The Way the World Works

Why I’m a Pacifist

Six months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Abraham Kaufman, the executive secretary of the War Resisters League, stood up in the auditorium of the Union Methodist Church in Manhattan and said something that was difficult to say. Kaufman, a man of thirty-three, who had put himself through City College at night and had worked Sundays selling magazines and candy in a subway station, insisted that we needed peace now — and that to get peace now, we needed to negotiate with Hitler. “This tremendous war can be ended by just one small spark of truth and sanity,” he said.

To those who argued that you couldn’t negotiate with Hitler, Kaufman replied that the Allies were already negotiating with Hitler, and with Japan, too — over prisoners of war, for example, and the sending of food to Greece. It was important to confer right away, Kaufman believed, before either side had lost. Our aim should be what Woodrow Wilson had hoped for at the end of the First World War: a peace without victory. “We ask for peace now,” Kaufman said, “while there is still a world to discuss aims, not when it is too late.”

What explained Kaufman’s urgency? It was simple: he didn’t want any more people to suffer and die. Civilian massacres and military horrors were reported daily, and Kaufman feared that the war would prove to be, as he’d written to the New York Times two years earlier, “so disastrous as to make the 1917 adventure seem quite mild.” He understood exactly what was at stake. In his view, a negotiated peace with Hitler was, paradoxically, the best chance the Allies had of protecting the world from Hitler’s last-ditch, exterminative frenzy.

Kaufman was one of a surprisingly vocal group of World War II pacifists — absolute pacifists, who were opposed to any war service. They weren’t, all of them, against personal or familial self-defense, or against law enforcement. But they did hold that war was, in the words of the British pacifist and parliamentarian Arthur Ponsonby, “a monster born of hypocrisy, fed on falsehood, fattened on humbug, kept alive by superstition, directed to the death and torture of millions, succeeding in no high purpose, degrading to humanity, endangering civilization and bringing forth in its travail a hideous brood of strife, conflict and war, more war.” Along with Kaufman and Ponsonby — and thousands of conscientious objectors who spent time in jail, in rural work camps, in hospitals, or in controlled starvation studies — the ranks of wartime pacifists included Vera Brittain, Rabbi Abraham Cronbach, Dorothy Day, and Jessie Wallace Hughan.

I admire these people. They believed in acts of mercy rather than in fist-shaking vows of retribution. They kept their minds on who was actually in trouble. They suffered, some in small ways, some in large, for what they did and said. They were, I think, beautiful examples of what it means to be human. I don’t expect you to agree, necessarily, that they were right in their principled opposition to that enormous war — the war that Hitler began — but I do think you will want to take their position seriously, and see for yourself whether there was some wisdom in it.

Praising pacifists — using the P-word in any positive way, but especially in connection with the Second World War — embarrasses some people, and it makes some people angry. I found this out in 2008, when I published a book about the beginnings of the war. Human Smoke was a mosaic of contradictory fragments and moments in time, composed largely of quotations; it made no direct arguments on behalf of any single interpretation of World War II. But in an afterword, I dedicated the book to the memory of Clarence Pickett — a Quaker relief worker — and other British and American pacifists, because I was moved by what they’d tried to do. “They tried to save Jewish refugees,” I wrote, “feed Europe, reconcile the United States and Japan, and stop the war from happening. They failed, but they were right.”

They were what? In a review in the Nation, Katha Pollitt said she pored over my book obsessively, for hours at a time — and she hated it. “By the time I finished,” she wrote, “I felt something I had never felt before: fury at pacifists.” Pollitt’s displeasure hurt, as bad reviews from thoughtful readers generally do. But I still think the pacifists of World War II were right. In fact, the more I learn about the war, the more I understand that the pacifists were the only ones, during a time of catastrophic violence, who repeatedly put forward proposals that had any chance of saving a threatened people. They weren’t naïve, they weren’t unrealistic — they were psychologically acute realists.

Who was in trouble in Europe? Jews were, of course. Hitler had, from the very beginning of his political career, fantasized publicly about killing Jews. They must go, he said, they must be wiped out — he said so in the 1920s, he said so in the 1930s, he said so throughout the war (when they were in fact being wiped out), and in his bunker in 1945, with a cyanide pill and a pistol in front of him, his hands shaking from Parkinson’s, he closed his last will and testament with a final paranoid expostulation, condemning “the universal poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry.”

Throughout Hitler’s tenure, then, the question for the rest of the world was how to respond to a man who was (a) violent; (b) highly irrational; (c) vehemently racist; (d) professedly suicidal; and (e) in charge of an expanding empire. One possibility was to build weapons and raise armies, make demands, and threaten sanctions, embargoes, and other punishments. If Hitler failed to comply, we could say, “This has gone too far,” and declare war.

Pacifists thought this was precisely the wrong response. “The Government took the one course which I foresaw at the time would strengthen Hitler: they declared war on Germany,” Arthur Ponsonby said in the House of Lords in 1940. The novelist Vera Brittain, who published a biweekly Letter to Peace Lovers in London, agreed. “Nazism thrives, as we see repeatedly, on every policy which provokes resistance, such as bombing, blockade, and threats of ‘retribution,’” she wrote in her 1942 masterpiece, Humiliation with Honour.

The Jews needed immigration visas, not Flying Fortresses. And who was doing their best to get them visas, as well as food, money, and hiding places? Pacifists were. Quaker pacifist Bertha Bracey helped arrange the Kindertransport, which saved the lives of some ten thousand Jewish children; pacifists Runham Brown and Grace Beaton of War Resisters International organized the release of Jews and other political prisoners from Dachau and Buchenwald; pacifists André Trocmé and Burns Chalmers hid Jewish children among families in Southern France; and pacifist Eva Hermann spent two years in prison for her actions as a judenhelfer (“Jew helper”). “I am fully conscious of the fact that my late husband and I did nothing special,” Hermann said when she later received an award from Yad Vashem. “We simply tried to remain human in the midst of inhumanity.”

“We’ve got to fight Hitlerism” sounds good, because Hitler was so self-evidently horrible. But what fighting Hitlerism meant in practice was, above all, the five-year-long Churchillian experiment of undermining German “morale” by dropping magnesium firebombs and two-thousand-pound blockbusters on various city centers. The firebombing killed and displaced a great many innocent people — including Jews in hiding — and obliterated entire neighborhoods. It was supposed to cause an anti-Nazi revolution, but it didn’t. “The ‘experiment’ has demonstrated, so far, that mass bombing does not induce revolt or break morale,” Vera Brittain wrote in 1944:

The victims are stunned, exhausted, apathetic, absorbed in the immediate tasks of finding food and shelter. But when they recover, who can doubt that there will be, among the majority at any rate, the desire for revenge and a hardening process, even if, for a time it may be subdued by fear.

If you drop things on people’s heads, they get angry, and they unite behind their leader. This was, after all, just what had happened during the Blitz in London.

“Even so,” you may say, “I don’t like the word pacifist. If somebody came after me or someone I loved, I’d grab a baseball bat, or a gun, and I’d fight him off.” Of course you would. I would, too. In fact, that’s exactly what I said in college to my girlfriend — who’s now my wife — when she announced that she was a pacifist. I also said, What about Hitler? She made two observations: that her father had served in World War II and had come back a pacifist, and that sending off a lot of eighteen-year-old boys to kill and wound other eighteen-year-old boys wasn’t the way to oppose Hitler. I said, Well, what other way was there? Nonviolent resistance, she replied. I wasn’t persuaded. Still, her willingness to defend her position made a permanent notch, an opening, in my ethical sense.

Next came my brief, insufferable Young Republican phase. For a year, just out of college, I worked on Wall Street, at a company called L. F. Rothschild, Unterberg, Towbin. (They’re gone now.) I became a confused but cocky neoconservative. I subscribed to Commentary, enthralled by its brilliant pugnacity. I read F. A. Hayek, Irving Kristol, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Karl Popper, Robert Nozick, and Edmund Burke.

I wasn’t interested in wars, because wars are sad and wasteful and miserable-making, and battleships and gold epaulettes are ridiculous. But I was excited by the notion of free markets, by the information-conveying subtlety of daily price adjustments, and I thought, Heck, if Commentary is right about F. A. Hayek, maybe they’re right about fighting communism, too. Surely we had to have hardened missile silos and Star Wars satellites and battalions of Abrams tanks. And the winning of World War II was unquestionably a plume in our cap, was it not? We’d stepped into the fray; we’d turned the tide of battle. At that point I put aside political thought altogether. It was beyond me. Its prose was bad. I concentrated on writing about what struck me as funny and true.

Then came the Gulf War. I’d just finished writing an upbeat novel about phone sex. My wife and I watched Operation Desert Storm on TV, while it was actually happening. Peter Arnett and Bernard Shaw were up on the roof of the Hotel Al-Rasheed in Baghdad. We saw the tracer fire sprout up over that enormous complicated green city with its ancient name, and we saw the slow toppling of the communication tower, which looked like Seattle’s Space Needle, and then, within hours (or so I remember it), we were shown grainy black-and-white clips of precision-guided bombs as they descended toward things that looked like blank, cast-concrete bunkers. Soundless explosions followed. Wolf Blitzer seemed unfazed by it all.

I thought: people are probably dying down there. They can’t not be. There was something awful in being able to witness feats of violent urban destruction as they unfolded — to know that big things that had been unbroken were now broken, and that human beings were mutilated and moaning who had been whole — and to comprehend that I was, simply by virtue of being a compliant part of my country’s tax base, paying for all this unjustifiable, night-visioned havoc.

Afterward we learned that those early “surgical” strikes had gone astray, some of them, and had killed and wounded large numbers of civilians. We also learned that there were many thousands of bombing runs, or “sorties”—such a clean-sounding word — and that only about 10 percent of the flights had employed “smart” weaponry. Most of the bombing of Iraq in those years, it turned out, was just as blind and dumb as the carpet bombings of World War II. There was, however, a new type of incendiary weapon in use: depleted uranium shells, fired from Gatling guns and helicopter gunships, which became unstoppably heavy burning spears that vaporized metal on contact, leaving behind a wind-borne dust that some said caused birth defects and cancers. Then came the medical blockade, years of it, and punitive bombings. What President Bush began, President Clinton continued. I thought, No, I’m sorry, this makes no sense. I don’t care what Commentary says: this is not right.

Later still, I saw a documentary on PBS called America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference, about the State Department’s despicable blockage of visas for Jewish refugees, which permanently broke my trust in Franklin Roosevelt. Then Bill Clinton’s Air Force bombed Belgrade. They used the BLU-114/B “soft-bomb,” which flung a fettuccine of short-circuiting filaments over power stations in order to bring on massive blackouts, and they also dropped a lot of conventional explosives from high altitudes, killing hundreds of people. And then, in 2002, we bombed Afghanistan, using 15,000-pound “daisy cutters,” and killed more people; and then we bombed Iraq again and destroyed more power plants and killed more people — wedding parties, invalids sleeping in their beds. And as we debated the merits of each of these attacks, we inevitably referred back to our touchstone, our exemplar: the Second World War.

