War, Peace, Man

Before speaking of war or peace, one must clarify what is meant by these words, because they do not describe natural phenomena but human arrangements, and arrangements are always products of decisions, exclusions, and hierarchies.

In Greek thought, pólemos does not simply mean armed conflict. In Heraclitus, pólemos names a principle by which order is produced through opposition; it is the force that separates, ranks, and assigns position. War, in this sense, is not first a historical event but a mode of world-making, a way of producing hierarchy by force. Already here, war is not chaos, but ordering violence.

What later Roman thought adds is administration. For Julius Caesar, war (bellum) is inseparable from discipline, command, and expansion; his commentaries do not romanticize battle so much as they normalize the conversion of human beings into instruments of territory, obedience, and legacy. War becomes the continuation of domestic authority on a territorial scale: not an interruption of civic order, but its projection outward, accomplished through chain of command, logistics, and the legal-moral language of necessity.

The term man must therefore also be defined historically, not biologically. In Greek and Roman political thought, the man is not simply the male body, but the bearer of authority (kyrios, pater familias), the one entitled to command others and to represent the household in public. Manhood is a political position before it is a personal identity. To be a man is to rule, to own, to decide, and to appear as the measure of the common world.

From here, a further distinction becomes unavoidable: the distinction between the private and the public, not as psychological interiors and exteriors, but as two regimes of visibility. The private is the realm where domination can be made habitual and therefore unremarkable; the public is the realm where domination must be justified, narrated, staged, or denied. A society is not peaceful because violence is absent, but because violence has found places where it can operate without appearing as violence.

This is why it is useful to pause with Confucius before moving to modern political theory. In classical Confucianism, order is imagined as correct placement: the world is stable when relations are performed according to rank; parent over child, elder over younger, husband over wife, sovereign over subject, so that authority is not experienced as coercion but as the natural shape of things. What matters is not the elimination of force, but the interiorization of hierarchy to the point where force is rarely required; peace is the name for domination that reproduces itself quietly.

If the Greek notion of pólemos gives us order through opposition, and Rome gives us order through administration, Confucius gives us order through habituation: the training of the private realm so that public stability becomes possible. In this triad, war and peace are no longer opposites. They are two speeds of the same arrangement: the slow violence of normalized hierarchy and the fast violence of overt coercion.

At this point, it becomes possible to understand why “discovery” is never merely geographic. The European explorer does not simply arrive; he must narrate arrival as origin. In letters and reports attributed to the first voyages, possession is performed linguistically; names are given, flags raised, sovereignty declared as if speech itself could annul prior existence and install a new reality. The decisive operation is not that land is found, but that what already exists must be rendered as if it were not there, so that taking can masquerade as beginning.

This is where the fantasy of man becomes visible in its purest form: the fantasy of being first.

To be first, one needs emptiness. But emptiness is rarely encountered; it must be produced. The rhetoric of virgin land does not describe geography; it manufactures legitimacy. Virginity here is not a property of land. It is a projection of man onto the world, a way of seeing that turns annihilation into settlement, erasure into founding, and theft into creation. The land must be imagined as female only in this restricted sense: not as woman, but as an object onto which man projects availability so that ownership can appear natural rather than violent. In this projection, woman is not a reality; “the feminine” is a screen.

This logic does not end with conquest; it is refined by capitalism.

Capitalism is more than an economic technique; it is a machine of thought that produces moral asymmetry out of numerical asymmetry. Its core claim is circular but powerful: the one who has more must deserve more; deserving is proven by having. Once this circle is accepted, accumulation becomes a virtue rather than an outcome, and inequality becomes evidence rather than problem.

What this machine requires is a specific distribution of meaning. The machine itself - la machine, die Maschine - is imagined as bearer and processor, as that which works, yields, and sustains the process. It is coded as woman: not woman as lived reality, but woman as imagined ground. It bears without owning, produces without appearing as origin, sustains without being recognized as sovereign.

What stands at the end of this process is success - le succès, der Erfolg. Success is not a mechanism but a figure. It is personal, visible, named, celebrated. It is coded as man. The yield attaches to him, while the labor, the bearing, the exhaustion remain elsewhere.

This asymmetry reproduces an old division: that which carries does not own; that which makes possible does not decide what counts. The machine is allowed to function only as long as it does not claim authorship. As soon as the bearer asserts itself as subject, the system falters.

At this point, war must be reintroduced, not as interruption, but as response.

War, as we have already seen, is not disorder but organized force. In Hannah Arendt, violence appears precisely where power fails. Power, for Arendt, is not the capacity to coerce, but the capacity to act in concert; it depends on consent, recognition, and the ongoing agreement of those who participate in an order. Violence enters when this agreement can no longer be secured. Violence is therefore not the foundation of power, but its symptom.

This distinction is decisive here. As long as woman, understood both literally and structurally, can be made to bear without resisting, power remains intact. As long as land yields, labor yields, bodies yield, and the earth absorbs extraction without visible collapse, domination does not need to announce itself. Order reproduces itself quietly. Peace persists.

