Lee Kern, G20, Q1

Si vis Pacem, Para Bellum: the Roman general Vegetius’ expression speaks of the necessity
for preventive deterrence of war - whether as a preventive threat or an actual occurrence - as
a means of preserving peace. Unsurprisingly, Vegetius’ view held and still holds a long and
prominent line of succession in the Western tradition after the Epitoma Rei Militaris1
eventually became the military bible of Europe, and has since expanded from Vegetius’
narrow focus of war preparation as a means of preventive deterrence to a means of achieving
geopolitical outcomes framed as a form of ‘peace’. It has become a stubborn and deeply
entrenched belief among nations of great power, from American leaders such as Ronald
Reagan who argued for a military arms build-up as a means of “peace through strength” 2 to
deter Communist threats, to strongman archetypes such as Vladimir Putin who justified
preparing for the invasion of Ukraine as a means of preserving peace from NATO expansion
in the Eastern bloc.3 Yet, if we divorce the statement from its military context - i.e., where
peace can be defined loosely as a negative peace of freedom from invasion and interference
from other sovereign powers - the unmistakable directionality underlying the statement
becomes deeply problematic. A Marxist expansion of our uses of the terms “war” and
“peace”, where war becomes a violent struggle from injustices of an infinite variation in
different contexts and socio-political environments4 may even collapse the statement upon
itself: the very waging of war is premised on a presupposition of what is at stake, which
itself may be flawed and deeply unjustified, and so the preparation for war is instead an
impetus for more injustice and hence more war. This is all the more evident in our recent,
more liberal uses of the term “war” as a metaphor, such as where Duterte’s War on Drugs, 5
presupposes, perhaps in a highly artificial and suspect manner, that the root cause of social
ills in the Philippines is predominantly illicit drugs, thereby dismissively silencing other
possible interpretations of the situation at the time.

1
Renatus, F. V., & Reeve, M. D. (2003). Epitoma rei militaris. Oxford University Press.
2
Cannon, L. (1980, August 19). Reagan: 'peace through strength'. The Washington Post. Retrieved April 15,
2022, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1980/08/19/reagan-peace-through-strength/
f343ddc5-fbda-49fc-a524-6fbc29dfb312/.
3
Friedman, T. L. (2022, February 22). This is Putin's war. but America and NATO aren't innocent bystanders.
The New York Times. Retrieved April 15, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/21/opinion/putin-
ukraine-nato.html.
4
Derrida. (2016). Deconstruction and the possibility of justice. Routledge.
5
Reesah. (2020). A Thousand Cuts.

1
Nevertheless, are we too hard on Vegetius by allowing his revered military wisdom to drown
in the quicksand of postmodernity, where attempt after attempt at peace-making and even
reconciliation are met yet again with an infinite Derridean contamination of potential
injustices? Perhaps not, because even if we divorce ourselves from the Marxist viewpoint
for a moment, we find alternative viewpoints synthesised with conceptions of justice,
but it is perhaps in the harmonising of these concepts that offer us a hope. Turning yet
again to give a vulgar gesture to Derrida, it is perhaps unfortunately an authoritarian (and
unmistakably directed) handling of issues of reconciliation, such as in Lee Kuan Yew’s
silencing of the Chinese community’s desires for further justice against the Japanese for the
sake of economic cooperation of Singapore and Japan that have allowed us to move on and
get on with life. Downplaying and forgetting issues may indeed preserve tensions, but it is
perhaps necessary for successive generations to forget the minor fault-lines, rather than wage
an infinite postmodern war of justice-exposing that can allow us to embrace peace. Therefore,
I ultimately agree that Vegetius’ wisdom may have indeed stood the time on the military
front, but for added nuance, a liberal, Marxist approach to the terms “war” and “peace'' may
present the statement to be a flawed and dangerous one - where a pragmatic letting go of the
past may afford us far greater peace.

For the rest of the essay, I shall refer to preparation for war in context, and peace to not be
that of an impossible positive peace 6 (as I shall explain later) but rather an absence of the
threat at hand.

Can the Marxists just shut up and leave us alone? Why preparation for cultural wars does
not give us peace
Here, it is apposite to define and scope the general modus operandi of a preparation for war
against a (non-military) form of injustice in the Marxist vein, which would be in general
terms a form of exposure of injustices which can serve as impetus for resistance against
these injustices. For the sake of brevity, I shall not refer to the acts of resistance
themselves - such as the lack of complicity or respect of Rwandans 7 towards government
officials as a form of an everyday act of resistance - as preparation for war but rather

6
What is Peace? (2008). In Cortright, Peace : a history of movements and ideas (pp. 1–22). Cambridge
University Press.
7
Thomson. (2011). Whispering Truth to Power: The Everyday Resistance of Rwandan Peasants to Post-
Genocide Reconciliation. African Affairs (London), 110(440), 439–456.