War is messy, we say. It’s not pretty, but let’s be real — it has to be fought sometimes. Cut to the image of a handsome unshaven G.I., somewhere in Italy or France, with a battered helmet and a cigarette hanging from his mouth. World War II, the most lethally violent eruption in history, is pacifism’s great smoking counterexample. We “had to” intervene in Korea, Vietnam, and wherever else, because look at World War II. In 2007, in an article for Commentary called “The Case for Bombing Iran,” Norman Podhoretz drew a parallel between negotiating with Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and negotiating with Hitler: we must bomb Iran now, he suggested, because look at World War II.

True, the Allies killed millions of civilians and absurdly young conscripts, and they desolated much of Europe and Japan — that was genuinely sad. But what about the Holocaust? We had to push back somehow against that horror.

Yes, we did. But the way you push is everything.

The Holocaust was, among many other things, the biggest hostage crisis of all time. Hostage-taking was Hitler’s preferred method from the beginning. In 1923, he led a group of ultranationalists into a beer hall in Munich and, waving a gun, held government officials prisoner. In 1938, after Kristallnacht, he imprisoned thousands of Jews, releasing them only after the Jewish community paid a huge ransom. In occupied France, Holland, Norway, and Yugoslavia, Jews were held hostage and often executed in reprisal for local partisan activity.

By 1941, as Congress was debating the Lend-Lease Act, which would provide military aid to Britain and other Allies, the enormity of the risk became clear, if it wasn’t already, to anyone who could read a newspaper. On February 28, 1941, the New York Times carried a troubling dispatch from Vienna: “Many Jews here believe that Jews throughout Europe will be more or less hostages against the United States’ entry into the war. Some fear that even an appreciable amount of help for Britain from the United States may precipitate whatever plan the Reichsfuehrer had in mind when, in recent speeches, he spoke of the elimination of Jews from Europe ‘under certain circumstances.’”

In response to this threat, the American Hebrew, a venerable weekly, ran a defiant front-page editorial. “Reduced to intelligibility this message, which obviously derives from official sources, warns that unless America backs down, the Jews in Germany will be butchered,” the paper said. So be it. The editorial went on:

We shall continue, nay, we shall increase our efforts to bring about the downfall of the cutthroat regime that is tyrannizing the world, and we are not blind to the price we may have to pay for our determination. But no sacrifice can be too great, no price too dear, if we can help rid the world of the little Austrian messiah and his tribe, and all they stand for.

Other Jews, a minority, disagreed. (“In wars it is the minorities that are generally right,” Ponsonby once said.) In 1941, Rabbi Cronbach, of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, began talking to Rabbi Isidor B. Hoffman, a friendly, bald, hard-to-ruffle student counselor at Columbia University, and Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld of Omaha, Nebraska, about forming a Jewish Peace Fellowship. The fellowship would help support Jewish conscientious objectors who were then in alternative service camps or prisons, and it would, according to the first issue of its newsletter, Tidings, “strengthen the devotion to pacifism of self-respecting, loyal Jews.”

“Crony” Cronbach became the honorary chairman of the Jewish Peace Fellowship. He was a fine-boned man, always in a suit and tie, and he had a horror of vengeance as an instrument of national policy. He’d seen what happened in the Great War. “People of gentleness, refinement, and idealism became, in the war atmosphere, hyenas raging to assault and kill not merely the foreign foe but equally their own dissenting countrymen,” he recalled in his 1937 book The Quest for Peace. By supporting the earlier conflict, he suggested, America’s Jews had “only helped prepare the way for the Nazi horror which has engulfed us.”

The American middle class, still dimly recalling the trenches, the mud, the rats, the typhus, and the general obscene futility of World War I, was perhaps slightly closer to Cronbach’s pacifism than to Roosevelt’s interventionism — until December 7, 1941. Once Pearl Harbor’s Battleship Row burned and sank, the country cried for the incineration of Tokyo. Abraham Kaufman gave his version of what happened in a letter to a historian in 1974: “Roosevelt,” Kaufman said, “was willing to use the natural Jewish opposition to Hitler to get US public opinion in favor of his war measures (was unsuccessful as far as the country at large) — and finally managed to force us in with the worst kind of skull-duggery of which history is yet to be written. Shalom, Abe.”

With the country demanding vengeance, the false-flag “peace” groups, such as America First, disbanded immediately; the absolute pacifists stuck to their principles. “Our Country Passes from Undeclared to Declared War; We Continue Our Pacifist Stand,” wrote Dorothy Day, in her Catholic Worker. She quoted Jesus Christ: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you and pray for those who persecute and calumniate you.” A Catholic newspaper, in response, charged that Day was sentimental and soft. Day, whose life was spent in poverty, caring for homeless people, wrote back: “Let those who talk of softness, of sentimentality, come to live with us in cold, unheated houses in the slums.” She said: “Let them live with rats, with vermin, bedbugs, roaches, lice. (I could describe the several kinds of body lice.)” She said: “Let their noses be mortified by the smells of sewage, decay, and rotten flesh. Yes, and the smell of the sweat, blood, and tears spoken of so blithely by Mr. Churchill, and so widely and bravely quoted by comfortable people.”

At the War Resisters League headquarters on Stone Street in Manhattan, the executive committee members, including Kaufman, Jessie Hughan, John Haynes Holmes, Sidney E. Goldstein, Isidor Hoffman, Frieda Lazarus, A. J. Muste, and Edward P. Gottlieb (a schoolteacher who had changed his middle name to “Pacifist”), published a post-Pearl Harbor flyer, “Our Position in Wartime.” “We respect the point of view of those of our fellow citizens to whom war presents itself as a patriotic duty,” the flyer said; nonetheless, the league could not abandon its principles. “The methods chosen determine the ends attained,” they wrote. They promised to assist in relief work, to help conscientious objectors, to work for economic justice — and also to call for an early negotiated peace. “The war must end some time and it is proper that we should urge an early rather than a late ending on a basis of benefit and deliverance for all the peoples of the earth.” The flyer got a good response, and won them some new enrollees; only a few angry letters came in, one written on toilet paper. The FBI visited the offices and began making a series of what Kaufman called “exhaustive inquiries.”

Meanwhile, Hitler’s anti-Semitism had reached a final stage of Götterdämerungian psychosis. As boxcars of war-wounded, frostbitten German soldiers returned from the Russian front, and as it became obvious to everyone that the United States was entering the war, Hitler, his arm tremor now evident to his associates, made an unprecedented number of vitriolic threats to European Jewry in close succession — some in speeches, and some in private meetings. (The Jew, Hitler now claimed, was a Weltbrandstifter, a world arsonist.) A number of Holocaust historians — among them Saul Friedländer, Peter Longerich, Christian Gerlach, and Roderick Stackelberg — have used this concentration of “exterminatory statements” (the phrase is Friedländer’s) to date, in the absence of any written order, Hitler’s decision to radically accelerate the Final Solution.

The shift, Friedländer writes, came in late 1941, occasioned by the event that transformed a pan-European war into a world war: “the entry of the United States into the conflict.” Roderick Stackelberg summarizes: “Although the ‘Final Solution,’ the decision to kill all the Jews under German control, was planned well in advance, its full implementation may have been delayed until the US entered the war. Now the Jews under German control had lost their potential value as hostages.” On December 12, 1941, Hitler confirmed his intentions in a talk before Goebbels and other party leaders. Goebbels, in his diary, summarized Hitler’s remarks: “The world war is here. The annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.”

Chelmno, the first killing factory, had already commenced operation on December 8, 1941: Jews from the ghetto in a town called Kolo were suffocated with exhaust gasses in sealed trucks. Beginning in March 1942, the Lublin ghetto in Poland was liquidated: Jews by the thousands were taken to a second extermination camp, Belzec, and gassed there. More Jews, including orphaned children and old people who had until then been excluded from the camps, were taken from Vienna at the beginning of June. Leonhard Friedrich, a German Quaker arrested in May for helping Jews, later wrote: “In the six months after the United States entered the war, the Gestapo felt under no restraints.”

It was an open secret in the United States. On June 2, 1942, a story ran in many American newspapers about Hitler’s plan. It was written by Joseph Grigg, a United Press journalist who had been interned by the Germans for five months, then freed with other Americans as a result of negotiations. “There apparently was an effort to create a ‘Jew-free’ Reich by April 1, as a birthday gift for Hitler,” Grigg reported, “but due to transportation and other difficulties the schedule could not be maintained.” The massacres in Russia, Poland, and the Baltic states were, Grigg said, “the most terrible racial persecution in modern history.”

Meanwhile, that June, the United States was “fighting Hitler” by doing — what? By battling the Japanese navy, by building big bombers, and by having war parades. On June 13, 1942, with the Allied land assault on Europe still two years away, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia threw an enormous war parade in Manhattan. It went on for a full day. There were tanks, planes, and picturesque international costumes, but there were also floats meant to stir emotions of enmity and fear. A float called “Death Rides” moved slowly by: it was a giant animated skeleton beating two red swastika-bearing drums. There was a huge mustachioed figure in a Prussian helmet and body armor, riding a Disney-style dinosaur that strode heedlessly through corpses — the float was called “Hitler, the Axis War Monster.” There was a float called “Tokyo: We Are Coming!” in which American airplanes set fire to the city, frightening off a swarm of large yellow rats. The New York Herald Tribune’s reporter wrote that the only thing missing from the parade was subtlety. This is what the United States was doing during the early phase of the Holocaust: beating big red toy death drums on Fifth Avenue.

During this same mid-war period, the Royal Air Force’s attacks on German civilian life crossed a new threshold of intensity. The militarily insignificant city of Lübeck, on the Baltic Sea, crowded with wood-timbered architectural treasures, was the target of the first truly successful mass firebombing, on the night of March 28, 1942, which burned much of the old city and destroyed a famous, centuries-old painting cycle called Totentanz (“The Dance of Death”). “Blast and bomb, attack and attack until there is nothing left,” said the Sunday Express. “Even if ‘Lübecking’ does not crack the morale of Germany, it is certainly going to raise our spirits,” said the Daily Mail. “We have no hesitation on any humanitarian grounds in writing over the whole map of Germany, as we have done at Lübeck and Rostock, ‘This was once a city.’” Vera Brittain, reading through a pile of these newspaper clippings, exclaimed: “We are Gadarene swine, inhabited by devils of our own making, rushing down a steep place into the sea.”

Operation Millennium was the RAF’s next large-scale fire raid, at the end of May. Nearly a thousand bombers flowed toward the city of Cologne, where they dropped about 1,600 tons of bombs — more firebombs than high explosives — in half an hour, destroying tens of thousands of houses and apartments and more than twenty churches. The area around the city’s main cathedral was a roasted ruin. “You have no idea of the thrill and encouragement which the Royal Air Force bombing has given to all of us here,” wrote Roosevelt’s personal aide, Harry Hopkins, to Churchill. He added: “I imagine the Germans know all too well what they have to look forward to.”

