Every philosopher who wishes to speak about war is nowadays confronted with a paradox. Namely, war leaves nobody in peace. Faced with it, it is not possible to persevere in the traditional pose of the intellectual overcome with so-called spiritual or philosophical peace. Henceforth, this peace will hide either implicit ideological support or an unclear quasi-rationalist conscience. It is impossible to methodically abstract or suspend, for example, the Gulf War, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Hiroshima or Auschwitz if one wishes to think not only the history, but also the agony of the twentieth century. It is just as impossible as it is to forget the latent threat of nuclear war, far away as it may seem now, in order to meditate serenely on the fin de siecle, or even on the mal de siecle. It is even less possible nowadays to "put in brackets" as a "natural attitude", or simply to forget, Sarajevo, to forget the unbearable proximity of what infinitely eludes us as ineffable and impossible in that known and close image.

Faced with the proximity of war, a philosopher worthy of his competences, one who takes philosophy seriously, is bound to feel a certain responsibility. And this responsiblity stirs in him unease of conscience and unease of inquiry. However -- and this is where the paradox occurs -- as soon as he inquires about the meaning of war or attempts to speak about it rationally, the philosopher quickly perceives the full senselessness of his situation: actually, he has nothing to say about this matter! Even though he must speak about the war in Bosnia, he can only remain silent about it, about its tragic essence! As a matter of fact, at least in this context, all speech is akin to approaching the horizon: constitutionally devoid of hope of ever reaching it.

This powerlessness or impossibility of speech does not result from everything that should and could have been said about war already having been said in some other type of speech -- political, scientific or that of direct human experience. We "all" "know" "everything" about Sarajevo, Bosnia, the Balkans. And we know what we know within a multitude of different, often contradictory narratives. However, in all those stories nearly nothing is said, and in any case nothing essential. If Paul Virillio's statement that the first victim of any war is the truth, then the shadow of this victim also falls on all those discourses which pretend, in one way or another, to say something such as the "most direct" truth about war. This does not refer only to banal ideological sacrifice for the sake of war aims, to "patriotic" bias which finds moral justification for even the most dubious of acts... In war, the truth is sacrificed in an essential way: becoming unsayable, becoming itself a ruin, becoming tragic. What should be said first and above all, what is the most important "thing" in this regard, and what is, after all, exclusively worthy of being said, this is precisely what remains unsaid and, apparently, unsayable.

People who have experienced the proximity of war or of the horrors of war have quickly realized that there is something in their experience which rejects thought, which resists uttering. War is a true epistemological minefield. It is a frowning, terrifying, tyrannical Absolute swallowing and devouring all meaning. To ask the millions of people from Bosnia and in Bosnia who have been forced from their homes, leaving behind tens of thousands of dead relatives, friends and acquaintances, to testify about the great strategic or historical causes and truths of war is nearly insulting. This horror given "by itself" and "for itself" sets itself down in front of thought as a simple anti-subject of thinking. The truth of war is radical anti-truth. No "constructive", "functional" or "affirmative" thought is possible in the face of the berserk and shattering nothingness of war. More precisely, such thought is possible only in the form of ideological "truths" which are themselves participants in the war, which produce war, which start it. These Subjectively (Sovereignly) profiled "truths" are founded precisely on the narcissism of the survivors, and maybe even on a certain profit arising from biased mockery of just that which is essential/unsayable in war, of that which remains unavailable for any justifying, apologetic instrumentalization. But if in war there is no truth about war, that is not only because truths themselves are used to wage war, with one set of "truths" against another, but also because no speech about war, however "adequate", that is, true and neutral -- if such a thing is possible -- is able to express what is unutterable in war, its horrifying essence in front of which even the wisest of speeches, or logos if you wish, remains simply dumb, without words.

However, people cannot not talk about war. Discourse about war is a necessity, inasmuch as it is meagerly possible, inasmuch as -- however paradoxical this may seem -- the impossible and unacceptance of the impossible are possible. This speech is unavoidable, not only as a deterrent, but aslo as testimony. It is simply not possible to remain silent about horror. What speculative or ideological hocus-pocus would be necessary to take away words from the discoruse of war for good?! But, if discourse about war is somehow -- certainly with great difficulty and responsibility -- possible, how should we then understand this possibility at the edge of the impossible?