2
the act of war itself. Therefore, I view the preparation for cultural war as the very act of
conceptualising these injustices to be acted upon.

Adopting the Marxist perspective - i.e., peace is an absence of injustice simpliciter and
war is a struggle against injustice - we are attacked by an acquiesce that there are
infinite possibilities for the presence of injustice given that there are infinite possibilities
for varying contexts and identity roles of humans. Ergo, a fatalistic answer to the
statement whereby the very possibility of peace does not even exist, or at least, that the peace
that is possible is not one of positive peace - i.e., our attitudes, institutions, and structures do
not promote lasting justice8 because they always create possibilities of new injustice, which
ipso facto preserve our natural disposition for waging more war and a lack of peace from
injustice.

Unfortunately, this seemingly pessimistic and absurd answer is not just confined to
theoretical Marxism as it is in fact largely consonant with approaches to cultural
discussions in academia today. We can glean insight from this from Patricia Nguyen’s
discussion on Vietnamese refugees and her role as an Asian American. 9 Her overarching
claim was that she was predisposed to interrogating the U.S. Western liberal narrative of the
compassion of American society towards Asian immigrants and exposing injustices and
inequalities that Asian immigrants in the U.S. face. Indeed, a disposition, and especially a
creatively disposed one dealing in an artistic domain to constantly interrogate and constantly
expose, constantly opens new horizons for discussing the very conceptions of subjection and
subjectivity which form the metaphysical basis for the injustice Asians are subjected to by the
U.S. Thus, an infinite spawn of targets for Nguyen’s to wage war against using her artistic
work.

This begs the question: What if there is no Hobbesian Sovereign 10 in the first place for people
to become subjects of injustice? Wouldn’t such statelessness be a source of infinite and
lasting justice and hence lasting peace? It would be dangerous to answer this in the
affirmative, because this would be what Nguyen refers to as a ‘state of exception’: 11 where
8
Derrida.
9
Nguyen. (2019). Project 0395A.ĐC | Performing disorientation. Women & Performance, 29(1), 88–94.
10
Hobbes. (2009). Leviathan The Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiastical and Civil. The
Floating Press.
11
Nguyen. (2017). salt | water : Vietnamese Refugee Passages, Memory, and Statelessness at Sea. Women’s
Studies Quarterly.

3
refugees are ‘bare life’ at sea, they are “human subjects reduced to a naked depoliticised state
without official status and juridical rights”. It appears that even the depoliticised subject of a
refugee, or a ‘bare life’, can be a subject of injustice because nation-states are at liberty to
create dangerous conditions for asylum where refugees are subjected to death while waiting
for entry. Indeed, the very act of exclusion and depoliticization is an exercise of power by the
Sovereign where the Sovereign excludes “in order to maintain the inside” 12 and hence a form
of manifest inequality and injustice.

The absurdity of Nguyen’s analysis, of course, is that she was not a Vietnamese refugee
herself and was in fact violently imposing her conceptions of justice onto her parents.
We can see this most clearly from her conception of “bare life” 13 qua excluded subjects of
sovereign states: her focus on exclusion from sovereign states as injustice is largely premised
on a deprivation of refugees from Western liberal conceptions of human rights such as the
right to life, liberty, equality etc. - conceptions which her parents may not have held.
Nonetheless, her academic discussion would still be a form of preparation for war as it
exposes injustices that can be further acted upon, which she herself has stated as
desiring to continue ad infinitum. Acting upon the infinite possibility of injustice,
unfortunately, does not afford us peace - as peace in the Marxist vein is by very
definition an absence of injustice.

Marxist war-preparation as self-defeating: the directionality of war as unjust in itself

Our woes with Marxist war-preparation do not stop at the infinite possibilities of injustice.
This is because our very act of framing situations in terms of war and peace, for instance to
use war as a metaphor - such as a War on Terror or War on Drugs - is inevitably laden with
presuppositions and assumptions. While, for the sake of this analysis, it is apposite to refrain
from discussing acts of war themselves, it is equally important to note that the very method of
framing the actions of war in preparation for them - in particular, framing them as a
metaphorical war - has profound effects on the degree of peace a potential war would create.