No doubt the Germans did know — in any case, they promptly blamed the Jews for the bombings. On the radio, Goebbels said that Germans were now fighting for their very skins. Then again came the overt threat: “In this war the Jews are playing their most criminal game and they will have to pay for it with the extermination of their race throughout Europe and, maybe, even beyond.” American newspapers gave wide coverage to Goebbels’s speech. GOEBBELS SAYS JEWS WILL DIE FOR R.A.F. RAIDS, said the New York Herald Tribune. NAZIS BLAME JEWS FOR BIG BOMBINGS, said the New York Times. JEWS FACE MASS EXTERMINATION BY ENRAGED NAZIS, said the headline in the Altoona Mirror. GOEBBELS THREATENS TO WIPE OUT JEWS, said the Pittsburgh Press.

The Jewish press took the threat seriously, too. “The Jews were to be used, Hitler often promised, as hostages to assure the good behavior of the democracies,” said Opinion: A Jewish Journal of Life and Letters. “The terrific RAF poundings of Cologne, Essen, Emden, Rostock and other German cities are being answered by the nazis with threats of reprisals — against the Jews.” And Rabbi Louis I. Newman, of Temple Rodeph Sholom, devoted part of his sermon that Saturday to Goebbels’s speech. “The dastardly threat of Goebbels that the Nazis will exterminate the Jews if the R.A.F. continues its bombardment of German cities should be clear evidence that the Jews of Germany and occupied countries have been and are merely hostages in the hands of brigands and gangsters,” Newman said, as reported in the New York Times. “Jews have been martyrs before in the annals of mankind, and if the slaying of Jews is necessary to redeem humanity from the blight of nazism those who are the victims will prove again the stuff of which the prophet and the martyr race is fashioned.”

In the Warsaw ghetto, that same June of 1942, Emanuel Ringelblum read the reports and remembered an old story about a profligate nobleman. Shlomo, the nobleman’s moneylender, auctioned the man’s land in payment for debts. The nobleman, enraged, bought a dog, named him Shlomo, and beat him daily. The same thing, wrote Ringelblum, was happening to the Germans: “They are being defeated, their cities are being destroyed, so they take their revenge on the Jews.” Ringelblum and his friends, although of several minds about the need for retribution, agreed on one thing: “Only a miracle can save us: a sudden end to the war, otherwise we are lost.”

A sudden end to the war, otherwise we are lost. This, then, was the context for Abraham Kaufman’s June 16, 1942, talk at the Union Methodist Church. First worry about the saving of lives, his logic went — everything else is secondary. In July, the SS began the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto, loading six thousand people onto freight cars every day. The head of the Jewish Council, Adam Czerniaków, committed suicide rather than comply; the Germans were holding his wife hostage. Knowing what we know now, wouldn’t we all have stood and said what Kaufman said?

Confirmation of the Final Solution didn’t get out widely in the Western press until November 1942, when Rabbi Stephen Wise, after inexplicable delays, called a press conference to reveal the substance of an urgent telegram he had received from Switzerland in August. The Associated Press reported: “Dr. Stephen S. Wise, chairman of the World Jewish Congress, said tonight that he had learned through sources confirmed by the State Department that about half the estimated 4,000,000 Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe have been slain in an ‘extermination campaign.’”

Once Wise broke his silence, there was a surge of press coverage. President Roosevelt promised retribution and, as Churchill had done not long before, quoted Longfellow: “The mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small.” Yiddish papers carried black bars of mourning. And in December, Anthony Eden, Churchill’s foreign minister, read an Allied condemnation in Parliament. “The German authorities,” Eden declared, “not content with denying to persons of Jewish race in all the territories over which their barbarous rule has been extended the most elementary human rights, are now carrying into effect Hitler’s oft repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe.” Like Roosevelt, Eden promised that the culprits would “not escape retribution.” After Eden was finished, there was a moment of silence: a minute or two of grief for the Jews of Europe. “The whole crowded House — an unprecedented thing to do and not provided for by any Standing Order — rose to its feet and stood in silent homage to those who were about to die,” Sydney Silverman, MP, recollected after the war. “We could not do much to help them. No one desired that our war activity should be moderated in any sort of way or that our war effort should be in any way weakened in order to bring succor to those threatened people.”

The atrocity was so gargantuan, wrote the Nation a week later, that it would have to await the perspective of history to be understood. Again came the question — what to do? “Peace with Hitler for the sake of saving hostages is out of the question,” the Nation’s editors asserted. “Such a surrender would mean disaster for the world, for the Jews above all. Yet the harder we fight, the nearer the doom of the Nazis approaches, the fiercer will grow their homicidal mania. Let it be admitted in all solemnity that there is no escape from this ghastly dilemma.” The only thing to do was fight on.

No, there was a better way, thought Jessie Wallace Hughan, founder of the War Resisters League. Hughan, a soft-faced, wide-smiling woman in her late sixties, was a poet and high-school teacher (she had been Abraham Kaufman’s English teacher at Textile High School). On November 27, 1942, she sent a letter to two fellow pacifist leaders, asking them to help her mount a campaign.

It seems that the only way to save thousands and perhaps millions of European Jews from destruction would be for our government to broadcast the promise of a speedy and favorable armistice on condition that the European minorities are not molested any further. I know how improbable it is that our U.S. government would accept this but if it is the only possibility, ought not our pacifist groups to take some action?

Hughan gave talks on the necessity of rescue, she wrote letters to the State Department and the White House, and she and Abraham Kaufman, with the help of volunteers, distributed thousands of pro-armistice flyers. We must look beyond slogans like “unconditional surrender,” Hughan wrote. “The European Jews, helpless victims of the Nazism we are fighting, are being ruthlessly massacred as the war goes on. Victory will not save them, for imminent defeat may be the signal for their extermination: only an armistice can rescue them, by including in its terms the immediate release of all Jews to allied guardianship.” A peace without delay, conditional upon the release of Jews and other political prisoners, might bring the end of Hitler’s reign, she suggested: “There are many anti-Nazis in the Reich, and hope is a stronger revolutionary force than despair.” She wrote a blunt letter on the subject to the New York Times: “We must act now, because dead men cannot be liberated.” The Times didn’t print it.

Other pacifists publicly took up this cause. In a peace letter, Vera Brittain said that Jewish rescue required “the termination or the interruption of the war, and not its increasingly bitter continuation.” Dorothy Day wrote a front-page article in the Catholic Worker in May 1943, headlined PEACE NOW WITHOUT VICTORY WILL SAVE JEWS:

If we persist in our present war of unconditional surrender; if we promise only executions, retributions, punishments, dismemberments, indemnities and no friendly participation with the rest of the world in a post-war world, we shall be depriving not only the German people of all hope, but we shall be signing the death sentence of the remnant of Jews still alive. If, on the contrary, we demand the release of all Jews from the ghettos of occupied Europe and work for a peace without victory, offering some hope, as Wilson did in his fourteen points, then there is a chance of saving the Jews.

In the following issue Day laid out a detailed plan: loosen immigration quotas, reopen Palestine, issue Nansen passports to stateless Jews, establish safe havens and sanctuaries in neutral countries, and feed those who are trapped where they are: “In view of the fact that mass starvation is the design of the Nazi regime, the United Nations should take appropriate steps without delay to organize a system for the feeding of the victims of Nazi oppression who are unable to leave the jurisdiction and control of the action.” The Jewish Peace Fellowship called for an armistice to prevent Jewish extermination and “make an end to the world-wide slaughter.”

Even lapsed or near pacifists — including Eleanor Rathbone in the House of Commons, and the publisher Victor Gollancz — urgently echoed this sentiment: If we failed to make some kind of direct offer to Hitler for the safe passage of Jews, we shared a responsibility for their fate. Gollancz printed a quarter of a million copies of an extraordinary pamphlet called “Let My People Go,” in which he questioned the Churchill government’s promise of postwar retribution. “This ‘policy,’ it must be plainly said, will not save a single Jewish life,” he wrote.

Will the death, after the war, of a Latvian or Lithuanian criminal, or of a Nazi youth who for ten years has been specially and deliberately trained to lose his humanity — will the death of these reduce by one jot or tittle the agony of a Jewish child who perhaps at this very moment at which I write, on Christmas day, three hours after the sweet childish carol, ‘O come, all ye faithful,’ was broadcast before the seven o’clock news, is going to her death in a sealed coach, her lungs poisoned with the unslaked lime with which the floor is strewn, and with the dead standing upright about her, because there is no room for them to fall?

What mattered, Gollancz held, was, and he put it in italics, the saving of life now. The German government had to be approached immediately and asked to allow Jews to emigrate. The Allies had nothing to lose with such a proposal. “If refused, that would strip Hitler of the excuse that he cannot afford to fill useless mouths,” Gollancz wrote. “If accepted, it would not frustrate the economic blockade, because Hitler’s alternative is not feeding but extermination.”

Nobody in authority in Britain and the United States paid heed to these promptings. Anthony Eden, who’d been tasked by Churchill with handling queries about refugees, dealt coldly with one of many importunate delegations, saying that any effort to obtain the release of the Jews from Hitler was “fantastically impossible.” On a trip to the United States, Eden candidly told Cordell Hull, the secretary of state, that the real difficulty with asking Hitler for the Jews was that “Hitler might well take us up on any such offer, and there simply are not enough ships and means of transportation in the world to handle them.” Churchill agreed. “Even were we to obtain permission to withdraw all Jews,” he wrote in reply to one pleading letter, “transport alone presents a problem which will be difficult of solution.”

Not enough shipping and transport? Two years earlier, the British had evacuated nearly 340,000 men from the beaches of Dunkirk in just nine days. The U.S. Army Air Forces had many thousands of new planes. During even a brief armistice, the Allies could have airlifted and transported refugees in very large numbers out of the German sphere.

In the American press, calls for a negotiated peace were all but inaudible. The only significant publicity that any U.S. peace advocacy group got after 1942 was negative — witheringly negative, in one instance, and rightly so. It came in connection with the formation of something called the Peace Now Movement, which set up an office on Manhattan’s East Fortieth Street in July 1943. Abraham Kaufman, while admiring the antiwar writings of the new group’s chairman, George Hartmann, remained wary of this group, and not just because its name appropriated his own group’s most stirring and useful phrase. What disturbed him was that the Peace Now Movement was willing, as the War Resisters League was not, to accept support from pro-fascists or anti-Semites, or even from “the devil himself,” according to Hartmann, in order to bring the war to an end.

Kaufman also had doubts about the past of one of the group’s organizers, John Collett, who’d been institutionalized for a mental disorder, and whose Norwegian visa imparted a fascist taint. In any case, Collett, out on a speaking tour, self-destructed: he was arrested in Cincinnati for peeping into a sorority shower and fined a hundred dollars.

After Collett resigned, another Peace Now staffer, Bessie Simon, carried on her friendly overtures to prominent isolationists and Nazi apologists, including Charles Lindbergh. Simon also hired a pretty blonde secretary, who turned out to be a plant working under an assumed name (“Virginia Long”), and whose stolen haul of damning correspondence soon found its way to the New York Post. PEACE NOW ENLISTS BUNDISTS! was one front-page headline in a week-long exposé. Life called the Peace Now Movement “not only dangerous but subversive”; the House Un-American Activities Committee condemned one of the group’s mailings, which encouraged churchmen to ask their congregations to follow Christ and lay down their arms. It was, the Dies Committee determined, “a plan for mass treason which was truly colossal in its conception.”

