Forever ceasefire? Forever war
A dozen short stories capture the trauma. And peering into the future
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The Big Story:
The Trump-brokered ceasefire between Iran and Israel is worth examining in light of the 75th anniversary of North Korea’s invasion of South Korea.
The Korean War ended late June 1953 with an armistice but no peace treaty, which means North and South Korea are still formally at war and have one of the most heavily armed borders in the world.
For now, the US president’s forceful intervention has ended one of the Middle East's most explosive confrontations in decades. But will that tenuous truce really mean the end of hostilities?
Donald Trump’s social media pronouncements offer little guidance.1
By some reckonings, a forever ceasefire is just another kind of forever war.
But better a truce than an outright war, which is its own hell for those forced to live through it?
Our first book pick captures the trauma of a child’s life in a war zone:
We could hear gunfire from time to time, but we grew used to it, as one grows used to the honking of passing cars…The gunmen fought around our street for months, because of its location between the sea and the city centre. But my mother still sent us to school – me and my twin brother, who was deaf, and on the way he would get frightened and stick close to me for protection.
These books offer context:
Jokes for the Gunmen
By: Mazen Maarouf (translated from Arabic by Jonathan Wright)
Publisher: Granta
Year: 2019
This collection of 12 short stories has a common theme: the trauma caused by war and violence. It was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize.
Author Mazen Maarouf is a Palestinian who was born in Lebanon and moved to Iceland. A poet, journalist and translator, Maarouf seems to have delved deep within, dredging up memories, fears and hopes for these sad, beautiful stories. Mostly, they take place in cities that aren’t named and could be anywhere on the planet that gunmen control a city or bombs suddenly start falling from the skies.
The book starts with a young boy deciding it’s necessary to procure a glass eye for his father. He has seen a street vendor with a glass eye and noticed he wasn’t harassed by the gunmen. Perhaps his father, who runs a laundry and is “so weak… so cowardly” would be better off with a glass eye? The boy decides to sell the organs of his deaf twin brother to pay for the glass eye. He doesn’t manage it. Instead, a bomb finishes off his brother as he travels home from school.
Through linked stories that serve up a mixture of surrealism and symbolism, the saga unfolds. There is the stench of blood, death, despair and family disharmony.
Maarouf is funny too, albeit in morbid fashion. His work has been likened to that of celebrated Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, who also grew up in a world threatened by violence.
Choice quotes:
“That afternoon my brother’s bus didn’t come back from school. We found out later that a shell had hit it. My brother and all the other children in the bus were incinerated and their bodies fused with each other. They were buried together in a small, remote terraced field near the school.”
“Abu Elia’s bar was only hit once, by a vacuum bomb that struck the whole building. The shell cut through three floors before exploding and crushing the building like an overripe pear. My father was one of the victims of course. Where he was, behind the gramophone player at the end of the bar, it would have been impossible to escape. The bomb sucked out all the air when it exploded but my father went on turning the handle of the gramophone for a moment, puzzled that the sound had completely disappeared. He was totally confused.”
The Future of War: A History
By: Lawrence Freedman
Publisher: PublicAffairs (Hachette)
Year: 2019
Though this book doesn’t really cover the type of warfare waged in 2025, it offers a steer on the need for adaptability – in military technology, strategy and media tactics.
Lawrence Freedman, an Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King's College London, looks at the evolution of predictive military strategy. He begins in the 19th century, when Waterloo was a model for the decisive battle and goes on to the Cold War, when it became unthinkable for the nuclear-armed Great Powers to even contemplate a real war. Fast forward to the Soviet Union’s collapse and the rise of local civil wars with the add-on involvement of Western nations (Kosovo, for eg.). And then 9/11, when it became clear traditional military methods were no longer sufficient to win an entrenched conflict.
Freedman explores various perspectives on war, through novels, such as H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds and Nevil Shute's On the Beach, as well military papers. And he takes a look at concepts for future wars.
Dispiritingly (but perhaps in the spirit of realism), he does not suggest that war might one day be passé.
Choice quote:
“If we concentrate only on [H G] Wells’s prescience we will miss the point of his military imagination. He can be credited with the invention of the tank, although the ‘ironclads’ he envisaged in 1903 were enormous at over 100 feet long and in their size and armament more like battleships (from which he took the name) than the sort of vehicles that could make a mark in a land battle.”
This post, on yet another war, is free to read from the archives:
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A meme on Donald Trump’s Truth Social account featured him kissing the American flag with the text “Trump was right about everything”. https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114736048805846023
Trump posted a screenshot of a text message from Nato chief Mark Rutte praising him for making “us all safer” with his “decisive action in Iran”. https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114738606142462442