For those who create wars, there are no days or nights, no summers or winters; what matters is to show dark areas where birds of prey fly over corpses. The images they show us are of devastation. Only in this way, in fear, will people surrender and accept slavery. I choose to write about war not with facts and statistics, but with what I feel when I see helpless, vulnerable people, refugee camps, raped women, starving, sick, injured, and crying children.
The first time I heard the word war I was very young and the adults were talking about the fight between the blue and the red they heard on the radio. Air Force planes were bombing the Plaza de Mayo.
On the edge of something inexplicable to me, a little girl who had never imagined what a battle was about. Yet I felt fear. Neighbors hid their cars so they wouldn’t be taken away, and my mother started buying food to store. They said the military would hoard everything and we would be left with nothing.
It was all a commotion of fear, even though it was happening almost 1,600 kilometers from where we lived. When I think back, I remember that the word war had always been there, my grandchildren had come from Europe before the First World War. Fear was, in a way, an everyday thing for us. War was always talked about, there were after-effects in their aching bodies, in their sad hearts, and in their minds, horrible images that they never forgot.
I remember when I was little, my parents would come home from the cinema and talk about the films as if they were life itself. When I grew up and could go in, it was a Sunday afternoon pastime. The whole family would watch American war films and cowboy movies. I’d cover my eyes and hide in my seat so I wouldn’t see the slaughter of women and children afterward because I’d have nightmares and it would scare the hell out of me.
Film wars are an ideological construction.
Nowadays, digital platforms and virtual games are where we are manipulated, where the real “indoctrination” takes place. These “neurophysiological constructions”, as Rita Segato puts it, have to do with teaching us cruelty and not empathy. I had an aunt who used to say: “How beautiful and elegant men in uniform look! When they parade, they always look disciplined, competent, with strength in their decisions.
This patriarchal civilization, with its mandate of masculinity, says that “every conflict is resolved by war”. But history does not show us that indiscriminate killing solves anything; on the contrary, it leaves the door open for another war. What history does show is how the powerful get rich in every conflict, which is why they create them. It is not war when they create food shortages and starve people by taking away their livelihoods, and their medicines, preventing their education; and communicating through fake news and post-truth narratives. This is also war.
The war is against women, their discrimination, and the structural inequality we live within conflict zones, where we lose all our rights and the availability of access to the resources necessary for subsistence, as well as being exposed to perverse forms of intersectional violence (economic, political, social, psychological, etc.).
Women who survive bombings and military operations in their territories live as displaced persons and face hunger.
War destroys
War kills illusions
War starves
War rapes women
War destroys toys
War doesn’t want children
War counts bodies
War competes for the dead
War destroys medicines
War tests new weapons
War has no compassion
War is a business
War lies about its aims
War shows black bags
War destroys homes
War annihilates what is human
War destroys love and compassion
War builds hatred
War does not rebuild
War destroys life
War destroys nature
War is patriarchal
If we add the beautiful monosyllable “NO” to this poem, we create a wonderful phrase:
No to war. War is not something fleeting in our lives, but something that is always present. We should have moderation to go on living, but how do you deal with slaughter?
Appendices
Socio-historical context: “Blue” and “Red” was the name given in Argentine history to the series of armed confrontations between two factions of the Argentine armed forces in 1962 and 1963, during the unconstitutional presidency of José María Guido. The “blue” sector of the Argentine army took a more conservative line, while the “colored” sector advocated a stance of greater political dialogue.
“Post-truth: Every year, the Oxford Dictionary chooses a “word of the year”. In 2016, that word was post-truth, defined as “circumstances in which objective facts influence public opinion less than appeals to emotion or personal belief”. At the end of 2017, the word entered the dictionary of the Real Academia Española, but there it was defined slightly differently: “deliberate distortion of a reality that manipulates beliefs and emotions to influence public opinion and social attitudes”. From the book “Pensar con otros” by Guadalupe Nogués. The full text is available at: https://elgatoylacaja.com/pensarconotros/indice