As Kaufman had foreseen, the scandal of Hartmann’s Peace Now Movement eclipsed much of the work he and his colleagues had done. Now, if you were willing to say publicly that the killing should stop, you weren’t just a harmless simpleton, you were a fascist fellow-traveler. According to David Lawrence, a widely syndicated conservative columnist and editor of U.S. News, peace talk diminished Allied soldiers’ fighting zeal. “It is a weapon which is worth more to the enemy than any other,” he wrote. “That’s why it is vital to squelch any ‘peace now’ activities at their very inception.”

And yet Kaufman, Hughan, and the other pacifists — the real ones — regrouped and carried on. In March 1944, with thousands of Jews still living who were not destined to survive, the War Resisters League published an updated demand that the Allies call a peace conference, stipulating Jewish deliverance. “The fortunes of war have turned, and with them the responsibility for war,” Jessie Hughan wrote. “The guilt is upon our heads until we offer our enemies an honorable alternative to bitter-end slaughter. Are we fighting for mere victory or, as enlightened adults, for humanity and civilization?”

We were fighting, it seems, for mere victory. It was inconceivable that we could stop, even though an end to the fighting was the solvent that would have dissolved quicker than anything the thick glue of fear that held Hitler and Germany together. By 1944, Hitler’s health was failing. He was evil, but he wasn’t immortal. Whether or not the German opposition, in the sudden stillness of a conditional armistice, would have been able to remove him from power, he would be dead and gone eventually. And some of his millions of victims would have lived.

Peace and quiet was what the world needed so desperately then. Time to think, and mourn. Time to sleep without fear. Time to crawl out of the wreckage of wherever you were and look around, and remember what being human was all about. Instead, what did we do? Bomb, burn, blast, and starve, waiting for the unconditional surrender that didn’t come until the Red Army was in Berlin. We came up with a new kind of “sticky flaming goo,” as the New York Times called what would later be known as napalm. Allied airplanes burned the Rouen cathedral, so that the stones crumbled to pieces when touched, destroyed Monte Cassino, and killed two hundred schoolchildren during a single raid in Milan. A conservative MP, Reginald Purbrick, who had wanted the Royal Air Force to drop a big bomb into the crater of Mount Vesuvius (“to make a practical test as to whether the disturbances created thereby will give rise to severe earthquakes and eruptions”), began asking the prime minister whether the Royal Air Force might bomb Dresden and other cities in eastern Germany. Churchill eventually obliged him. Remorse works well, but it works only in peacetime.

When Vera Brittain argued against the Allied program of urban obliteration in her 1944 pamphlet Massacre by Bombing, the Writers’ War Board, a government-funded American propaganda agency, pulled out all the stops in attacking her. MacKinlay Kantor (who later cowrote Curtis LeMay’s memoir, the one that talked about bombing Vietnam “back into the Stone Age”) published a letter in the Times dismissing Britain’s “anguished ramblings.” The Japanese and Germans well understood the “language of bombs,” Kantor said. “May we continue to speak it until all necessity for such cruel oratory has passed.”

Some historians, still believing that bombing has a magical power to communicate, conclude from this dismal stretch of history that the Allied air forces should have bombed the railroad tracks that led to the death camps, or bombed the camps themselves. But bombing would have done absolutely nothing except kill more Jews (and Jews were already dying when Allied fighter planes routinely strafed boxcars in transit). A cease-fire—“a pause in the fury of hostilities,” as Vera Brittain called it in one of her newsletters — was the one chance the Allies had to save Jewish lives, and the pacifists proposed it repeatedly, using every means available to them.

They were ignored. The Holocaust continued, and the firebombing continued: two parallel, incommensurable, war-born leviathans of pointless malice that fed each other and could each have been stopped long before they were. The mills of God ground the cities of Europe to powder — very slowly — and then the top Nazis chewed their cyanide pills or were executed at Nuremberg. Sixty million people died all over the world so that Hitler, Himmler, and Goering could commit suicide? How utterly ridiculous and tragic.

Pacifism at its best, said Arthur Ponsonby, is “intensely practical.” Its primary object is the saving of life. To that overriding end, pacifists opposed the counterproductive barbarity of the Allied bombing campaign, and they offered positive proposals to save the Jews. Create safe havens, call an armistice, negotiate a peace that would guarantee the passage of refugees. We should have tried. If the armistice plan failed, then it failed. We could always have resumed the battle. Not trying leaves us culpable.

At a Jewish Peace Fellowship meeting in Cincinnati some years after the war, Rabbi Cronbach was asked how any pacifist could justify opposition to World War II. “War was the sustenance of Hitler,” Cronbach answered. “When the Allies began killing Germans, Hitler threatened that, for every German slain, ten Jews would be slain, and that threat was carried out. We in America are not without some responsibility for that Jewish catastrophe.”

If we don’t take seriously pacifists like Cronbach, Hughan, Kaufman, Day, and Brittain — these people who thought as earnestly about wars and their consequences as did politicians or generals or think-tankers — we’ll be forever suspended in a kind of immobilizing sticky goo of euphemism and self-deception. We’ll talk about intervention and preemption and no-fly zones, and we’ll steer drones around distant countries on murder sorties. We’ll arm the world with weaponry, and every so often we’ll feel justified in taxiing out a few of our stealth airplanes from their air-conditioned hangars and dropping some expensive bombs. Iran? Pakistan? North Korea? What if we “crater the airports,” as Senator Kerry suggested, to slow down Gaddafi? As I write, the United States has begun a new war against Libya, dropping more things on people’s heads in the name of humanitarian intervention.

When are we going to grasp the essential truth? War never works. It never has worked. It makes everything worse. Wars must be, as Jessie Hughan wrote in 1944, renounced, rejected, declared against, over and over, “as an ineffective and inhuman means to any end, however just.” That, I would suggest, is the lesson that the pacifists of the Second World War have to teach us.

(2011)

We Don’t Know the Language We Don’t Know

One Saturday last month I went to Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C., across the street from the White House, in order to protest several wars. The squirrels were out doing seasonal things. A tree was balancing big buds on the finger-ends of its curving branches; the brown bud coverings, which looked like gecko skins, were drawing back to reveal inner loaves of meaty magnolial pinkness. A policeman in sunglasses, with a blue and white helmet, sat on a Clydesdale horse, while two tourists, a father and his daughter, gazed into the horse’s eyes. The pale, squinty, early-spring perfection of the day made me smile.

The demonstration wasn’t officially supposed to start until noon, but already off in the distance a few hundred people had gathered near a platform festooned with a row of black-and-white Veterans for Peace flags. It was March 19, the eighth anniversary of the shock-and-aweing of Iraq, and there was an air of expectancy: arrests were going to happen that day. I sat down on a bench and watched volunteers setting up loudspeakers. Birds were getting in as much chirping as they could before the human noise began. A woman with an armful of red and black signs passed by. Her signs said:

STOP THESE WARS

EXPOSE THE LIES

FREE BRADLEY MANNING

Jay Marx, head of Proposition One, a nuclear disarmament group, took the microphone. He was wearing a knit hat. “Testing, one, two, three,” Marx said into the microphone. “Testing our patience. Testing, four, five, six, seven, eight years of war. Eight years of lies! And we’re live! This park is live! The Vets for Peace are live in Lafayette Park!” (Cheering.)

Code Pink, a women’s antiwar group, was in charge of the pre-noon proceedings. Jodie Evans, Code Pink’s founder, sang “When we make peace instead of war,” to the tune of “Oh when the saints go marching in.” She had on a black hat and a pink vest. She introduced a retired army colonel, Ann Wright, who had resigned her job at the State Department in 2003 because she couldn’t countenance the invasion of Iraq. “I’ll tell you, when Code Pink’s in the house, you know it!” said Wright, to hollers of approval. She pointed across the street. “And the White House knows it!” Wright told us that she had just gotten back from Afghanistan, where the Obama administration was building a $500 million embassy complex. “It’s going to be the largest embassy in the world — larger than Baghdad,” she said. “As a retired colonel, as a former member of the US State Department, and as a citizen, I say that it is our obligation to raise hell! To raise cain! To get these endless wars stopped, and take care of America!” (Big cheering.)

I hurried off to buy some double-A batteries for my audio recorder, and when I got back a group called Songrise was performing a heartbreaking a capella version of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” The crowd was bigger now, about eight hundred people. More police had gathered, too.

Caroline Casey, another patroness of Code Pink, came on the stage to explain, in a strong contralto voice, what it meant to be advocating peace at the time of vernal equinox and lunar perigee. The culture of cataclysmic dominance was going down, Casey told us, and the culture of reverent ingenuity was rising up out of the cracks. She invited us to spiral the best of ourselves forth into what she called “the memosphere.” She also offered a quote from Hafiz, a Persian poet: “The small man builds prisons for everyone he meets, but the wise woman ducks under the moon and tosses keys to the beautiful and rowdy prisoners.” She tossed a figurative key to young WikiLeaker Bradley Manning, in solitary confinement in Quantico, as an agent of democracy, and she tossed a second key to President Obama, to help him see the wrong of Manning’s imprisonment. Obama was himself, she said, “a prisoner of empire.”

A group of Code Pinkers arranged themselves in a row and opened seventeen pink umbrellas that spelled BRING OUR WAR $$ HOME. The crowd was up to about fifteen hundred people by now. A small but committed group of pro-defense protesters — eight of them by my count — were standing out in the street holding flags. Some of their signs seemed to date from another era: CHE IS DEAD GET OVER IT! (held by a woman in sunglasses), and JANE FONDA TRAITOR (held by a man in a black biker jacket). One woman, wearing a gigantic red hat with a red bow, had a sign that said:

I Stand 4

CODE RED, White & BLUE

NOT Pink & YELLER

I went back nearer the platform to hear some of the Vets for Peace speakers. Mike Ferner, who worked in a navy hospital during the Vietnam War and was the author of Inside the Red Zone: A Veteran for Peace Reports from Iraq, was the master of ceremonies — he was an immediately likable guy with a thick asymmetry of graying hair. He introduced Debra Sweet, director of World Can’t Wait, another antiwar, anti-occupation group that had its beginnings during the Bush era. “We have to take a stand against these immoral, illegitimate wars, and this torture being done in our name,” she said. “I’ll see you in front of the White House!” (Huge cheer.)

Caneisha Mills, who had successfully sued the city of Washington for setting up military-style police checkpoints in poor neighborhoods, said: “The president of the United States, Barack Obama, said that he was going to make a change in the United States. The change that we’ve seen has only been for the worse.” Obama and the government were claiming, falsely, that there was no money for education and health care, Mills argued — and now he was calling for military intervention in Libya, even after Libya announced a cease-fire. “We can see that he only cares about wars of occupation and massive slaughter,” Mills said.

Zach Choate, injured in Iraq, read a Dear Mr. Obama letter, which he then rolled up and put in a pill bottle that had held one of the medications that he’s had to take since the war. “You said you would bring my brothers and sisters home, and they’re still there,” he read. “5,938 of my buddies have died. I’m here today to act peacefully in civil disobedience for my disapproval of these wars.”

