To confront the war machine and to tell the true war story, the artist, the activist, and the concerned citizen, or resident, or alien, or victim, must climb to the high ground. This is an ethical and aesthetic move, a double gesture that involves both moral standing and strategic vision. Morally, one must be above the fray in order to renounce and to forgive the bloodletting, as well as to see the (potential) culpability of oneself and one’s allies in past, present, and future conflicts. Strategically, one must be able to see a vast landscape if one wants to comprehend the war machine in its totality and its mobility, as well as the war machine’s other, the movement for peace. “War can teach us peace,” says Hayslip.12 This task requires, among others, the artist. To imagine and dream beyond being the citizen of a nation, to articulate the yearning for a citizenship of the imagination — that is the artist’s calling. To imagine and dream in this manner, one must work for peace as well as confront the war machine. Whereas the war machine wants acts of imagination to focus only on the human face of the soldier, the artist needs to imagine the war machine’s totality, collectivity, enormousness, sublimity, and inhumanity. The artist must refuse the identity that the war machine offers through the human soldier, whose dead, sacrificed body, scholar Elaine Scarry argues, persuades the patriotic citizen to identify with the nation.13 The artist must instead show how the inhuman identity of the war machine incorporates the patriotic citizen and renders her or him inhuman as well.
This is where art plays a crucial role in both antiwar movements and movements for peace, which are not the same. Antiwar movements oppose and react. They can repeat the logic of the war machine, when, for example, antiwar activists treat victims of the war machine solely as victims, taking away the full complexity of their flawed (in)humanity in the name of saving them. When a particular war ends, so may the antiwar movement opposed to it. Understanding that war is not a singular event but a perpetual one mobilizes a peace movement. This movement looks beyond reacting to the war machine’s binary logic of us versus them, victim versus victimizer, good versus bad, and even winning versus losing. Perpetual war no longer requires victory in warfare, as what happened in Korea, Vietnam, and now the Middle East shows. Stalemates or outright losses — if not too damaging — can be overcome. The war machine can convert stalemates or losses into lessons for future wars and reasons for further paranoia by the citizenry, both of which justify continuing psychological, cultural, and economic investment in the war machine. While victories would certainly be wonderful, the war machine’s primary interest is to justify its existence and growth, which perpetual war serves nicely. An endless war built on a series of proxy wars, small wars, distant wars, drone strikes, covert operations, and the like, means that the war machine need never go out of business or reduce its budget, as even some conservatives admit.14
A peace movement is required to confront this inhuman reality. This peace movement is based not on a sentimental, utopian vision of everyone getting along because everyone is human, but on a sober, simultaneous vision that recognizes everyone’s unrealized humanity and latent inhumanity. Powerful memory from the low ground presses our noses against this inhumanity in a negative reminder of our capacity for brutality. This memory activates our disgust and revulsion. Powerful memory from the high ground reminds us positively of a more transcendent humanity that can emerge from looking at our inhuman tendencies. It does so through promoting empathy and compassion, as well as a cosmopolitan orientation toward the world that places imagination above the nation. Empathy, compassion, and cosmopolitanism guarantee nothing, but all are necessary to break the connection between our identity and the war machine. Both Hayslip and Lê value empathy and compassion over politics and ideology. Hayslip empathizes not only with those like her, but extends compassion toward her enemies and her torturers of all sides. She imagines herself as a cosmopolitan citizen of the world, living beyond all artificial boundaries of border and race. Lê immerses herself in the war machine, from those who rehearse and drill for war to those who reenact battles. In a striking photograph from her Small Wars series, Lê inserts herself into a scene of American civilians who reenact my war, dressing up with uniforms and weapons from that time. She takes the role of reenactor herself, playing a Viet Cong sniper aiming her rifle at American soldiers. If one knows the shooter herself is being shot, the picture amuses. But the photograph also reenacts something never recorded by an American camera, an ambush from a Viet Cong perspective. Empathy marks this act of imagination, as Lê sees through the viewpoint of the other to both Americans and to herself, a refugee from the Viet Cong. This empathy underlies the ethics of remembering oneself and others.
In contrast, the war machine requires that one limit empathy and compassion to those just like us, on our side. Those who call themselves political know that the most effective way to mobilize their adherents quickly is to terminate that empathy and compassion for others. The artist who submits to this kind of political demand may create interesting art, but it will be art hampered by an inability to imagine those others that may be most troubling to the artist. For the artist, “politics” may mean choosing a side in life and art, but it also must eventually mean more than choosing a side. The good artist must expand her scope of empathy and compassion to embrace as many and as much as she can, including even the war machine’s participants. The genuinely political artist can see across all kinds of borders, beginning with those that separate selves from others. For the artist, politics should ultimately be about abolishing sides, venturing into the no man’s land between trenches, borders, and camps. We need an art that celebrates the humanity of all sides and acknowledges the inhumanity of all sides, including our own. We need an art that enacts powerful memory, an art that speaks truth to power even when our side exercises and abuses that power.
For this purpose, the problem is that empathy and compassion are tools, not solutions. They lead to no political, or even moral, certainty, as is the case with empathy’s weaker cousin, sympathy. The criticism against sympathy is that it may only compel pity for someone. But it may also breed a sense of shared suffering, and this fellow feeling may urge us toward action, an urge that empathy may also encourage in its ability to make us identify with, or even as, an other. This empathetic identification may take place through our relationship to works of art, particularly those that explicitly stage or narrate compassion. But while these narratives ask readers to witness scenes of suffering, they may purge readers of the need to take political action.15 This is why “compassion is an unstable emotion,” according to Susan Sontag. “It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.”16 If this is the case, what good is compassion or its related emotions of sympathy and empathy? I advocate for them because they point the way to the high ground, no matter how they might mask more troubling things. The identification with others that arises from compassion often conflicts with our self-interest or instinct for self-preservation, as when the other threatens our survival. Or we carry out our feelings for others from a distance, seeing the other’s suffering but doing absolutely nothing. At most we might offer charity that only alleviates rather than solves problems. But while compassion may allow us to disavow our complicity, without compassion we could never move the far and the feared closer to our circle of the near and the dear. Such a move is crucial to art and is fundamental to forgiveness and reconciliation, without which war will never cease.