Nietzsche was quite right when he maintained that blood was the worst witness for truth (although this statement remained rather ambiguous in his polyphonic discourse). It is not only a matter of the possibility of sacrifice, but also of testifying badly. Great bloodshed is, doubtless, the key effect of the phenomenon we call war. This effect makes war what it is: a bloody orgy of destruction; concrete, materialized horror. This horror will never allow us to instrumentalize with a clear conscience the idea of war in order to confrim some "higher truth".

The belief that even in the furnace of war there is "one", "our" truth, which the "others" will be forced to accept sooner or later is sickeningly naive. In relation to such a "truth", which will become "known to all" one day, there is, as a rule, a counter-truth: that it is much better that nothing ever be known about its destructiveness, useless sacrifice and the iniquity of the crimes committed in its name! Please God, don't ever let the full truth about us be known! -- this could be the universal motto of all the participants in all the wars from the beginning of time... and especially of the present Balkan wars, at the end of the 20th century.

The flip side of Nietzsche's statement that blood is the worst witness to truth tells us that truth itself is very bad at testifying about blood. There are no "crown" witnesses, because the privilege of such testimony would have to be assumed precisely by those who are no longer around, by the victims... That is why war, like death, is a universal un-truth. As collective bloodshed, war represents a clear defeat of man's generic existence. Also, the impossibility of testimony about that defeat! Its frightening characteristic, that paroxism of destruction, represents at the same time the defeat of all human values, including the value we call "truth". In its key effect, war not only voids or invalidates its own instrumental relation to the so-called "higher truths" which supposedly give it "meaning", it also abolishes the elementary descriptive value of truth itself. In war, there is no truth about war. No martial strategy or tactic contain their own truth, except in the form of false ideological "truths" whch are only instruments of war. Today, in the Balkans and in the whole world, or in the "global village" if you wish, we have a series of ideologically biased and contradictory reports on events in Bosnia, we have a series of attempts to performatively construct/"state" the truth, we have "information" which is practically war carried on, or even begun, by other means; truth itself, in the final instance, has been sacrificed to the destructive, aggressive, unutterable other: inflicted death. The sense of this sacrifice is functional subjugation to aggression by the completely other or to the completely other as aggression which it is then impossible to tame, to make benign or benignly present/close, especially not by making destruction speak by itself, by its supposed identity, its truth or strong reasons. The completely other, as a rule, has no truth/identity, but only a paradoxical, aporematic structure of relation to non-relation, to the impossible. Contact with the impossible only too often offers us nothing but unbearable pain.

War is both affirmation and negation of death at the same time. Man's existence, whatever it is like, includes the constant possibility of stepping out into nothingness, into the completely other as death. Death is the alternative which shadows man's every step. And this is so until the final moment. We cannot ward off this fate in any way. However, the affirmative side of our existence demands constant negation of this virtual step in the completely other. Life, by definition, is always some kind of negation, never sufficiently successful, in the final instance nearly futile, of the first negation -- of death. It is, first of all, a certain strategy of survival: cancellation of death, and then, in these "safe" conditions, everything else, other strategies... War is also a strategy of survival, a cancellation of death, but it is at the same time an affirmation of death-for-the-other. War is inflicted death and the crime of inflicting it.

In war, crimes are committed which too often remain unpunished or unrecognized. The current events in Bosnia are fearful testimony of the terrifying hyperproduction of crimes, especially in the opening phases of this Balkan religious-national-civil-peasant conflict. But war itself, war as such, is a crime, too, war "by itself" and "for itself", including "just war", such a war which would be in accord with some (logocentric, let us say Hegellian) strategy of intellectual justification. There is no reason which could justify or make just not only any war, but also the principle of inflicted death. Therefore, war is an unrecognized crime, or the crime of not recognizing one's "identity" as crime, which comes down to the same. Is not this lack of recognition the very point of crime itself? Maybe this deficit of recognition of crime should definitely incite us to study more strictly in the future the phenomenon of recognition, recognition of everything in history that could be recognized by war and its extensions?! Maybe the affirmative side of all these recognitions was based on the abovementioned non-recognition and concealment of crimes!