I walked around the crowd and took some pictures of a six-foot-long scale model of a Reaper drone. It was painted gray, with wide wings and underwing missiles tipped with red and orange paint, and it was balanced on a pole above our heads. What would daily life be like, it prompted us to ask, if we lived in a country where real drones were flying around high overhead, able to murder by remote control? It would be deeply radicalizing and terrorism-sustaining — obviously.

A woman held a white cloth with lettering on it: “How Many Lives Will You End? How Many Billions Will You Spend? Before You End This Madness?” Meanwhile someone — I missed his name — began talking about the heavy “F.O.G.,” or Forces of Greed, which surrounded us. “President Obama — with his very lovely smile and lovely family, and beautiful rhetoric — sometimes fools people. Now we know that he’s part of the F.O.G. The F.O.G. needs to be lifted.”

A woman shook my hand and said, “You are so familiar — have we been arrested together?” I said no, I’d never been arrested.

Ralph Nader was up eventually. He began with some words of sympathy for the victims of the disaster in Japan. Then he said, “General Petraeus said there are fifty al-Qaeda, they estimate, in Afghanistan. Why are we blowing that country apart? Why are we sending our injured and sick home day after day?” Iraq, too — we’d blown that country apart. He quoted a coinage from a recent book called Erasing Iraq: “sociocide.”

Someone near me with yellow dyed hair abruptly turned his back on Nader and said “I’m still pissed off at that son-of-a-bitch about Florida.” Everyone else was clapping, though. How was it, Nader asked, that twenty-five or thirty thousand Taliban fighters, with no air force, no navy, no tanks — armed only with Kalishnikovs and suicide belts and rocket-propelled grenades — were able to resist the most powerful military force in history? “Because,” said Nader, “they have a cause that says ‘Expel the invader.’ Expelling the invader will be forever the cause of anybody in the world who is invaded.”

A duct-taped bucket came around for donations to Vets for Peace, and I stuffed in some money. Then Brian Becker of the ANSWER Coalition, a socialist group that sponsored some of the biggest peace demonstrations before the Iraq War, tore into the Libyan intervention, which had begun with the launch of a hundred cruise missiles that morning. “We have to learn the lessons that are so crystal clear, as Obama and the Pentagon and France and Britain prepare in the next few hours to start dropping bombs on the people of Libya in the name of democracy,” Becker said. “Let’s know this: Libya is the largest oil producer in Africa, and there’s no possible way that if the U.S. goes into Libya it’s ever going to come out.” Libya must be the masters of their own destiny, he continued. “We ourselves reject the idea, fed to us once again, that U.S. imperialism, with all of its guns and bombs and missiles, is going to help an oppressed people. The only help we can give to the people of Libya and Egypt and Tunisia and Yemen is to make our own revolution right here!” (Whooping and cheering.)

Watermelon Slim, a craggy country blues singer and Vietnam vet in a camouflage T-shirt, told President Obama to listen up. “Mr. Obama, these wars were George Bush’s wars,” he said. “They are now your wars. I hate to say that, but it’s a fact.” Vietnam vets, Slim said, were now standing at the White House to make known their opposition, just as they’d done back in 1971: “Mr. Obama, you and Mr. Nixon got that in common. We’re paying attention to you. We say, bring our brothers and sisters home, right now!”

Somebody gave me a flyer for the next protest, on April 9 in New York City. Somebody else handed me another flyer, “How Is the War Economy Working for You?” It was published by Veterans for Peace’s Smedley D. Butler Brigade. On it was a quote from Marine Corps General Smedley Butler (1881–1940): “I spent 33 years in the Marines being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers,” Butler wrote. “The general public shoulders the horrible bill in lives, shattered minds, and back-breaking taxes for generations.”

Then Daniel Ellsberg, former Marine Corps company commander and distributor of Vietnam War secrets, was on. He wore a blue blazer and a blue shirt and a sober tie. He was only a few weeks away from his eightieth birthday. He looked great. “Can one person make a difference?” Ellsberg asked. “I would say that without Bradley Manning having released the cables through WikiLeaks that inspired the uprising in Tunisia — along with the self-sacrifice of a Tunisian named Muhammad Bouazizi, who burned himself to death in protest against the oppression there — without either of those individuals, Ben Ali, our dictator there, whom we were supporting, would still be there. And Mubarak would still be in Egypt. So one person can make a difference.”

Ellsberg asked us if we knew the names of the two languages of Afghanistan. Almost nobody in the audience knew. “The two languages are Dari — which is eastern Farsi, or Persian — and Pashto,” he said. “In Vietnam, none of us spoke the language, but we knew the language that we didn’t speak — that it was Vietnamese. We’re fighting in a country now where we don’t know the language we don’t know.”

Kings, Ellsberg said, once locked their critics away in dungeons till they were forgotten; the French, he reminded us, referred to these dungeons as oubliettes. Kings also once declared wars without parliamentary approval. Bradley Manning was now in an oubliette at Quantico for revealing America’s war crimes; and the Libyan intervention was, like Korea, an illegal war, waged without congressional approval. President Obama believed that he was in a throne room in the oval office, said Ellsberg, with a crown on his head. It was up to us to knock that crown off. (Wild cheers, including Indian war-cry ululations.)

Ellsberg said: “One of the groups in Tahrir Square, that had been fighting Mubarak for some time, called itself Kafaya, ‘enough.’ We need an ‘enough’ movement: enough to empire, enough to imperial wars, enough to oubliettes.” And he ended with: “This is a good day to get arrested at the White House, and tomorrow at Quantico.” (Mad applause.)

Mike Ferner took the mic. “If you’re planning on getting arrested, if you have any questions, Matt Daloisio is back here behind the stage. Come on up and see Matt.” Once arrested, you had to pay a hundred dollars to be freed, or else you had to appear later in court, Ferner advised. He introduced Chris Hedges, columnist for Truthdig, who said, “If you want to stop terrorism, you must first stop committing acts of terror.” Ferner then gave us guidance on the march. “This is going to be a silent march,” he said. “We need to keep in mind what we’re here for, which is to observe the eighth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. We’re here for a solemn purpose. So let’s be that way, purposeful and thoughtful in our march.” He thanked us for coming and then he said, “I’d like to add one personal note to this, which has really been rubbing me raw for some time now.” The people in Afghanistan and Iraq were bearing the brunt of the military aggression, Ferner said, while our cities, our veterans, and our public institutions were all collateral damage. “Our infrastructure and our public institutions may not be being bombed, but they’re being allowed to slowly rot. And that has got to stop.”

The last speaker was Ryan Endicott, an Iraq marine veteran. He was full of powerful indignation, and he spoke at the top of his lungs. “When we joined the military, we rose our right hand, and we swore to defend the people of this country against all enemies foreign and domestic,” he said. “And the biggest enemies to the people of this country do not live in the sands of Iraq. They do not live in the caves of Afghanistan.” He gestured toward the White House. “They live hundreds of yards away!” (Roar of agreement.)

Endicott said: “We know the realities of these brutal occupations, and we know that these people are not our enemies. The fact is that these wars have cost the American people more than just our lives and our limbs.” The wars had cost trillions of dollars, he cried — trillions that could have gone toward free education and health care, that could have prevented millions from losing their homes, and that could have helped thousands of homeless veterans get off the streets. “And that’s why we’re here today in the streets! The streets that we built! With our sweat, and our tears, and our blood!”

Revolutionary change was possible, Endicott believed: Harvey Milk, Martin Luther King, the people of Tunisia, the people of Egypt, had all made revolutionary change. “We’re going to shut down our workplaces. We’re going to shut down our factories and our schools. And we’re going to tell this government not one more dollar! Not one more bullet! Not one more bomb! Not one more day of U.S. imperialism!” (Cacophony of applause.)

People began arranging their banners and signs and assembling to march. “While everybody is waiting, will you please remove your hats?” said Watermelon Slim. “Except those of us who have chemical gear on.” Then he came to attention. “Present — arms!” He played taps on his harmonica, with a slow mournful vibrato. “We must mourn, we must also show our anger,” he said. “We must also bear this war evenly. Let’s go let them bear some of it, too. Come on.”

Then we marchers set out, led by a World War II vet from the 90th Infantry Division, Third Army. We walked silently around several blocks to the west of the White House (evidently the police didn’t want us to actually circle the White House), and then half an hour later, we massed where we’d begun, in front of the black, sharp-tipped White House fence.

There were many policemen now: motorcycle cops, park police, horseback police, K-9 police, and sinister-looking SWAT teams in black hats and black uniforms tucked into high black boots. It was a strangely varied festival of police “protection.” They were hauling out segments of a metal crowd-control fence. They locked together the segments, fencing off a large area of public sidewalk and street. (The street, Pennsylvania Avenue, is normally open to public foot traffic and closed to cars.) And then they announced that if you stood on the wrong side of the temporary fence you were going to get arrested. The police created, in other words, a potential criminal infraction where there should have been no infraction. For standing on a public sidewalk, in a place where people had strolled undisturbed moments before, you could now be arrested for “disobeying an official order.” I decided that this was ridiculous and that I wanted to be arrested. But after consulting my wallet, I realized that because I’d given forty dollars to Veterans for Peace, I didn’t have enough cash to bail myself out. Next time, I thought.

More than a thousand of us stood against the new barricade, shouting, along with the hoarse-voiced bullhornist, “This is what democracy looks like!” And “Money for jobs and education, not for wars and occupation!” And “Stop these wars! Free Bradley Manning!” And “From Wisconsin to Iraq, stand up, fight back!” And “They say more war, we say no more!” I suddenly felt the rising power of an outraged crowd. It has a different kind of persuasiveness than any verbal argument does. I watched a blind man in a wheelchair, missing several fingers, chanting “U.S. out of the Middle East, no justice no peace.”

A hundred and thirteen protesters were eventually arrested in front of President Obama’s White House that afternoon. (Obama, meanwhile, was down in South America trying to sell F-18 warplanes to Brazil.) The arrests took hours. Someone called out, “You’re arresting the wrong people! Arrest Bush I, arrest Bush II, arrest Obama!” One of the women, when she was out of sight in the arrest tent, began a series of blood-curdling screams of protest. “Let us see what’s happening,” someone called. As a paddy wagon drove off, someone called out, “The Jell-O’s no good in the slammer, don’t eat it.”

In the end the SWAT team had to summon two city Metro buses, in addition to the wagons, to carry off the detainees. Both buses carried ads for breakfast at McDonald’s: PUTS THE A.M. BACK IN AMAZING. The police so parked the paddy wagons and the buses that the crowd couldn’t witness the arrests. As a man with a ponytail was pushed into the back of a paddy wagon, a woman in our crowd read from the Constitution, the part about how Congress cannot abridge the right of the people “peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” I applauded her. There was no question that the police were denying the public the right of peaceable assembly.

There were cheers when Daniel Ellsberg, forty years after his arraignment for leaking the Pentagon Papers, was led toward the arrest tent. He turned toward the White House, obliging a policeman who wanted to take his picture. His wrists were zip-corded behind his back. He flashed us a double peace sign from his cuffed hands.

