At the beginning of her virtuoso essay about war and patriarchy, Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf describes a series of photographs she receives each week "from the Spanish government"—urging support for the Republican cause in the Civil War. The pictures showed the effects of fascist violence—particularly of the bombardment of civilians. Woolf describes images of charred corpses, including those of children. She offers these photos as self-sufficient proof of the "beastliness" of war, the waste of war—which she summarizes as the Wilfred Owen view of war—arguing that the mere sight of these images makes the case for pacifism and disarmament virtually self-evident.
In her 2003 book-length essay Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag cites this passage in order to argue that Woolf was perhaps oversimplifying. After all, Sontag notes, the uselessness and brutality of fighting and of the use of force in general is not the only possible conclusion one could take from the photos. Quite to the contrary, many were moved to take up arms precisely because of seeing photos like that. The pictures didn't teach them that the use of force was always unjustified. They showed them what happened when fascist violence was left unchecked, and underscored the reasons for resisting it—by arms if necessary.
Indeed, this—making the case for armed intervention on the Republican side—was precisely the reason the Spanish government sent the pictures out in the first place—and why they landed on Virginia Woolf's desk. They were seeking to motivate and inspire recruits or donations for their armed cause, not to induce absolute pacifism.
Of course, Woolf is well aware that the pictures had this effect on many of their recipients. She archly suggests that the gentleman who has written to her requesting funds for the cause of "peace" and "liberty" could perhaps decide to go to Spain himself and "take up arms [...] in defense of peace." But, with the experience of World War I fresh in everyone's memory, she can only treat such an idea with irony (and the essay as a whole is a masterpiece of deadpan wit). For she adds: "But that [the war for peace proposal] presumably is a method that having tried you have rejected."
Still, though, I find that Sontag's critique of Woolf's position stands with respect to the essay as a whole. For, however much Woolf was aware that outrage over Fascist atrocities in Spain could prompt people to take up arms as readily as it could motivate them to lay them down, there is still a strange unacknowledged rejoinder and counterargument hovering over Woolf's whole case that she never really addresses.
Woolf's essay is directed to abolishing the psychological and sociological preconditions for fascist violence, and in order to do this, she recommends disarmament and pacifism. Yet—and this is the irony—it is precisely fascist violence that would soon make the next war necessary, just a year after Woolf's essay was published. If Britain had followed Woolf's advice, they would have been incapable of defending themselves, and fascist patriarchy in its worst form would have triumphed throughout Europe—and maybe throughout the whole globe.
It comes down then to a hoary but valid insight: sometimes force is necessary to prevent force. Sometimes, if rarely, then, there may indeed be such a thing as a "war for peace." The Spanish Republican resistance to Franco's forces was likely one such, even if it failed. And images of the carnage that the resistance opposed might make the case for that armed resistance as effectively as it does the case for total pacifism.
Our news feeds the past several weeks have been full of pictures much like the ones Woolf describes—chilling and heart-rending images of "dead bodies and ruined houses." The images of violence and atrocities unleashed against civilians have poured in both from Israel—where Hamas butchered more than a thousand innocents and took hundreds of civilians captive as hostages—and Gaza, where the Israeli response has cut off humanitarian supplies to the entire population, bombed and obliterated apartment buildings and homes, causing untold suffering. We have all seen the pictures of the carnage.
We can all agree the images are horrific. But beyond acknowledging this, it cannot be said that they make a self-evident argument. On this point at least, Sontag is right, and Woolf is wrong. The pictures of slaughtered Israeli civilians might make the case to some minds that force is never justified; but to others—including me—they underscore that a military response is needed to ensure that similar atrocities can never be repeated. Likewise in Gaza. Some may be urged by the images of the unjustified suffering of innocents to call for peace; others may use them as propaganda to support further attacks on Israel.