It seems, truly, that there is a surfeit of recognition, a sufficit of justice which necesarily shapes the "dialectics" of every war. Because it is unrecognized as crime within itself, war then unavoidably calls upon what is the very opposite of crime, and that is, of course, justice. As an expression of a certain (narcissistic) subjectivity every war is unavoidable just, founded on just "truths", because it is only in this way possible not to take on its own crime. There is no war which is unjust within itself (in its own hiden, complex subjectivity). If its judged from some position that this or that war is unjust, that cannot be a "neutral" position, but only a position of just "truth", therefore a position of war, one which is already "involved" in the war. If it is also strategically superior, then it is also the victor's position, the position which answers war with war, only this time just/justified war.

In order for a war to be proclaimed unjust, it is necessary that within itself, in an "essential" way, there exist a just war on the other, "more important" side of the front (the point being that both sides are always equally "more important"! -- this comes from the narcissistic subjectivity which is invested in war) which will be the obverse of its "unjust" reverse side. And the other way around. Every just war contains its reverse side within itself: an injustice which is annulled. War is the perfect crime, or the personification of justice, which comes down to the same! It is a crime with an unavoidable happy end: an orgy of the survivors. This necessity is the consequence of the crime having been committed by a (narcisstically) sovereign subjectivity. Victims have only instrumental value.

Finally, in war there is no meta-instance, or supreme judge who could decide on who is just and who isn't. The sole meta-instance is sovereign force: the ability of one side to silence the other. The statement "that was a just war, which we lost" makes sense only if its the anticipation of a close or remote future battle, if its the discourse of a war which is not yet over. Otherwise, "righteous" moralism was always a hypocritical witness of the crime in which the criminal was a double victim: his own and somebody else's.

The Habermasian belief that it is nolonger possible to speak of a just war, but that it is possible to speak of a justifiable one is naive... Supposedly, a just war would be one calling upon an "absolute aim", and which could be justified only from a religious or metaphysical point of view; a justififable war would be one which could be legitimized by certain rational "reasons", set down, for example, in a UN resolution. But the distinction between just and justifiable war, where the former is rejected as "metaphysical" and the latter possibly recognized as "rational" should not deceive us: in both cases war is crime.

Even in a "defensive" war the enemy is attacked and killed. The reasons which impel us to defend ourselves from war by war are often very strong, suggestive, but they will never be able to change the criminal nature of war. Our "justifiable" war is nothing but a perfect crime! If some reasons suggest to us that this or that war "had to be" waged, and if they act soothingly upon our sense of responsibility, the fact remains that -- faced with horror -- our responsibility or consience can be soothed only at the price of insensible oblivion or non-recognition of crime. Whether the reasons for war are metaphysical/substantial or rational/targeted is more or less irrelevant, as both function to conceal the essence of war, its criminality. To say that "our" crime is "justified" because others would, if they could, commit equal or worse ones, is a justification procedure which will not make of any crime something better or different from what it is. Regardless of what reasons and aims could be cited for a "justifiable war", its key aim is still death of the other. War is an operation of inflicting death. For what type of life is the death of others a relevant justification?

Nietzsche was irritated by "bloody farces" such as, for example, the French Revolution: "Its 'immorality' is of little concern to me: what I hate is its Rousseaudian morality -- the so-called 'truths' of the revolution with which it still exerts influence and draws to itself all that is superficial and mediocre" (Twilight of the Idols). This specific war which is called revolution never had a separate existence from that lived by any other war, by war as such. Only, if that is so, could we say: the "immorality" of the bloody late 20th century Balkan orgy concerns us little, what we hate is its multiple (antagonistic) national-moralism and chauvinism? Are not this morality and immorality the obverse and reverse of the same story?

In Battle of the Universities, Kant maintained that there is a discernible moral tendency in humankind through history, and that it is visible precisely in the phenomenon of revolution, or, more concretely, in the enthusiasm and sympathy which this phenomenon arouses even in neutral spectators... He came to believe that this moral tendency only factually confirmed some of the postulates of his philosophy, the postulates of pure practical reason. The meaning of the "enthusiasm" mentioned in this context is doubtless equivalent to the feeling that, in a single moment, all becomes possible. What is overlooked is that crime, too, becomes possible. This feeling is the more intrusive if the opposite feeling -- one of complete powerlessness -- was dominant before the outbreak of the revolution. But is not every war an attempt -- however clumsy and stupid -- to resovle a situation which has become impossible?! Is not war also the violent transformation of the impossible into the possible? Have not wars, like revolutions, only too frequently been the object of moral enthusiasm of numerous intellectuals? Finally, has not this victorious, or even triumphant "enthusiasm" or, if you wish, transformation of impossible into possible, always in the end, post festum or after the orgy, resulted in a certain "brotherhood of terror", in a cruel victory of the forces of the day and in a renewed fall into the impossible?!