When the arrests were all done, one of the cops collected some FREE BRADLEY MANNING signs and put them in a garbage bag in the trunk of his cruiser.

(2011)

Painkiller Deathstreak

I’d never held a video-game controller until last fall. Which is a pretty sad admission, as if I’d said in 1966 that I’d never watched Bonanza or heard a song by the Rolling Stones. My sixteen-year-old son and his friends — his male friends, that is, all of them polite, funny, good-hearted kids — play video games just about every day. They don’t watch much TV; they don’t have time. Most of the games they play are on the Xbox 360 console — not the Wii or the PlayStation 3—and most involve killing and dying. The big one for the first half of last year was Nazi Zombies, a mini-game included with the best-selling Call of Duty: World at War. In it, you and your friends, linked by audio headsets, hide out in a ruined building, and yellow-eyeballed zombies in Nazi uniforms lurch toward you, mumbling and waving their arms and trying to eat your head. You have to shoot them or stab them or set them on fire, and they never stop coming. If they swarm you, you call out, “Dude, they’re on me!” and a friend struggles over to save you. If you’re near death, you call out, “Dude, revive me!” and a friend jabs you with a revivifying hypodermic. There’s a lot of wild laughing.

I still haven’t played Nazi Zombies. But since last fall I’ve been buying some of the biggest new game releases and trying them out. I say “trying” because the first thing I learned is that video games — especially the vivid, violent ones — are ridiculously hard to play. They’re humbling. They break you down. They kill you over and over. Eventually, you learn how to crouch and crawl through grass and hide behind boxes. You fight your way to a special doorway and you move up to the next level. Suddenly, you feel smart and euphoric. You reload, with a reassuring metallic click, and keep on going.

To begin, you must master the controller. On the Xbox 360 controller, which looks like a catamaran, there are seventeen possible points of contact. There’s the left trigger and the right trigger, the left bumper and the right bumper, two mushroom-shaped joysticks, a circular four-way pad, two small white buttons, each with triangles molded into them, and a silver dome in the middle that glows green when you press it. Then, there are the very important colored buttons: the blue X, the green A, the red B, and the yellow Y. On the slightly smaller Sony PlayStation 3’s controller, the buttons are similar, except that in place of the colored letters you’ve got the green triangle, the pink square, the red O, and the blue X. (The PlayStation 3’s blue X button is in a different place than the Xbox 360’s blue X button — madness.) In order to run, crouch, aim, fire, pause, leap, speak, stab, grab, kick, dismember, unlock, crawl, climb, parry, roll, or resuscitate a fallen comrade, you must press or nudge or woggle these various buttons, singly or in combination, performing tiny feats of exactitude that are different for each game. It’s a little like playing “Blue Rondo à la Turk” on the clarinet, then switching to the tenor sax, then the oboe, then back to the clarinet.

The second thing I learned about video games is that they are long. So, so long. Playing one game is not like watching one ninety-minute movie; it’s like watching one whole season of a TV show — and watching it in a state of staring, jaw-clenched concentration. If you’re good, it might take you fifteen hours to play through a typical game. If you’re not good, like me, and you do a fair amount of bumping into walls and jumping in place when you’re under attack, it will take more than twice that.

On the other hand, the games can be beautiful. The “maps” or “levels”—that is, the three-dimensional physical spaces in which your character moves and acts — are sometimes wonders of explorable specificity. You’ll see an edge-shined, light-bloomed, magic-hour gilded glow on a row of half-wrecked buildings and you’ll want to stop for a few minutes just to take it in. But be careful — that’s when you can get shot by a sniper. Stay frosty.

The first game I bought was Halo 3: ODST, developed by Bungie and published by Microsoft Game Studios last September. It’s not one of the really beautiful games, but it’s instructive. Halo was Microsoft’s first hit on the Xbox, in 2001, and this is the latest offering in the long-running series. It’s set in 2552, during a space war. ODST stands for Orbital Drop Shock Troopers — people who say things like “You know the music, time to dance,” and then drop down through the atmosphere into battle. I plummeted into the city of New Mombasa, Africa, which looked like a dim, cast-concrete parking garage but with grand staircases. An alliance of bad creatures called the Covenant had killed billions of people, and this drop might be an opportunity to save humankind.

Mostly I glided up and down ramps and stairs, shooting at enemies, listening to chilly electronica. I played the game in “easy” mode, as opposed to “normal,” “heroic,” or “legendary”—the menu option reads “Laugh as helpless victims flee in terror from their inevitable slaughter”—but it didn’t seem all that easy to me. Short-statured, stocky aliens called Grunts popped up frequently, and with hostile intent — they had munchkin voices and cackled nastily and they said things like “Die, heretic!” I had to kill many of these. Other alien enemies, called Brutes, said, “I will split your bones.” They sounded as if they had ripped up their vocal cords by popping steroids. I used several different weapons to kill them, including the needler, which shot explosive needles, and I plundered dead alien bodies for more guns and ammunition. The Grunts and the Brutes jeered and tried to end my life. I got lost and hit cul-de-sacs and said bad words and hopped up and down near a burning car. Sometimes I died.

Whenever you’re injured, the screen begins to go red and you hear yourself gasping. Red arrows point in the direction of your attackers. As you near your end, your gasps come quicker and they become odd little yips and yelps of pain. Finally, you die, and the camera lifts. For the first time in New Mombasa — this being a first-person shooter — you see yourself from the outside: a rookie in a helmet falling to the pavement. Another life consumed in this endless war. But immediately you “respawn”—that is, you reappear, ready to try again, at a point a little earlier in the game.

The good thing about Halo 3: ODST is. . I don’t know. If I was fonder of 1970s cast-concrete architecture, I’m sure I would have enjoyed the experience more. The game seemed to me to be both desolate and repetitive, with incomprehensible biblical and race-war undermeanings. I flipped through the game guide, published by an imprint of Random House, and read a list of some of the medals you can earn. Killtacular is what you get if you kill five enemies in quick succession in fire-fight mode; Killtrocity if you add a sixth; Killimanjaro if you reach seven. “Dash about with the Gravity Hammer,” I read, “killing large groups of enemies for lengthy kill chains and hammer sprees before swapping to the Magnum and running to the next group of foes, plugging Grunts and Jackals in the head to keep the kill chain going.” Forget it.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, a production of the Naughty Dog studio, in Santa Monica, was the next game I tried, and it’s good. It was a Sony exclusive, meaning that I needed a PlayStation 3 to play it, and I didn’t have a PlayStation 3. Just coincidentally, in October my son’s Xbox developed the famous red ring of death, a total hardware failure signaled by a warning light around the On/Off button. This seemed a sign from the gods of war to get a PS3, which I did.

Uncharted 2 is about a blue-jeans-wearing male model, Nate, who wakes up with fresh blood on his hands and climbs around on a cold train wreck that is hanging off a cliff. It’s literally a cliff-hanger, you see. Nate (whom we can see, because this is a third-person game) is remarkably good at climbing on things, and his hands never stick to frozen metal, because he’s an action hero. He grunts realistically when he hurls himself up and over the edge of something — the voice actor who plays Nate, Nolan North, is an inspired grunter, and there must be a hundred different expressions of strain on this soundtrack.

Then the screen goes white, and we’re in a flashback. We learn that Nate, who can sight-translate medieval-Latin prose, is in search of Marco Polo’s lost treasure and that he must break into a museum in Istanbul, dart-gunning or punching or choking its numerous flashlight-wielding security guards. His goal is to find an ancient, precious green lamp that holds a clue. He finds it and, being an American action hero, immediately breaks it like a piggy bank on the floor. The clue within leads him to the jungles of Borneo, where he shoots some Russian-accented mercenaries — people are always shooting Russians in video games — and then it’s time to hurry off to sunny Nepal, where there are prayer flags, more mercenaries, and incredible vistas. The acting is often good and includes some funny ad-libs — not just by Nolan North but also by Richard McGonagle, who plays a crusty cigar-puffer. Two women appear in the game — one a tanned Aussie with black unruly bangs and sparkly eyes, who wears a red crop-top shirt that we see a lot of, and the other an old flame of Nate’s, an American journalist with Jennifer Aniston hair pulled back — both of them joshing and likable.

It’s a visual glory hallelujah of a game. Zebra shadows on leaves and rocks never looked better, nor did sunlit onion domes, nor bombed-out laundromats with puddles in them — and the shirts of the guards glimmering in the plum-purple half-light of the Istanbul Palace Museum are a sight to behold. I wish so many foreigners didn’t have to be shot, so many historical sites damaged without comment, but evidently they do or the game wouldn’t exist, and it’s diverting to clamber around on stone Buddhas, solving (or repeatedly failing to solve) spatial puzzles. When you die, the image desaturates to black-and-white and there’s a tactful moment of funereal bagpipery.

The best time I had with Uncharted 2 (which went on to win several game-of-the-year awards) was while eating a submarine sandwich and watching the making-of videos that came with the game disk, fantasizing about what it would be like to work for Naughty Dog as a late-afternoon-lighting designer or a stony-ledge-placement specialist. These people know how to have fun. They’ve even included an optional zero-gravity mode, in which mercenaries, when shot, flip up rag-dollingly in the air and drift there. After one battle, there were two riot shields and six bulletproof-vested dead people peacefully hanging like barrage balloons in the air in front of a temple.

After Uncharted 2 came the biggest release of the year—Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, developed by Infinity Ward and published by Activision on November 10. My son and his friends went to a local GameStop at midnight to get their reserved copies; they played it all night and then fell asleep in school assembly. Modern Warfare 2 sold fast — it reportedly made more money in its first twenty-four hours than Titanic or Avatar did. Millions of people play it every day. In less than a year, it has become the second-best-selling video game of all time, after Wii Play.

Here’s what it’s about. It’s about killing, and it’s about dying. Also, it’s about collecting firearms. And it’s modern warfare, which means it’s set in places like Afghanistan. As in Halo, you are a gun that moves — in fact, you are many guns, because with a touch of your Y button you can switch from one gun to another. But this game has a much crisper, brighter look than the murky Halo, and the graphics engine is better, and the telescopic rifle scopes, their lenses pale blue and curvingly reflective, are a delight to peer through. “Yesterday’s enemies are today’s recruits,” says the narrator, General Shepherd, who is full of little bits of wisdom like that, until he slides over to the dark side.

The first thing you have to do is learn how to aim and shoot, and to do that you run through a training course in Afghanistan with pop-up wooden targets. Some targets depict enemies — they have angry frowns and wear turbans and look like Khomeini — and some depict civilians: boys in blue-striped polo shirts, little girls in dresses, and a plump man in a button-down shirt. The training course keeps track of how many civilians you’ve killed and how many frowning Khomeinis, while a corporal shouts at you to hurry up: “Go, go, go!”

