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The First Casualty of War by Steven Yates
Wars play a predominant role in Babylon 5 – the overriding plot of which builds towards a colossal conflict between two unimaginably ancient and powerful races of beings, one called the Vorlons and the other known only as the Shadows. The former believe in achieving progress through order and discipline, and are not above manipulating the "younger races" (as they view us) to achieve this. The latter believe in achieving progress through sowing seeds of conflict and chaos, out of which the races deserving to survive emerge triumphant and the rest perish. The two are on collision course, with humans and other "younger races" caught in the middle. If the show has a theme, it is about choices having consequences, including those choices that lead to war. During a pivotal moment in the first season, a central character, an ambassador from a Rome-like world in decline known as Centauri Prime, makes a thoughtless and impulsive decision to ally himself and, by extension, his people, with an agent of the Shadows. Naturally, he does not know that the polite, soft-spoken fellow dressed in black is a harbinger of a bottomless well of evil; he just seems to represents a means of turning the ambassador’s broken, dying civilization around. The ambassador’s motivation is to recapture lost glory and achieve for his people "a rebirth of glory, a renaissance of power" reclaiming their "rightful place in the galaxy." Before too many more episodes, he realizes he’s made a colossal mistake. He is involved with a much larger power he can’t fathom, much less control. Before events play themselves out, he ends up paying dearly. The long-term result of his decision is the final disgracing of his people before the civilized universe and their enslavement to remaining minions of the Shadows. War and conflict are thus not glamorized. Some of Babylon 5’s episodes have scenes of violence bordering on the sadistic. Parents should beware: the show is not for kids! But the way war, its causes, and its consequences, are portrayed seems to me accurate enough to be worthy of attention – especially these days. In the context of the larger plot, one of the reasons the "last of the Babylon stations" was built was to try to prevent war, by "creating a place where humans and aliens could work out their differences peacefully," as the first season’s opening monologue reads. This is important, because Earth was almost wiped out in a war that occurred ten years prior to the events of the series. That war started because of a miscommunication. What the alien race (known as the Minbari) intended as a gesture of respect through a display of strength and courage (leaving their gunports open), a single human captain took as a sign of hostility. He opened fire. The result was the death of one of the Minbari’s most beloved leaders. They went on a rampage. Under attack from vastly superior weapons technology, humans didn’t have a chance. Driven back to Earth itself, the final battle began (called the "battle of the line"). Had this battle been consummated, the result would have been the extermination of the human species. But then, the Minbari learned – or believed they’d learned – something about the humans that made them stop the war in its tracks. I won’t say what it was, but it changed everything. It made them realize that if they pressed ahead, the short-term consequences would be easy victory, but the long-term consequences would be their own destruction. In the larger threat that was looming from the Shadows, the two races – human and Minbari – would have to learn to work together or both would perish. Civilizations are built up, and strengthened, through peaceful, prudential alliances based on mutual, voluntary cooperation and trade. Admittedly these alliances don’t come about overnight. Peoples are different, and often the meeting of minds necessary for trade relations is hard to establish. Notice, though, how governments invariably get in the way. Strictly speaking, governments fight wars, not peoples. With no tradition of freedom, a people may end up enslaved to tyrants who would rather conquer and take what they want by brute force. History is loaded with the resulting horror stories. Science fiction doesn’t portray anything fundamentally new. It just rearranges the details into exciting and sometimes thought-provoking stories that we can watch as entertainment or examine as a source of insight, by seeing images of ourselves in these conflicts between humans and aliens. I think of the statement Ludwig von Mises made in his treatise Socialism: "War, [the classical liberal social philosophy] teaches, is harmful, not only to the conquered but to the conqueror. Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking. Peace and not war is the father of all things. Only economic action has created the wealth around us; labor, not the profession of arms, brings happiness. Peace builds, war destroys" (p. 59). Yet there are still those who prefer war. Babylon 5 portrays several lesser wars. Earth always gets dragged into them. The station’s commander, John Sheridan (who takes over at the beginning of Season Two), is a career military man. As a strategist, he is superb: he was responsible for the one victory won by humans in the war with the Minbari. He is also thoughtful and reflective. He does not take killing lightly. If anything, this is the most un-Hollywood-like portrayal of war to come out of Hollywood – or Rome on the Potomac, where war fever has never been higher. In a pivotal scene he tells another career military man, "There is one truth about war: people die." Both Hollywood and Rome sometimes seem to see Gulf War II as a kind of game. The celebrities are all against the war, of course, but to the extent these people can articulate reasons at all, they are against it for the wrong reasons. They naively believe Bush should have waited on UN approval. One gets the impression they’re more for globalism and empowering the UN than they are against Gulf War II. (One reviewer described Babylon 5 as a "galactic United Nations." This is wrong. The station’s command staff does not aspire to rule the