The back-and-forth this past week in the news over the question of responsibility for the explosion at a hospital in Gaza merely underscores Sontag's point that a picture does not in fact speak for itself. We were all appalled by the images of blasted hospital corridors and civilians covered in ash and dust from the deadly ordinance. But many were motivated by these pictures to immediately attribute blame to Israeli forces. Then, as the week wore on, this story began to grow holes. It now appears somewhat more likely that the blast was caused by an errant Islamic Jihad rocket, not by an IDF airstrike.
I therefore can't get behind Woolf's sentiment that simply showing the images of suffering caused by war automatically makes the case for peace. Knowing the back story and surrounding context for the photo is just as important. In the first days after the Hamas attack, for instance, disinformation circulated widely online, much of it fueled by videos of unrelated atrocities—oftentimes ones that had occurred years earlier and in an entirely different part of the globe—that had been decontextualized. Likewise with the hospital blast: the suffering was unmistakeable; but the photos alone could not tell us who was responsible for it.
A photo of suffering, therefore, can never on its own serve as a final argument—either for peace or for war. It cannot tell us that force is never justified; since—if it depicts violence of a sort that can be prevented in future—it might just as well serve as evidence for the necessity of a resort to arms. Likewise, it cannot tell us that a particular side or the other is culpable—not until we know what exactly the photograph depicts, its provenance, the circumstances that gave rise to it.
It is worth recalling in this regard, after all, that the people who made the most stirring and haunting depictions of civilian suffering in the Spanish Civil War—the poems and paintings that serve as counterparts to the Republican propaganda photos that sat on Woolf's desk—were not trying to make the case for pacifism. Neruda's poem "I'm Explaining a Few Things," with its images of the blood of murdered children running red in the streets, like a modern-day massacre of the innocents; the paintings of Picasso and Siqueiros ("Echo of a Scream"), concerning the death of civilians in aerial bombardment from fascist forces; the photo-montages of John Heartfield—all these were arguments for signing up for the Republican cause, not for laying down arms.
But if the images of suffering civilians on their own give us no aid in choosing between a policy of disarmament and re-armament, or between doubling down on military aid as a deterrent or giving it up entirely—do they in fact then tell us nothing at all? Is there truly no argument to be found, implicit and self-evident, within the images we have seen these past weeks of needlessly suffering civilians in Israel and Gaza?
Surely, there is such an argument. But it is more basic than the elaborate superstructures of blame and justification that people want to layer on top of them. The argument is that no military objective, however otherwise justified, should be pursued at the cost of suffering such as this. It is that, even in the context of a just war, responding to aggression, all parties must do all in their power to prevent the suffering of innocents. It's that, however righteous a resort to force may be, this, if it is truly a consequence of such a resort, is unrighteous—and if any party finds itself in the position of having to choose between a military objective and the killing of a child, or the bombing of a home, they should always sacrifice the former.
This is a higher standard, I admit, than what international law imposes on armed parties. It is a stricter measure against civilian suffering than the typical laws of war, which merely require that civilian suffering be proportionate to the military ends in view. But it is also a looser standard than that of absolute pacifism. And it is the only way I know of to balance the fact that, in a world of aggressors and bullies—in a world, in short, of fascist violence and terrorism—it is sometimes necessary to take up arms in defense of self and others—with the equally compelling fact that there is never a legitimate reason to target or harm a civilian, no matter how otherwise pressing the armed conflict may be.
It would appear, then, that our earlier claim that photos never make an argument on their own must be supplemented by a caveat. Woolf may have overstated the case in implying that photos argue for absolute pacifism on their own. They do not. Still less do they argue that this or that side was necessarily responsible for the suffering the photos depict. But they do argue one thing unmistakably: this suffering is wrong. It can never be justified. It must be avoided—nearly, one is tempted to say, at all costs.
In regarding such images—the images of "dead bodies and ruined houses" in Israel and Gaza—the images of suffering and displacement and weeping ash-covered children—we should remind ourselves, as the poet Stephen Spender did, in a poem on the threat of war:
No cause is just unless it guards the innocent
As sacred trust: no truth but that
Which reckons this child’s tears an argument.
This, this alone, is the argument the photos teach us.
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