You do so well as Private Allen, shooting Arabs in Kabul, that you are enlisted to help out the CIA, which is up to nothing good in Russia. Then, as part of something called Task Force 141, you begin dying in earnest. I don’t know how many times I was killed as I tried to work toward the northeast section of a runway in order to plant a bomb. (This was at a military base in Kazakhstan.) I wandered tensely through cold Quonset huts. Each time, a jeep would park, and there was a sudden surge of Russian voices and men would aim at me and shoot me. I was shooting them, too. My name during this phase of the game was Roach. “Roach, search the northeast part of the runway for the fueling station!” my commander, Soap MacTavish, said repeatedly, in his Scottish burr. When I got someone in the head, MacTavish would say, “Nicely done,” or “Good kill.” When I shot badly, he would say, “That was sloppy.” I always felt better when MacTavish was telling me what to do.

When you’re hit in Modern Warfare 2, the bullets make a zing and then a flump. Your field of view jolts and gets alarmingly blood-dropletted around the edges. You begin to gasp. The sound goes hollow, as if you’re listening through a long tube, the controller vibrates, and you know that you have only a moment of life left. As your head hits the ground, the screen’s image turns suddenly diagonal and fuzzes out. There’s a swooshing in your ears, followed by a brief whistling-teakettle sound. The last thing you hear is MacTavish shouting, once again, from far away, “Roach, search the northeast corner of the runway!”

Then, at the blood-blurred moment of death, you are rewarded with a literary quotation. These come from Einstein, Voltaire, Zora Neale Hurston, Edward R. Murrow, Churchill, Machiavelli, Dick Cheney — all sorts of apropos people — and they are confusingly contradictory. Some quotes are cynical, some pacifist, some earnestly pro-war. Cheney says, “It is easy to take liberty for granted when you have never had it taken from you.” Gandhi says, “An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.” These neat word packets, displayed just as you’ve been shot or blown up by a grenade, mock the notion that there is any body of aphoristic wisdom that can be applied to a fatal firefight. You’re lying in the snow, dead. Words of wisdom mean nothing now.

But of course you’re not really dead. Almost immediately, you respawn. You’re given another chance. You’re given many, many chances, because Modern Warfare 2 is just about the dyingest game out there. It isn’t, in my reading, a glorification of modern warfare. You play for three hours and you think, This? This chaotic chattering absurdity and panic and wasted ardor is what we mean by “troop surge”? It is an unjingoistic, perhaps completely cynical amusement. The CIA, covertly making everything worse, gets mixed up in an airport atrocity in Russia, which prompts Russia to attack a residential neighborhood in northeastern Virginia, not far from the Pentagon and CIA headquarters (both in flames), with paratroopers and helicopter gunships. “Ramirez,” a sergeant shouts, voice-acted by Keith David, “take your team and secure the Burger Town!” Also: “Be advised multiple enemy mobiles have been sighted near the taco joint, over!”

I’d been playing alone, but the “single-player campaign,” with its improbable story, is not what Modern Warfare 2 is really about. Most people want to go online and shoot at other real people, not at software soldiers controlled by artificial intelligence. “Single player is like taking a Spanish class,” my son explained. “Multiplayer is like going to Spain.” In multiplayer, you choose a locale — for instance, the submarine base — and a style of competition. There’s Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Domination, and others. And then you run around shooting and setting claymore mines where other players won’t see them when they walk into a room. If you kill three people without dying, you can get a U.A.V. — a Predator drone. A kill streak of nine gives you a Stealth Bomber air strike. If you kill twenty-five people in a row, you can get a tactical nuclear weapon, and the game is over. You get frequent bonuses and awards — new weapons, new ammunition, new scopes, new camouflage, new proficiencies. “It’s like they’ve got you on a drip feed of sugar,” my son said. “The only way you get the next little drip is by playing a little more.”

In multiplayer you kill and die so often that a single statistic becomes extremely important to you: your kill-to-death ratio. As you get better — reviewing your deaths on “killcam” instant replay to see who got you — your kill-to-death ratio goes to one and then to more than one. One of my son’s friends, a good student, has a kill-to-death ratio of 1.65. In 219 hours of game-playing, he has killed 32,884 times and died 19,956 times. My son, who believes that wars serve no purpose, has played for 96 hours, and he has a kill-to-death of 1.17; it was 1.4 when he was playing every day. Mine is 0.08.

In order to give me a taste of multiplayer madness, as I practiced my shooting and my sprinting skills, my son set us up by ourselves in a location called Rust — a place in Afghanistan where there is an old oil installation. Sitting side by side and watching our characters on the split screen, we spawned out in Rust, and he began running circles around me. I could hear his feet going pad pad pad pad in the sand, and then the sound changed and became hollow as he ran onto a pipe. I would look around, trying to find him — and then I’d see that he was a few feet away, pointing his gun at my head. His character was an American soldier, I noticed. My character, which I saw when I looked at his split-screen image, was some bad jihadist with Arabic writing on my head scarf.

We were very considerate of each other in the beginning. My son could have shot me many times, but he didn’t. “Go ahead!” I said. “No, Dad,” he said, “I’m not going to shoot you.” He followed me around, waiting for me to take some shots. We carried on this peculiar chivalry for fifteen minutes, sometimes using riot shields, whose glass cracks realistically under repeated fire. Finally I wounded him, and he stabbed me, and we relaxed and began shooting and sniping and running and laughing, just as he did with his friends via inter-couchal headsets. We switched to another map, Afghan, which has as its centerpiece a C-130 transport plane that has crashed somewhere in the mountains of Afghanistan. There were thick-budded poppies growing in the sun, with PVC irrigation pipes over them. Again I heard my son’s sprinting footsteps — he had a multiplayer perk that allowed him to run forever without tiring. He knew a way to get up on the fuselage — I could hear him running down the metallic skin — and onto the tail, and from there up onto a high cliff. I’d spray bullets in a semicircle, and then there would be a single quick sniper shot and I’d be dead. Then he’d apologize. “Sorry, Dad, I didn’t mean to kill, only to maim.” I died often enough that I received a temporary health boost called a “painkiller deathstreak.” By the end, I’d improved — so he said — and I’d machine-gunned him a few times. We went off to dinner full of weird camaraderie.

Altogether, it took me an astounding twenty-four hours to get through the single-player version of Modern Warfare 2—three times longer than the average player takes. But I made a lot of notes, and that stretched the time out some. What fascinated me most were those moments in the midst of a fierce firefight when you were given a chance to find some “intel”—on the second floor of a house on the Russian border, say, where Makarov, the paleo-Soviet terrorist, was rumored to be hiding out. During these tranced lulls, I found, you could wander at your leisure from room to room while your squadron-mates stood around waiting for you to act. As they waited, they cracked their necks from side to side and scratched themselves, as idle men seem always to do under the guidance of artificial intelligence.

I found many interesting things while exploring this house, not wanting, particularly, to get back into the action and be killed again. Some Russians lay in pools of blood in the upstairs hall. In the master bedroom were books on a bookshelf, including The Jungle Book, a law treatise, and what appeared to be a biography of the Dutch painter Gerard van Honthorst. I’d seen these same books back in northern Virginia, during a break in the frantic action there, before the bloodbath at Burger Town. In the bathroom there were sections of illegible newspaper and a Teddy bear fixed to the wall with a knife through its nose. I went into a smaller bedroom.

In it were seven or eight sleeping bags, unrolled, empty, and a lot of rollaway suitcases. Also a pinup of a clothed woman wielding a machine gun. There was something touching about this tableau of sleeping bags, since I knew that the soldiers who had slept there were now dead. If I got down on my stomach, I could crawl right through the sleeping bags, which was an interesting experience — seeing the underside of the texture. I could even crawl through a dead body, and I did once — for everything in a video game is just a contortedly triangulated, infinitely thin quilt of surface. What, I wondered, was in the suitcases?

The only way I knew how to look inside a random object was to shoot it. So I shot at a suitcase. A dingy striped shirt flew out. I shot at another suitcase: another dingy shirt. These rang a bell: I’d seen them hanging from a clothesline in the Brazilian favela, the setting for an earlier battle. In the master bedroom, I shot at some cardboard boxes. Bags of potato chips and beef jerky popped out, and little cherry pies. Down in the kitchen, I noticed an old crate of potatoes — also bags of flour and basmati rice. These staples, too, I’d seen in the favela.

I began to think a lot about the hardworking set dressers for this game, who cleverly reused the same props in different ways in different countries. What moral were they offering — that people were basically the same everywhere? That most of life was getting up in the morning, putting on your clothes, and eating basmati rice? That war, even for the soldier, was the aberration? Or were they just being thrifty, or playful?

Modern Warfare 2, at that moment, felt truer, realer than almost all war movies — although it owes much to them, of course, especially Black Hawk Down. In fact, when I watched The Hurt Locker I sensed the rifle-scopic influence of the entire Call of Duty series — as in the long, still standoff in the desert with the tiny figure at the window. Cinematographers and movie directors think more like snipers now because of the Xbox. I went downstairs in the Russian house to resume the battle. When I was shot and died, I was offered a quotation from Confucius: “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.”

Next on my master list, appearing on November 17, was the ultra-stealthy, silver-hooded Assassin’s Creed II, set in Renaissance Florence and Venice. (This list, by the way, I’d made with my son’s help. He reads the video-game websites and listens every week to the charmingly garrulous “Giant Bombcast,” which is like “Car Talk” but with four vastly knowledgeable gamers.) In Assassin’s Creed II, you are Ezio, a man with many missions. You deliver letters and hurry around cities with a loping stride, climbing up the facades of palazzos and churches when the mood moves you. You leap from rooftop to rooftop, and sometimes you leap in the wrong direction and fall, and if you fall too far you die, whereupon the screen goes red and then white, crisscrossed with many schematic lines, and it says “desynchronized”—because in the game’s frame story you’re not really in Renaissance Italy; you’re really a twenty-first-century man (again voice-acted by Nolan North) reclining in a comfortable virtual-reality machine with an orange cushion.

Sometimes you have to assassinate someone — that’s your creed, after all — which you can do with hidden wrist knives or poison blades or swords or even an early gun, and sometimes you just have to beat someone up. One of your first tasks, in fact, is to find a lout who is cheating on your sister. You call him a lurid pig, and when you beat him up you make money. You can hire thieves, you can loot dead bodies, you can steal florins from pedestrians (although they will fuss if you do), and you can buy Renaissance paintings from a small art stand. You can even hire a group of murmurously flirty courtesans who wear low-cut pastel gowns and coo provocatively, and if you suddenly decide to parkour around on the roof once again they will wait for you down below.

The game, made by Ubisoft Montreal, has moments of loveliness, as when you reach a lookout high up over Venice and allow your gaze to sweep across the sfumatoed city. The colors are brown stone, weathered brick, the occasional red flapping banner, and pale Mediterranean blue. The wind sounds just the way wind should sound. Not much that’s noble or witty or soul-stirring happens in these lovingly re-created cities. If you hang in there for many hours, you get to fly Leonardo da Vinci’s bat-winged glider by night. But mostly it’s death, death, death — and fistfights, and the accumulation of wealth by acts of thuggery. You leap down on the Borgia Pope in the middle of Mass and punch him out. You’re forever pressing the pink square to stab. (Or, on the Xbox, the blue X.) “There’s a lot of face and neck stabbing, if you like to stab dudes in the face and neck,” Ryan Davis explained on the Giant Bombcast. “There’s one really good move where you will stab a dude five or six times super quickly, shank style, like, uh uh uh uh uh, just jabbing — and that’s oddly satisfying.” The most fun I had was jumping off a building into a pile of hay. My son showed me how to rock-climb to the top of the Tower of San Marco, keeping a lookout for the slightly darker brick where the handholds were. That was a pleasure.