universe. Although they form a shaky alliance in the final season with a formidable fleet of ships at their disposal, their ironclad rule is that their fleet goes where it is wanted, and otherwise pursues a policy of noninterference.) The neocons are for Gulf War II unconditionally, with the ferocity and gusto of gladiators wielding swords; they say we absolutely must stop Saddam Hussein. For all practical purposes, the neocons have become the political establishment, at least in foreign policy. This establishment has given us any number of reasons to launch a war of aggression: Saddam has supported al Qaeda as part of an axis of evil. Saddam has weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Saddam is an evil, sadistic tyrant who brutalizes his own people and tortures prisoners. Saddam threatens his neighbors, and threatens the United States. In the last analysis, none of these offers a convincing case for our having gone to war. No one has offered conclusive proof of connections between Iraq and 9/11. While Saddam may have WMDs, so does practically everyone else of note. And it is true; Saddam is not a kindly old gent like your grandfather. He does brutalize and torture. But others are worse. North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il, for example – or Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. Does Saddam threaten his neighbors? He couldn’t defeat Iran during the 1980s (even with U.S. backing). He invaded Kuwait in 1991 – thinking he had a green light from the U.S. And that’s all. Did he threaten U.S. interests on U.S. soil? C’mon! Saddam was a product of U.S. interests, originally. Moreover, this has been known for more than ten years now. There are a few writers (Henry Lamb is an example) who see this war as evidence that the New World Order is unraveling, and that this is a golden opportunity for the U.S. to get out of the UN. Well, any excuse to do this last would be welcome in these quarters! We should have gotten out of the UN a long time ago. It is true that Bush attacked without UN approval – after some of us doubted he would. But the truth is, Bush has sent us a mixed message here. While attacking Iraq without UN approval, the most recent reason Bush has given for the invasion of Iraq is to enforce UN resolutions. So is this war diminishing or increasing the status of the UN? Very suggestive is something that the major news media are blacking out: the fact that America’s troops are going into battle without the familiar Stars and Stripes. UN resolutions? What we ought to say is: so what? UN resolutions do not have the force of law, and there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that empowers a U.S. commander in chief to enforce them as if they did. Of one thing we can be sure, therefore: the world government movement is far from dead. Its henchmen wouldn’t just give up after efforts going all the way back to the Wilson Administration. Beyond that, all we can do is speculate. War involves us in a maze of deceptions and unknowns. No one can say for sure where this will lead, or even how much it will cost. The price tag will be high – given that the burden of rebuilding a "newly liberated Iraq" will doubtless fall to the U.S., and therefore to the longsuffering American taxpayer. I tend to be cynical about the idea that our global elites are really much concerned about the fate of the Iraqi people – although I think many the men and women in American uniforms probably are. If we can believe media reports at all, the latter are doing their best to keep civilian casualties to a minimum. With the exception, perhaps, of the occasional Charles Manson or Ted Bundy, it is not in the nature of Americans to engage in bloodlust for its own sake. Iraqi soldiers taken prisoner by Americans no doubt will receive more humane treatment than those cases where the situation is reversed. With our globalists, though, the case may be different. Governments are about force. Global government will be about unaccountable force wielded at an international level. Now that they control much of our foreign policy, the neocons are showing their true colors – something we would expect from a movement founded by ex-Trotskyite types. The other day Jeff Tucker cited the ever-scary William Buckley saying, "How in the hell are you going to get Saddam Hussein without killing a lot of innocent people?" Tucker quoted several other neocons, noted their desire to target hospitals, for example. One is left with the impression that these people aren’t too tightly wrapped, so to speak. Back in reality, there’s still that old saying: for every political decision, there’s the official reason and then there’s the real reason. I’ve no reason to think this war is any exception. We already noted the numerous official reasons given for going to war against Iraq. None are really convincing. Which suggests that the real reason(s) is/are quite different. Perhaps this really is about a need by Western power elites to grab Iraqi oil, as writers too numerous to cite individually have concluded. Perhaps – and this seems to be the neocon view – what this war is about is taking the best opportunity to come along in quite a while for Rome on the Potomac to establish a global empire: in the name of preserving world peace, of course. Woodrow Wilson and his minions called it "making the world safe for democracy." This would include controlling the finances and resources of entire regions including the Middle East. If so, we most assuredly won’t hear about it from the dominant national news media. We won’t hear about it from President Bush. We won’t hear about it from the neocons. Commander Sheridan, of Babylon 5, put it this way: "The first casualty of war is always the truth." It’s hardly a new or ingenious sentiment. It goes back at least as far as 1917, when California Senator Hiram Johnson uttered a very similar phrase: "The first casualty when war comes is truth." He was speaking in opposition to this country’s entrance into what became World War I. Regardless of who said it first, or how it was worded, the statement remains as applicable now as ever. March 29, 2003
Copyright © 2003 LewRockwell.com
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