Editorial»
Greeks had a word for Iraqi vengeance
NOV 03 - Our word of the day is ecpyrosis. To the ancient Greeks, it meant destruction by fire. The “pyr” root gives us the modern word “pyromaniac.” But the Greeks also used ecpyrosis as a word for extreme combat, as in to be so consumed with fighting that one disappears, as it were, in a ball of flame. There’s some of that now, and there’s more coming.
President Bush had a point on Monday when he said of Iraqi suicide bombers and rocket-attackers, “They don’t care who they kill. They just want to kill.” At one level, the terrorist resistance has the clear goal of driving out all foreigners, regardless of their nationality or purpose for being there. But at another level the killing has no goal whatsoever, since it’s spread far and wide across the whole of lawless Iraq, where street crime and vengeance killings aren’t even reported, let alone investigated. That’s ecpyrosis, the fire that’s consuming Iraq.
Men have been consumed by their violent passions since the beginning of time. This is from Homer’s Iliad: “Achilles then sprang upon the Trojans with a terrible cry . . . as a fire raging in some mountain glen after long drought . . . even so furiously did Achilles rage, wielding his spear as though he were a god, and giving chase to those whom he would slay, till the dark earth ran with blood . . . and his hands were bedrabbled with gore.” Sometimes, ecpyrosis has a terrible poetic beauty to it.
And there are other reasons for some to love ecpyrosis, too. Sigmund Freud was no warmonger, but he observed pessimistically that combat “lays bare the primal man” in each of us. And in that raw mental state, “We are, like primitive man, simply a gang of murderers.” The military historian Martin Van Creveld put it even more simply: “However unpalatable the fact, the real reason why we have wars is that men like fighting.”
It would be nice to believe that Americans are immune to such feelings. But here’s an item in Tuesday’s San Francisco Chronicle, in which a homeless Vietnam veteran was asked if he enjoyed killing. “Absolutely,” came the answer. “Because you have no idea the sense of power that you get from killing someone. You are God. You are playing God to anything and everything that’s in front of you, and you’re killing whatever it is.’’
OK, so maybe some readers will dismiss the testimony of a homeless vet speaking to a Bay Area newspaper. Yet, how about The Toledo Blade? That’s about as Heartland as one can get. Earlier last month the Ohio paper ran a long series recalling the 1967 operations of the 101st Airborne Division’s Tiger Force unit in Vietnam. The paper reported on the killings and massacres of hundreds of civilians, adding ghoulish details — such as soldiers stringing severed ears around their necks as ornamentation. This is ecpyrosis, the sort of thing that was depicted in movies such as “Apocalypse Now” — or that really happened in previously reported Vietnam incidents, such as the 1968 slaughter ordered by Lt. William Calley in a village called My Lai.
But the truly ecpyrotic comment in The Blade’s series came from an ex-sergeant, who recalled the death-defying, death-welcoming spirit of those gory days: “We didn’t expect to live.” That is, if one is going to die, then everything is permitted.
Indeed, after such experiences, ecpyrosis, to be consumed by fire, is sometimes welcomed, almost as a cleansing — which was what the Greeks believed. Or the Germans, and their Gotterdammerung legend, in which even the gods passed into the inferno.Posted on: 2003-11-02 11:12
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