Masters of War

‘Watch them working / The builders of ruins.’ I remembered these lines in Paris this summer while at an exhibition by the Italian photographer Gabriel Basilico. It consisted of pictures taken in Beirut between 1995 and 2003, and while political factors there have changed since then, much the same pictures could be made today by anyone willing to risk the cross-fire.

In Basilico’s images one sees no fighting, only its effects. Nor are there any bodies: only pitted, broken buildings incrementally but irreversibly eroded by small arms or disjointed by bombs. Aside from incidental figures and hints of daily life suspended (no telling at what point during the cycle of destruction), the streets recorded in these portraits of a city undone are vacant. ‘They are black, stupid and patient,’ echoes the poem in my head, ‘and they do their best to be the only ones left on earth.’ In Basilico’s photographs ‘they’ have succeeded, although we have no way of determining who the builders of ruins are or were. It is part of Basilico’s reticent art not to name them. And as urban demolition in the region recommenced in July under ‘new’ management, his work is an unblinking reminder that the identities and avowed purposes of war’s technicians are a polarizing distraction from the horrors of ‘collateral damage’ that opposing forces conspire to bring down on the heads of non-combatant populations.

For the poet Paul Eluard ‘they’ had an unambiguous meaning – fascism – and the subject of his eponymous poem was the bombing of Guernica by German planes during the Spanish Civil War. It was Eluard’s descant to Picasso’s great painted protest against the terror unleashed by the Nazi bombers on common citizens. Nowadays ‘fascism’ is a word widely and loosely bandied about in debates over the nascent world war in the Middle East. It is scripted into the mouths of presidents wishing to associate the misbegotten policies of moment with the moral certainties of the last ‘good’ war fought by the West, and it appears graphically as swastikas and SS signs on placards denouncing that president and others.

The analogy is prevalent elsewhere. During the second week of Israel’s onslaught against Beirut and southern Lebanon this summer one of the major newspapers in New Delhi ran an article on Pablo Picasso’s anti-fascist masterpiece, drawing a clear parallel with current events. It was a deliberately provocative, even inflammatory one as well, insofar as tacitly accusing the Israeli army of acting like Hitler’s Condor Legions is the sharpest accusation one could hurl at a state founded in the aftermath of the Holocaust. That the piece appeared in a ‘Third World’ daily might mislead some into thinking that it was purely polemical and prompted by pan-Islamic solidarity. Until one realizes that only months ago Islamic fundamentalists bombed commuter trains in Mumbai, and bloody communal antagonism between minority Muslims and majority Hindus has been the centrepiece of chauvinistic politics in India, with ordinary Muslims praying in mosques or Hindus riding to work being the victims. Meanwhile, Hezbollah rains unguided missiles down on Israel, indiscriminately killing Arabs and Jews who live together more or less peacefully on the other side of the border.

Left/right, freedom-lover/freedom-fighter, fascist/anti-fascist: in reality our political categories crumble with the wholesale ruination of cities and towns and the systematic targeting of, or callous disregard for, civilians. And because all who pursue war by these means fear judgement the Geneva Conventions are disintegrating even faster. However, it makes little difference to the dying whether death is delivered face to face by militias and suicide bombers or anonymously from under the seat of a train or from on high by a pilot pressing a joystick, or by a predator drone manipulated from another continent. There are murderers who relish gore and murderers who can’t bear the sight of it, those who rage and strike out and those who rationalize their eagerness to kill and then dispassionately execute their decisions. These tastes are the proper concern of Sadism’s psychologists, but media fascination with the perpetrators is but one of the ways by which those who suffer are obliterated. Nor should the political context of bystanders serve as an excuse for their annihilation, whereby being in the wrong place at the wrong time signifies collaboration with ‘the enemy’ and passive sympathy is tantamount to active support.

The builders of ruins are hard at work around the globe, but to avoid becoming entangled in remote historical comparisons that blur our view of present atrocities, I suggest a more recent precedent than Guernica. It is the poster made by the Art Workers’ Coalition in protest at the My Lai massacre of 1968, during the war in Vietnam. Over the image of slaughtered villagers appears the question asked to the American officer responsible: ‘And babies?’ Below is his answer, ‘And babies’. Anyone now choosing to wage war who replies in the affirmative, no matter what the their cause or the extenuating circumstances, is a criminal.

Robert Storr is a critic, curator and Dean of the Yale School of Art. He is Director of the 2007 Venice Biennale.