. Thirty five - fortyyears later, children at the same age were sent to Afghanistan to per-form their “internationalist duty” within the ranks of the Limited Con-tingent of the Soviet Army in Afghanistan. During the First Chechen War (1994-96), soldiers’ mothers would come down from Russia to find their sons at the sites of military dislocation and bring them back home. Nowadays in Russia, the only organization disclosing, and pro-testing against, illegal conscription and brutalities in the barracks is the organization of soldiers’ mothers. It is always the same war because it always has the mother-and-child relationship in its very foundation.
For children, war means puberty and emancipation. They expect war to give them what they do not have: the right to decide for themselves, grown-ups’ respect for their own experience and judgment, a transi-tion from childhood to adulthood. Or, more pragmatically, a possibility to practice spoken language of the country they invade. War serves as a stage for a teenage revolt against a protected childhood, an in-troduction to a real world which is so different from home because people live in ugly environments and have to fight for their daily bread. Volunteering to the war, children are not ready to think they will be killing people. Still, they do, -- but they are children and therefore not answerable.
It is never the same war
There are no two people on Earth who would make sense of war in the same way, and for whom the experience of war would be identical. Even though war involves the lives and death of millions of people, its reality is experienced, remembered, and narrated on a strictly individual basis. It affects singular existences in unique ways and implies an inti-mate, unique relationship with language. Watching the soldiers in the installation and listening to them tell their stories, we find ourselves involved in a double act of witnessing. While they relate their unique experiences, we go through another unique experience, that of relating to their stories. Paul Celan’s famous dictum, “no one bears witness for the witness”, is by the same token confirmed and ceases to apply.
Indeed, while bearing witness, the witness stands alone and is irreplace-able: no one else can testify instead of her about what she has gone through. Further, no one can witness in favour of the witness, because witnessing is subjective: no one witnesses people witnessing things. A testament is no proof: it is subject to the judgment of the listener who is free to believe or not to believe it. It is possible to share and commu-nicate a memory of something witnessed, but it is not possible to share responsibility in the act of witnessing with somebody else. [9]
As we listen to the story told by the witness, we become ourselves the witness’s witness – and thus relieve the loneliness of her unique position, and help her to fulfill the task of witnessing.
What is this task? Testament is not knowledge, not evidence, nor proof, it has no cognitive obligations. But it operates in a very special temporality: the messianic time of memory and justice. In messianic time, as Walter Benjamin wrote, all history seeks to achieve com-pleteness of citability, when “nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost to history.” [10] This is a temporality of a world that seeks redemption in history: “Of course only a redeemed man-kind is granted the fullness of its past -- which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments.” (ibid.) To help achieve such a citability as complete as only possible is the mission of the witness.
The catastrophic instances of the past are traumatic because their interpretations are incompatible: “now” and “then” are the same, and not the same, always the same and never the same all at the same time. But witnessing and witnessing for the witness, we still can achieve at least a share of memory and justice, both for the “then”, and for the “now”.
Irina Sandomirskaia
Irina Sandomirskaja, b. 1959 in Moscow. PhD in Theoretical Linguistics, collaborative partner in feminist art projects in Russia, USA and Sweden, Professor of Cultural Stud-ies at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies at Södertörn University. Special-izes in Russian Culture History, Language Philosophy, Art and Critical Culture Theory.
[1] http://www.ucdp.uu.se/gpdatabase/gpcountry.php?id=1®ionSelect=6-Central_ and_Southern_Asia, lats accessed October 10, 2011.
[2] http://www.isaf.nato.int/mission.html, last accessed October 10, 2011.
[3] http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/enduring-freedom.htm
[4] On the qualitative transformation of today’s war and on the ever widening gap between the human realitiy of war and war technologies, see Mary Kaldor (1999), New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era. Stanford : Stanford University Press, 2-3.
[5] Jacques Callot, The Hanged. From the print series “Les grandes misères de la guerre”, 1633.
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_and_Peace_(game), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_war_game, both sites last accessed October 10, 2011.
[7] On Wikipedia, Afganskaja vojna (1979—1989), http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%90%D1%84%D0%B3%D0%B0%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D0%B 2%D0%BE%D0%B9%D0%BD%D0%B0_(1979%E2%80%941989)#.D0.9F.D0.BE.D1.82. D0.B5.D1.80.D0.B8_.D1.81.D1.82.D0.BE.D1.80.D0.BE.D0.BD, last accessed October 10, 2011.
[8] Boris Groys, Anne von der Heiden und Peter Weibel (hrsgb) (2005), Zurück aus der Zukunft : osteuropäische Kulturen im Zeitalter des Postkommunismus. Frankfurt am Main : Suhrkamp
[9] On the dilemma of witnessing, see Jacques Derrida, “A Self-Unsealing Poetic Text”: Poetics and Politics of Witnessing”, in Revenge of the Aesthetic: The Place of Literature in Theory Today (2000), ed. Michael P. Clark, Berkeley Los Angeles London: University of California Press, 179-207. In this essay, Derrida gives an analysis of Paul Celan’s poem Aschenglorie which contains the line about the impossibility of witnessing for the wit-ness. See also, Irina Sandomirskaja (2011), “The Problem of the Witness”, Rethinking Time: Essays on Historical Consciousness, Memory, and Representation, eds. Hans Ruin and Andrus Ers, 245-254
[10] Walter Benjamin (2003/1940), “On the Concept of History” in Selected Writings. Volume 4. 1938-1940, Cambridge, Mass. and London, England : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 390.