Nietzsche is right when he incriminates the moral truths of the revolution, and with them, maybe, the truths of any war. However unbridled military fanaticism may be, however obedient the ideological conviction accompanying it, however steadfast the "philosophical peace" or "revolutionary tranquility" with which enemies' heads are chopped off, the fact will always remain that these truths are, as Nietzsche said, "something else which only cannot find a more honourable name"! The fact of hateful ideological shrouding will always remain.

The statement that blood is the worst witness of truth includes, doubtless, the truth that blood, although the worst witness, does testify somehow: the truth of testimony. Does the idea of testimony in itself offer us an epistemologically problematic discourse? As a symbol of aggression, violence, war, blood is the fatal effect of inflicted death. Blood is fate itself. What is it, though, that blood (badly) testifies about in discourse? What about, if no the "truths" themselves?! What is it that the blood which Nietzsche himself spills with the tip of his sharp pen, with his textual polemicism, calls upon? What does it testify about? What does the blood call upon which "flows" in our polemics, quarrels, babblings, in our quotidian speech, as in war prolonged by some other means? Of what real, ontological power (or powerlessness) is the witness this "movable army of metaphors" of which the Nietzschean "hammer philosophy" consists?

An aesthetician correctly said that blood in art is not bloody. He probably did not dream that this "rule" applied not only to art, but also to every discourse or testimony about war which man would or could articulate. The fact that blood cannot be bloody in any sort of speech means that there are events which cannot be converted into words without immediately losing what is essential in them: their tragicalness. There is nothing tragical in art, for even tragedy itself is not tragical: it is only a game and a simulation... The word war does not go to war. Except in cases when it is used as an instrument of war, as an ideological "truth"...

The tragical is possible in life only, and exclusively in that part of it which is cruelly defeated. The only ones who could maybe "authentically" testify about war, and who would do it best, no longer exist. The cruel unutterableness of the tragic in human life is reflected in the fact that those most competent to speak of this suffering are precisely those who have already had their last word. The empty space left behind by those who are "leaving" will be quickly filled. The grass will keep growing. The postman will bring new call-up notices... Boys die, the militaristic mascarade carries on its euphoric funeral dance ceaselessly.

Many of those here who until the day before considered themselves great humanists, and strategists of universal human emancipation, now theodically cheer the dull derision of death, believing that blood always drips dialectically to the rhythm of a higher, ascending justice, if not terrestrial, then certainly celestial. What matter if this theodicy of blood and charred earth is not the least bit original. Goebbels's propaganda offers unforgettable examples, such as this one: "One being drinks the blood of another. The death of one feeds the other. One should not blather about humaneness. The struggle remains". Such "thoughts" can be articulated much less crudely and brutally, but their meaning, and especially their consequences in a situation of national conflict, such as the one after the break-up of Yugoslavia, must be equally fatal. It is enough to "innocently" say: "We cannot live with them!" Such a statement was not, and never will be, a constative, even though numerous strategists of hatred tried their utmost to prove that this was an ancient and eternal (supra)historical truth. In that statement, conflict is performatively established and is, of course, a constative only apparently/ideologically, containing therefore only a certain anticipation and production of war. Hitler spoke of the final solution of the Jewish question, while today, in the Balkans, many dream of the final solution to their own problems...

Though today no-one will openly espouse the motto of "Long live death!", we live in a situation in which death has become the currency of life, the general equivalent of all our exchanges. Death is mutual and total, a total negation of the other as a constitutive precondition of "our" survival. And for the others, "our" survival is, naturally, theirs! The game of ideological, religious and ethnical satanization of the other is a game played between two "us" and two "they", where all the subjects are mutually legitimized and delineated by their readiness to drink the blood of the other. Ones feed on the death of the others. Death becomes useful, productive, nutritious. Therefore, war as inflicted death becomes the instrument to satisfy the highest interests of a community, the bread and salt of the people... But crime cannot replace life. It will never have its own identity. However ominous it may be, sooner or later it is revealed as a pathological excrescence on the tissue of life, and is rejected by it.