But when woman refuses, when reproductive, emotional, sexual, or economic submission is withdrawn, power begins to erode. When the earth refuses, when soil depletes, climates destabilize, waters rise, forests burn, the fantasy of endless bearing collapses. What had been treated as passive ground reveals itself as finite, reactive, and no longer compliant.

This is experienced by man not as ecological reality, nor as political consequence, but as betrayal.

At this point, the logic that once operated privately must be enforced publicly. What could previously be secured through habituation, dependency, and silence now requires overt force. War emerges as the attempt to reassert a hierarchy that no longer reproduces itself. It appears as necessity, but functions as punishment: punishment not only of women who refuse submission, but of a world that no longer behaves as endlessly available ground.

War thus functions as reaction to non-success: the failure of suppression, the failure of extraction, the failure of control. It is the violent effort to restore the distinction between bearer and owner, between machine and success, between earth and man. Where domination no longer works through dependency, it works through destruction.

Seen this way, war is not only directed outward toward enemies, but inward toward the conditions of life themselves. It does not merely kill; it wastes. It burns resources that can no longer be quietly taken. It destroys what can no longer be owned.

Peace is simply the indoor version of this order, the form it takes when domination no longer requires spectacle. In times of peace, violence does not stop; it becomes quiet, repetitive, intimate, and therefore easier to deny. Killing learns to whisper.

Violence relocates into spaces designated as private and therefore non-political: bedrooms and nurseries, offices and kitchens, contracts and routines, gestures and silences. The battlefield contracts to the scale of the body. There are no medals for this form of violence, no parades, no official memory. What replaces them are discipline, repetition, normalization, and shame.

Within this arrangement, the man strikes, coerces, rapes, humiliates, and objectifies, not as eruption, but as maintenance. Objecthood is required so that the man can continue to experience himself as central, stable, unquestioned. Without an object beneath him, he risks becoming visible as contingent, dependent, replaceable. Visibility threatens the order that sustains him.

Birth stands in direct opposition to this order. It produces life without permission, without property, without conquest. It does not accumulate, does not obey linear time, does not generate ownership. It creates relation rather than territory. For a system grounded in possession and inheritance, this form of generation is intolerable.

As long as private domination functions, so long as women comply, submit, internalize, withdraw, the world appears orderly. Violence remains deniable. But when women refuse, when land no longer yields, when labor resists, when the earth itself begins to collapse under extraction, the fantasy of endless bearing dissolves.

This is experienced by man not as consequence, but as betrayal.

The significance of what are commonly referred to as the Epstein files lies precisely here. Their importance is not reducible to the criminality of one man, nor even to the scale of abuse, but to what they reveal about the architecture of peace. What becomes visible is not an anomaly, but a system: the organized, routinized access of powerful men to bodies rendered available through wealth, dependency, legal shielding, and silence.

The publicly available records released by the United States Department of Justice concerning the Epstein case document years of sexual abuse of children and girls, alongside repeated institutional failures to interrupt that abuse despite extensive evidence and testimony.

-> https://www.justice.gov/epstein

What these records make clear is not only the existence of sexual violence, but the conditions under which such violence can persist without political consequence. The private settings, aircraft, residences, contractual arrangements, jurisdictional ambiguity, were not incidental. They were the condition of possibility. Violence operated openly because it was correctly privatized.

What is striking in the publication of these documents is the asymmetry of visibility they produce. The names of many men implicated as perpetrators or participants are intentionally redacted, while the names of girls, children, and women were left unredacted unintentionally, appearing fully spelled out and permanently attached to the public record. Men remain structurally protected by anonymity; those subjected to violence are exposed through administrative failure rather than deliberate choice.

This asymmetry does not require intent in order to have effect. Protection continues to operate upward, while visibility is imposed downward. Responsibility is diffused, while vulnerability is fixed. The order that enabled the abuse remains largely intact, even as its traces are made public.

At this point, what could no longer be enforced privately must be enforced publicly. The household expands into the nation, personal coercion hardens into ideology, and domination takes the form of war. War begins when the existing order can no longer be enforced quietly.

In Ukraine and Iran, this logic appears in concentrated form. Figures such as Putin and Trump function as carriers of authority that asserts itself through force when continuity fails. What is projected onto these territories is not policy but domination: control over land, bodies, and infrastructure. Where hierarchy can no longer sustain itself through dependency, it is imposed through violence. The position itself cannot accommodate loss. To lose would mean to relinquish the claim to centrality on which the order depends. This dynamic intensifies even within environments already structured by rigid internal hierarchies, producing expansion rather than resolution.

Seen this way, war is not only directed outward toward enemies, but inward toward the conditions of life themselves. In times of ecological collapse, this becomes unmistakable: war accelerates where the earth refuses further exploitation, where the fantasy of infinite yield reaches its limit.

War does not erupt because peace failed.
War begins when the existing order can no longer be enforced quietly.

Bibliography

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· Arendt, Hannah. On Violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970.

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