Nelle ultime settimane uno dei miei blogger scientifici preferiti, Revere (nome collettivo) di Effect Measure (un ottimo blog di epidemiologia), ha postato a giorni alterni video musicali come commenti sulla guerra in Afghanistan, a seguito delle dichiarazioni di Obama sulla strategia per uscire (?) dal paese e dalla guerra.

In genere mi colpisce il fatto che buona parte della rettorica (non in senso negativo) anti-war che origina dagli States si concentri sui soldati americani morti e non su tutti gli altri morti, ma l’ultimo video pubblicato amplia lo sguardo e lo rende più comprensivo, e per questo mi piace linkarlo, non solo per il fatto che condivido la stance del blogger sulla guerra.

Più in generale ripensando alla facilità con la quale ai tempi della guerra nella ex Jugoslavia certuni parlavano di realpolitik, si stupivano della mia indignazione dicendo “ma non lo sapevi che la guerra era così?” , sottointendendo una ingenuità e distanza dalla realtà di chi alla guerra si oppone, mi sovviene il bel saggio di Elaine Scarry: “The body in pain“, (nota 1) ed in particolare il capitolo “The structure of war: the juxtaposition of Injured Bodies and Unanchored Issues”, che ci ricorda l’importanza di affacciarsi sul mondo e toccare la realtà della guerra, ovvero del corpo aperto, lacerato, lesionato, mutilato, morto…

Che ci ricorda che è proprio del discorso sulla guerra (e non necessariamente del discorso dei guerrafondai) il mascheramento, la sparizione, l’obliterazione del nucleo fondamentale della guerra stessa: la ferita, la morte, il danneggiamento e la distruzione di corpi, la creazione di dolore.

E questo mascheramento impedisce di guardare in faccia la realtà, e quindi di indignarsi, di abbassare l’etica dalla testa alla pancia (nota 2).

Offro qui dei lacerti dal capitolo 2 per una meditazione:

“War and torture have the same two targets, a people and its civilization…When Berlin is bombed, when Dresden is burned, there is a decostruction not only of a particular ideology but of the primary evidence of the capacity for self-extension itself: one does not in bombing Berlin destroy only objects, gestures, and thoughts that are culturally stipulated but objects, gestures, and thoughts that are human, not Dresden buildings or German architecture but human shelter.”

“…while torture relies much more heavily on overt drama than does war, war too … has within it a large element of the symbolic and it is ultimately, like torture, based on a simple and startling blend of the real and the fictional. In each, the incontestable reality of the body – the body in pain, the body maimed, the body dead and hard to dispose of – is separated from its sources and conferred on  an ideology or issue or instance of political authority impatient of, or deserted by, bening sources of substantiation.

There is no advantage to settling an international dispute by means of war rather than by a song contest or a chess game except that in the moment when the contestants step out of the song contest, it is immediately apparent that the outcome was arrived at by  a series of rules that were agreed to  and that can now be disagreed to, a series of rules whose force of reality cannot survive the end of the contest because that reality was brought about human acts of participation and  is dispelled when participation ceases.

The rules of war are equally arbitrary and again depend on convention, agreement and participation; but the legitimacy of the outcomes outlives the end of the contest because so many of its participants  are frozen in a permanent act of participation: that is, the winning issue or ideology achieve for a time the force and status of material “fact” by the sheer weight  of the multitudes of damaged and opened human bodies”

“The essential structure of war, its juxtaposition of the extreme facts of body and voice, resides in … the relation between  the collective casualities that occur within war, and the verbal issues (freedom, national sovereignity, the right to a disputed ground, the extraterritorial authority of a particular ideology) that stand outside the war, that are there before the act of war begins and after it ends, that are understood by a warring population as the motive and justification and will again be recognised after the war as the thing substantiated … by war’s activity. “

“The main purpose and outcome of war is injuring. Though this fact is too self-evident and massive ever to be directly contested, it can be indirectly contested by many means and … (t)he centrality of the act of injuring in war may disappear – the centrality of the human body can be disowned – by any of six paths.

First, it may be omitted from both formal and casual accounts of war.

Second, it may instead be redescribed and hence be as invisible as if omitted: live tissue may become minimally animate (vegetable) or inanimate (metal) material, exempt from the suffering that live sentient tissue must bear; or the conflation of animate and inanimate vocabularies may allow alterations in the metal to appropriate all attention …; or the concept of injury may be altered by relocating the injury to the imaginary body of a colossus.

Third, it may be neither omitted nor redescribed and insted aknowledges to be actual injury occuring in the sentient tissue of the human body, but now held in a visible but marginal position by four metaphors that designate it the by-products, or something on the road to a goal, or something continually folded into itself as in the cost vocabulary, or something extended as a prolongation of some other more benign occurrence”

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Nota 1
Riguardo alla più generale posizione della Scarry sul dolore, cioè che esso sia ciò che in maniera assoluta e universale definisce la realtà, e alla differenza con altre concezioni, più storicizzare e relativizzate di dolore, vedi il testo di David Morris The Culture of Pain, ed il testo classico di Eric Cassell, The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine

Nota 2
In parallelo con la necessità di smascherare i metodi di allevamento intensivo per trasformare una astratta idea di giustizia per gli animali in una sentita etica animalista.