Of course, life can wait, but the philosophe and the intellectual cannot. They are responsbile here and now. The unutterability of horrors will never be sufficient alibi for silence. The intellectual is a pacifist, or he is not an intellectual. He is the enemy of instrumental apology of war, of cartographic poems and modern theodices of blood and soil... Pacifism itself is not a standpoint devoid of paradoxes. But radical -- not half-way or moderate -- pacifism is the only standpoint which enables us to avoid ideological self-delusions, and to understand, if not solve, the paradoxes into which pacifist rejection of war falls when faced with aggressive coercion.

Is not pacifism too abstract, though, and, as such, superfluous, since peoples have been going to war from the beginning of time, so that war represents both the concrete and the fated reality of human history? This objection is unfounded for several reasons. First, because the concreteness of war reaffirms, rather than denies, pacifism. Pacifism would be superfluous only in a situation in which people would not be going to war, or in which war would not exis even as a threat. Next, just as important, war is not the fated reality of human history. However frequent and likely an occurrence, it is not necessary or unavoidable. There is no ontological or any other necessity in the constitution of war. Whatever the reasons for waging a war, the reality to which they practically point will always be something performatively produced, not antecedent which then becomes constative. Infliction of death is not fated. Death of the other is neither the necessary nor the unavoidable condition of "our" survival, just as that other is not through any ontological or eschatological necessity genocidal (because the death of his enemy, that is, of "us", is neither necessary nor unavoidable for his survival). Any form of inflicted death, including war, is a matter of someone's criminal decision, or of a series of decisions, and of their strategic or practical inertia. If there were not a surfeit of crime in war -- which is, however, always the case -- then war heroes would be the greatest criminals.

Is the following objection possible: war may be undesirable, but is certainly a natural and usual (if not unavoidable) occurrence in human history? Is not this opinion on the naturalness of war, if not generally accepted, at least widely diffused? Let us look closely at that sort of argument.

In The Republic, Plato argued that the Hellenes and the barbarians were "natural enemies, and this enmity should be called war. If, however, Hellenes fight Hellenes, we shall say that they are natural friends, and that Greece in that state is sick and rebellious, and this enmity should be called discord" (V, 470). In other words, pacifism is a good thing in relations among Hellenes. In relations with barbarians, though, war is a natural occurrence, and pacifism would be an overly artificial, so to say Platonic, position! All of history after Plato was not too inclined to "exaggeration" in rating the chances for peace between different nations (whatever that term means). Plato's views gained universal currency.

War between different nations/peoples/states/communities was considered ("regrettably" -- this aside was not obligatory, and often not sincere) a natural phenomenon, something like a storm, while internal conflicts (rebellion, unrest, civil war etc.) were usually seen (if we except interpretations such as that of Machiavelli) as pathological digressions... However, something has changed significantly in this respect now. After the breakdown of the bipolar structure of the world order, the world is gradually, regardless of many inconsistencies, turning into a single community (=OUN) in which, in the future, "enmity should be called discord"! War is no longer a natural phenomenon, because in the global village there are no more "natural enemies", or "barbarians", and beyond the global village there is nothing! That is why war today, in the post-Cold War era, is slowly taking on its constitutional characteristic, that of impermissible crime!

Pacifism is the necesary precondition for the existence of something such as the global village. This does not mean that in that village there are no wars, and that there can and will not be any. It means that there should not be any wars in it, and that this performative ban, acting progressively through the institutions of the global village, will construct a reality in which conflicts will no longer be solved by war. Regardless of the still slow and insufficiently consistent signs of these changes today, many of those who understand the matter will recognize that precisely an abstract pacifism and humanism are the implicit (philosophers would say: prereflexive) cogito of the intellectual. Precisely because one can only be silent about horror, everything that one can speak about speaks against the horror, and primarily against the horror of war. For those who consider the disappearance of war as a justifiable or heroic activity too great a loss, consolation lies in the fact that war between Tom and Jerry is, after all, an eternal category.

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