Anatomy of Torture by Ron E. Hassner (review)

In other words, there is nothing wrong with the waging of forever wars—against communism, terrorism, and the enemies of freedom—so long as we can feel good about how this is being done and are spared the ugly bits. Fat free, sugar free war enjoyed thousands of miles away from the real consequences. What gives Moyn’s Humane its gravity, and which elevates it above interesting but cynically critical texts in the same vein like Jean Baudrillard’s The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, is the fact that he genuinely believes in an alternative to all this. Drawing deeply on the pacifist tradition of Leo Tolstoy and Bertha von Suttner, Moyn wonders why so much time is spent resigned to making war more humane—and consequently less appalling—and not on the cause of achieving genuine worldwide peace. Written in the aftermath of a 20-year-long failed campaign in Afghanistan and as Russian tanks roll over the Ukrainian plains, it is a very good question. It also isn’t an especially partisan one. While Moyn himself is obviously very much on the left end of the American political spectrum, Humane is very free of the rote biases and mania that characterizes too much commentary on American geopolitics. Indeed, some of the most complex sections of the book involve his deep ruminations of Barak Obama. Initially hailed as a worldwide symbol of progress, preemptively crowned with a Nobel Prize as his tenure had barely begun, Moyn makes no bones about the role of Obama’s administration in perpetuating and even expanding the global war on terror. In an appropriately Tolstoyan manner, Moyn is critical of the 44th President even as he acknowledges how powerless the most powerful man in the world sometimes seemed to advance a cause of peace undoubtedly close to his heart. That fat free, sugar free war has become a structural necessity is one of the grimmer intuitions one gets when reading Humane. There are limitations to Moyn’s book. It would have been nice to see him engage more deeply with the literature defending war, of which there is always a surfeit. This isn’t only for geopolitical reasons. Many find in war everything from an expression of human nature to a catalyst for our most exalted existential projects; including many of the neoconservative intellectuals who cameo in the later parts of Humane. It would have been interesting to see Moyn take a page out of Corey Robin’s playbook and engage this vastly different conceptualizations head on. But these are minor quibbles next to the book’s immense riches. Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War is a remarkable book by an essential scholar. We can only hope that more of us will take Moyn’s dream seriously and give real peace a chance.