Ποιειν Και Πραττειν - create and do

Children playing war in Paris during WWI - out of the collection of Photographer Reinhard Schultz.

• Reinhard Schultz
  • Reinhard Schultz – Biography
  • Photographic evidence of children and war

   

          

 

 

                

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

     



 

     Amazing are these scenes. The photographs resemble citatios out of a children's play. The earnestness written in their faces makes you think however otherwise. Game and reality is always a dangerous mixture, so that some poets like Zbigniew Herbert in Poland refused all along to play a game. It would mean getting involved in the really dirty side of politics. 

     At yesterday's final press conference of the year, President Obama outlined his strategy on how to fight ISIS. This President was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize but he ends up doing everything but avoiding from entering another kind of war called the 'drone war'. Obama is intelligent enough to make his outline of a plan appear reasonable. He seems not to rush into war as did President Bush after 911 into first Afghanistan, then Iraq with all the consequences to be seen in 2015 with refugees upon refugees seeking safety in Europe. It marks another turn in this crude instrument to gain power, namely war. Enzensberger in his book 'civil war' calls it an extension into a demographic warfare which happens when thousands upon thousands are forced to flee and risk their lives while crossing in sea unworthy rubber dingies the Mediterranean Sea having become especiall in 2015 more and more huge cemetery for countless innocent victims. What does this say about humanity? Even while the Security Council has finally passed a resolution to call for cease fire in Syria, the stakes are so high since above all with all the slaughter forgiveness is a rare currency to find these days. 

     Some lessons can be learned from how parents could avoid letting their children socialize or rather become accustomed to war by playing it as a game. Especially during WWI the aristocrats along with the generals from the upper echelons of society took war to be a lovely game. A film with the title "what a lovely game is war" drew attention to the fact that the upper level of society played with soldiers as if models on their geographical maps converted into a chess game like scenery. This was indeed the case with generals wishig to see or to prove their troops were fit by commanding them to move the trenches five meters forward. It had the consquence that thousands upon thousands were slaughtered. 

Solshenitzyn in his novel '1914' describes how generals debated whether or not the troops were fit enough to fight the Finnish troops, so to find out they ordered them to climb off the trains taking them to the border and to march for three days along the tracks. By the time they did arrive at the border, they were naturally over tired and easily defeated by the Finnish troops. 

That difference is alwaýs masked by claims of heroism but underneath that blanket of silence there is demanded that the simple soldier sacrifices his life for the sake of the country. That then is the real primitive nature of war when propaganda machines over scream all the killing by appealing to Patriotism as if this would justify the making of oneself into a lamb to be sacrificed on the bloody altar of war. By mentioning this metaphor it reminds that priests would bless soldiers and the killing machines before they would head off into battle. 

Why there is no effective resistance once conscription becomes mandatory, that then is the story of the lost generations in endless wars. Sad enough to make those left behind weep in silence.

Hatto Fischer
Athens 19.12.2015