To avoid competing with Modern Warfare 2, many game publishers took cover and postponed their launches, so after Assassin’s Creed II there wasn’t much going on till late in January. Out of curiosity, I played the demo for Bayonetta, a Japanese game in which a woman dressed in her own hair kickboxes her way through battles with fearsome creatures. She wears hip eyeglasses and looks like Tina Fey. When she goes wild with a kick combination, her hair suddenly swooshes out and forms itself into a swirling lethal force that helps her defeat her enemy. I also fought zombies with a fry pan and a crowbar in Left 4 Dead 2. A zombie called the Spitter doused me with corrosive stomach acid that emerged in a flume from her enormous toothy mouth. That was the only game that gave me a bad dream: in it, I crouched in a jet engine with my family, hiding out from evil people on the runway, wishing I had a fry pan.

Meanwhile, my son and his friends were laboriously working their way up the multiplayer ladder of Modern Warfare 2. The goal is to reach the top rank, level 70, in which you unlock an AK-47. At that point, you start again at level 1, but with a fancy star icon next to your name to signal that you’ve gone “Prestige.” My son quit playing the game at that point — many of his friends have continued.

Then came BioWare’s gigantic opus, Mass Effect 2, released on January 26, 2010. Commander Shepard (no relation to Modern Warfare’s General Shepherd) is in control of a gracefully elongated spaceship, the Normandy, which has bunk beds, fish tanks, and a wisecracking mess officer who also cleans the bathrooms. “This ain’t no luxury liner,” he says. “I catch what falls through the cracks, heh-heh.” Young ensigns flirt outrageously with Shepard as they give him messages, and Miranda, a brunette with “extensive genetic modification” (i.e., breast implants), accompanies you sometimes on your travels. You visit a strip club where a blue alien dances for you and a bartender tries to poison you. You avert a plague by using some big fans to spread an antidote around.

Mass Effect 2 is the most novelistic of the games I played. It’s an elaborately cataloged scatterment of worlds in which you slingshot yourself around using mass-effect generators that make you go at light speed. You meet many colorful humanoids, with whom you converse by choosing bits of dialogue with your control stick. It sounds awkward, but it works. After one battle, Shepard encounters a young Krogan standing in a corner. The Krogan, a hulking monster with a huge reptilian neck, was born in a tank the week before. “You are different,” the Krogan says. “You don’t smell like this world. Seven night cycles and I have felt only the need to kill. But you — something makes me speak.”

“How can you speak if you’re only a week old?” Commander Shepard asks, providing you prompt this query with your control stick.

“There was a scratching sound in my head, and it became the voice,” the Krogan replies. “It taught things I would need — walking, talking, hitting, shooting.” Walking, talking, hitting, shooting — that just about sums it up. Video games aim to find and nurture the tank-born Krogan in all of us.

I played for a while, visiting planets and shooting incendiary bullets at waves of venomous antagonists. Then I stopped. It’s two DVD disks. It’s really enormous. In order to do all the missions and side missions of Mass Effect 2, you can easily spend fifty hours or more, especially if you like trying all the dialogue options, as I do. I craved more sunshine pouring in through the helmet visors, more leaf shadow, more wind, more air — maybe some little Krogans riding on bicycles. Finally, I gave up. I was dying too much, and when you die the music goes bom-bom-bom-bom-bom-bom-bom, while terrible red and black retinal veins grow in from the edges of the screen.

By then it was the end of February, and time to play the most self-consciously artistic game on the list: Heavy Rain, by Quantic Dream, a studio in Paris that got development funding from Sony. Sony kindly sent me an early copy, in a faux-battered shoebox. When I lifted the lid, an audio clip of a woman’s voice asked, “Are you prepared to suffer to save your son?” David Cage, Quantic Dream’s founder, calls the game an interactive drama. In one interview, in the Independent, Cage said that he feels close to Orson Welles, advancing an art form. And in fact he’s right.

For the first half hour, the game is a stunner. “It’s flipping genius, Dad!” my son called out as he began playing. The faces have complicated eyes and eyelids, and you, a sad-faced father with a strong resemblance to David Duchovny, do pleasant things with your kids and your wife. Then comes grief: one of your sons dies in front of your eyes. Whereupon you enter the gloomy Heavy Rain universe, switching among several characters, one of whom may possibly be a serial murderer who likes paper folding. You are a woman with amazingly good posture and an impassive face who high-steps around her apartment in her underwear. You are a private detective with a big stomach and a big heart. You are an FBI agent with virtual-reality sunglasses. It’s always raining, and the music is lush, and everyone’s face is sad and empty, until you can’t stand the pop of droplets anymore and you’re slogging around in the runoff at the side of the street, wondering whether the clouds will ever part. No, they never will.

Is it a good game? It has realistic eyeblinks and moments of ecstatic mundanity, as when you use the controller to put a frozen pizza in a microwave for your TV-watching son (who is soon to be kidnapped) and then dump it onto a plate. It’s forward-looking, too, in the way it uses the control buttons: at moments of high tension, you have to hold down several at once, like Lon Chaney playing a Bach arpeggio, till you’ve accomplished a difficult action — fought off an attacker, say, or chopped off one of your own fingers. But the plot and the conversational tropes will be familiar — too familiar — to crime-drama watchers. It’s an homage to NYPD Blue episodes and the movie Seven: cops who squabble in Brooklyn accents, some serial killing, some split personality, some amnesia, more lush music — nothing that has any reality in any conceivable life lived anywhere on planet Earth. The endings vary based on what you do — the script is more than two thousand pages long — but my son and I both arrived independently at similar endings, in which the character that we liked the most turned out to be the Origami Killer. Which made us unhappy and made no sense dramatically. In my version of the story, my second son died, too. I suffered, to be sure, but I didn’t manage to save him.

Heavy Rain feels like a clinical depression served up in a shoebox. Possibly that’s what David Cage intended it to be — and more than a million copies have sold, so it’s a successful depression.

The next game on my list was another eagerly sought-after PlayStation 3 showpiece: God of War III, a single-player game set on and under Mt. Olympus. I got about eight hours into it, during which time I cut off the Chimera’s tail, ripped off Helios’s head, and stabbed somebody in the eye with his own horn. I hooked into the flesh of middle-aged naked birdwomen who flew around as Harpies. I injured a horse and saw its intestines pour out. I cut off Hades’s chest muscle and watched it jump around on the floor like a toad; I had to destroy the muscle before the huge Hell god could grab it and slap it back into place. I took hold of the Cyclops’s eye like a beach ball and pulled on it till the optic nerve dangled.

Why did I do this? Because I was the muscleman Kratos, a Spartan-born hero who wears a lot of eye makeup and wanders the mythosphere with a spoiled scowl on his face. Kratos is on a rampage, bent on revenge, because one of the gods tricked him into killing his family. He has a flaming bow and arrow, some claws he won from Hades, a long blue sword, and two big blades, and every time he whirls around — and he whirls a lot, because that’s how he fights — he’s slashing at something. If he slashes well, the words “Brutal Kill!” come on-screen. Once, he runs into a toga-wearing civilian on a window ledge of Olympus. “Curse the gods and their war,” the civilian says, quite sensibly, weeping. “My home — everything I own — destroyed!” Kratos knocks the civilian’s head against the wall and tosses him down the mountain.

This game isn’t satire. It’s a slasher movie over which you have control. It uses the Greek stories to trick you, or your parents (few families abide by the rating system), into tolerating a level of participatory gore that would be otherwise impossible in a mass-market entertainment. You think it must be okay to make your hero, Kratos, slowly tear off someone’s head by whanging away on the O button because the someone is a Greek god and everyone knows that Greek myths are dark, brutal, and Oedipal. It’s all in the name of classical culture, isn’t it? No — it’s a trick.

Even so, God of War III has visual astonishments in almost every scene. You walk around on Gaia’s gigantic rocky body. You see her giant stony breast. You climb into her chest cavity and see her stony heart beating. You cut her wrist so that she falls away. The game, to a surprising degree, is about hacking away at half-naked women, or naked half-women. Whenever you see female breasts, you have a pretty good idea that the breasted person is going to die horribly, and soon. God of War III is a confused confection, and the brilliant, smiley, jokey designers who made it should hang their claws in shame for so misdirecting their obvious talents.

The last big game I played was a Western called Red Dead Redemption, made by Rockstar, the people who created Grand Theft Auto. I bought it on its release day, May 19, 2010. You are John Marston, a polite whoreson cowboy with virtuous instincts who has done bad things in the past. John is handy with a lasso and he has dirty hair, as does everyone in the game. He collects medicinal herbs like feverfew, he keeps cows from panicking in a storm and running off a cliff, he shoots and skins skunks, wolves, bears, raccoons, vultures, and coyotes—“Ugh, what were you eating?” he mutters to the dead coyote as blood splatters on the screen — and he travels the dry borderlands of Texas and Mexico helping or hurting innocent people: your choice. When he loots a bounty hunter’s corpse, he says, “This ain’t nice, I know.” A kind woman named Bonnie tries to draw him out, but he’s not chatty. “You are being deliberately obscure as a substitute for having a personality,” Bonnie says, as she and John canter around her ranch on horseback.

You kill and you die in Red Dead Redemption, of course — with “dead eye” aiming, you can queue up several shots in slow motion, while on horseback — and when you die the word “dead” appears on the screen in fat red cracked letters. But after an exhausting day of shooting and skinning and looting and dying comes the real greatness of this game: you stand outside, off the trail, near Hanging Rock, utterly alone, in the cool, insect-chirping enormity of the scrublands, feeling remorse for your many crimes, with a gigantic predawn moon silvering the cacti and a bounty of several hundred dollars on your head. A map says there’s treasure to be found nearby, and that will happen in time, but the best treasure of all is early sunrise. Red Dead Redemption has some of the finest dawns and dusks in all of moving pictures. Albert Bierstadt couldn’t make morning light look this good. When you do eventually wander back into town, a prostitute pipes up, “I can’t stand to see a man walking around town with such a dry pecker. Can I help?”

So those were the games I tried. They showed me many sights I’m glad I’ve seen, and some I wish I hadn’t seen. I liked Uncharted 2 best, but Red Dead Redemption had the prettiest clouds and hootiest owls, and the taciturn Modern Warfare 2 had the deepest moral snowdrifts. My son has been trying out Crackdown 2, where you leap around a city shooting mutant freaks and collecting energy from green orbs. But he’s playing less now; he’s waiting for September’s release of Halo: Reach, which will let players construct intricately ramped battle structures that hang out over rocky coastlines. I think it’s time for me to take a break. No war, no gods, no bounties, no kill chains, no vengeance. No convoys in Afghanistan. Just end it. Maybe I’ll try a game like Flower, for the PlayStation 3, which is a sort of motocross game for wind and petals. Or even go outside, with my pants legs tucked into my socks so that the midsummer ticks don’t crawl up my legs. I miss grass.

(2010)