In the urban landscape of many places, testimonies of wars past remain. Invaded cities. Bombarded cities. Ruins. Before the decayed structures of Euryalus Castle and the remains of the great wall that once encompassed Syracuse, the memory of Thucydides' account surfaced. Between words and vestiges, the imaginary that gave meaning to that vast theatre of ancient conflicts was being woven. In Ortygia, I walked through the streets of the polis alongside a retired postman of the city. We reached the highest point of the island: in that place, Archias, who had sailed from Corinth leading migrants to Sicily, founded Syracuse (c. 734 BCE), after expelling its indigenous inhabitants. We walked further, to the house where he was born. Nearby, ascending the steps up to the belvedere overlooking the Ionian Sea, he recalled a sorrowful event he had lived through as a child, during the Second World War. From an early age, the violence of armed incursions had been on the horizon of those societies of the past. As it is today. In remote time, in recent time, human violence.
Among the objects of childhood, we find those related to the universe of war. Boys reinvent myths and adventures of conquest in animated imaginary battles, with their miniature warriors or dressing as such, embodying characters and heroes raising toy weapons in their hands. In the ludic territory of that fantasy — within a civilisation that continually nourishes the imaginary of violence and its exercise in patriarchal culture — one army fought another: when invaded by the troops of the stronger (or the cleverer), some corner of the back yard was thus dominated by the armed force of the opponent. Today, new games enter the scene, this time no longer in the back yards of childhood, but rather through electronic screens: the old pastime is now yet more realistic, in astonishing images; violence still as entertainment, in vivid colours and gestures, in a technological experience that grows ever more immersive…
Emperors invested in the representation of wars won, above all in the visual memory of the power of their existence on Earth — victories by which they wished to be remembered. Laudatory scenes of that might were elaborated to be seen upon lofty architectural structures, such as the Wars of Seti I (XIII BCE) visible on the exterior of the Great Hypostyle Hall of the Temple of Karnak; scenes of the Siege of Lachish by the Army of Sennacherib (VII BCE), modelled in low relief in his palace at Nineveh; the narrative spiral depicted upon the celebrated Column of Trajan (II CE) in Rome, representing the two wars in Dacia conducted by that emperor — all of them admired by successive throngs of tourists. The violence exposed in the cited scenes does not terrorise the contemporary gaze regarding the pain of others — accustomed as it is to the myriad dystopian imaginaries long propagated, a gaze that coexists with another technological dimension, whose destructive intensity is incomparable, as the detonation of the Царь-бомба (Tsar-Bomb) demonstrated.
War and colonisation are two sides of the same coin, minted in the blood of beings decimated by imperialist expansions that continue to march, beneath other mantles and faces. In this process, the geological memory of the remotest time of union between Africa and South America continues to be excavated — to extract from the continental bodies (separated thereafter by the Atlantic) gold, silver, diamond, petroleum, as well as rare earth elements and everything that sustains the turning of the capitalist engine, a turning that thereby constitutes the memory of slavery and of the many genocides, a memory that still unites both continents.
In this age of ruin-making, war is hybrid, diffuse, amplified by cybernetics, robotics, and artificial intelligences; it encompasses a vast theatre of operations that envelops the Earth and its beings under capitalism. It further involves the absurd factor of entertainment and cultural expression of nationalist spirit. The conflicts disseminated today, spectacularly displayed across telematic networks and social media, reveal more than weapons and high-technology devices of the war industry — represented and propagated by the audiovisual industry that promotes it; they reveal the permanence of this institution deeply rooted in human societies. Thus we witness, in the landscape of ancient cities — stages for other wars in the past — the clash of forces devastating lives, destroying places and memories whilst (re)writing, in the present, another chapter of this ancestral practice in the march of civilisations.
We glimpse, across the multiple screens of available technical devices, terrible scenes etched in iron, fire and symbols into the political history of recent global hypocrisy — among them those that constitute the newest chapter of the genocidal Zionist war in Palestine, ever sustained by United States support, as the destruction of Gaza attests, laying bare neocolonial interests and an extreme trance in which imperialist rhetorics, mystical delusions, corporate strategies, ethnic elimination, exacerbated racism, utmost vigilance, and other converging factors within the global neo-fascist wave (con)fuse.
Silvio Luiz Cordeiro