Most profoundly, the use of war as a metaphor frames a situation as a complete destruction -
rather than a mere mitigation or amelioration - of a targeted enemy. By claiming a certain
social ill, political occurrence etc. as the enemy, potentially more justified discussions of

12
Nguyen.
13
Nguyen.

4
identifying what the root cause of a problem is (or even the problem itself) are dismissed due
to the imposition of a strong and unifying assumption on a target enemy. Duterte’s
declaration of a ‘War on Drugs’14 in the Philippines, for instance, shifts and simplifies the
locus of the social ills of the Philippines to the consumption and trafficking of drugs. A
discussion - perhaps on the reasons why youths are consuming drugs, for example perhaps
due to social alienation or a lack of job prospects - is effectively scuppered by the power of
the war metaphor which renders such discussions largely irrelevant. What serves this purpose
especially powerfully is the totalizing narrative the term ‘war’ has on its subject-matter: it is a
desire for a complete elimination, or a zero-sum, uncompromising approach on a certain
matter. Indeed, the Marxists are no less innocent in this respect: Malcolm X’s ‘Ballot or the
Bullet’15 speech largely sought to wage war on the injustices the white community imposed
on the black community by declaring the very integrated coexistence with the white
community itself as the source of the problem - a highly uncompromising solution which
ignores the potential faults the black community may have had in contributing to their
segregation.

Therefore, it is not difficult to see why framing issues in absolutist, war-faring terms is
deeply problematic for someone who wants peace because it creates a dictatorial,
uncompromised, and ipso facto assumption-laden narrative that violently silences
alternative opinions and discourses. Taking us back to the Marxist view, the very use of
the term ‘war’ in framing situations is a source of immense violent oppression and
injustice that creates the possibility of resistance from members of society. We may in
fact see this source of injustice even in the most seemingly un-militarised situations, such as
in medical situations where surgeons have to balance between “waging war” on diseases - a
patriarchal, all-out solution - or considering milder solutions such as mitigation of a disease
which can balance other areas of a patient’s well-being. 16 “Waging war” on the diseases will
allow for a greater compromise on the patient’s well-being by involving more drastic surgical
measures. More frighteningly, and particularly where such a war is institutionalised and thus
particularly totalizing, institutions which would otherwise speak against certain war-faring
measures would experience a moral inversion - or, in the Hegelian sense, have competing

14
Reesah.
15
Malcolm X. The Ballot or the Bullet. Retrieved April 15, 2022, from
http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/speeches/malcolm_x_ballot.html.
16
Warren. (1991). The “medicine is war” metaphor. HEC Forum, 3(1), 39–50. h

5
ideas “held in tension”17 in the name of survival. This could be seen most poignantly during
the Rwandan genocide, where the church’s emphasis on obedience to authority sustained the
genocide as a religious drama which perversely sanctified the genocide even where its
religious teachings would otherwise speak against it.

While much of these injustices are carried out in the acts of war themselves, framing
situations in terms of preparing to wage war on a target enemy opens the realm of possibility
of injustices in the name of the war which may have been otherwise less significant. It is
perhaps this that justifies Obama’s remark in his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize lecture 18 that it is
impossible for wars to create peace, for the haunting effect of injustice likely pervades
society in war’s wake all the stronger.

Harmonising (or even reframing) injustices to achieve peace

In the wake of the failure of the Marxists to gain peace in preparing for cultural wars, is it still
possible for nations that want peace to gain it, or at the very least, prevent war? The
misfortune of looking to an empirical survey to find such an answer - for instance that
of Steven Pinker19 - is that even Pinker’s analysis to demonstrates that wars (in the
military, sovereign nation against sovereign nation sense) tend to be more consistently
undergirded by moral justifications rather than forms of resource determinism or the
economic power of the nations,20 which finds itself synthesized yet again with the
Marxist view of looking to notions of justice.

Another empirical survey nevertheless provides a glimmer of hope for Vegetius’ method of
achieving negative peace because it demonstrates to us that much of the justifications for
military war can be largely harmonised and thus be prevented through military deterrence.
Indeed, the centuries-old Western tradition of discussing the concept of jus ad bellum,21 or the
“right to war” refers to conditions in which it is just for states to be permitted to go to war.
Even the realist school of international relations (“IR”), which argues that the international

17
Temoney. (2016). The 1994 Rwandan Genocide: The Religion/Genocide Nexus, Sexual Violence, and the
Future of Genocide Studies. Genocide Studies and Prevention, 10(3), 3–24.
18
“Remarks by the President at the Acceptance of The Nobel Peace Prize.” National Archives and Records
Administration.
19
On Angels’ Wings. (2011). In Pinker, The better angels of our nature : why violence has declined (pp. 671–
696). Viking.
20
Pinker.
21
Big Think. Michael Walzer on Just War Theory. Retrieved April 15, 2020, from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcBovmGZSPU.

6
political system is fundamentally anarchic and exists in a void of authority and that states
should therefore desire power and sovereignty for preservation, is premised on doing what is
necessary for self-preservation. While some may consider the realist school of IR as
fundamentally amoral, I argue that the realist justification - i.e., everyone is entitled to do
what preserve’s one’s community - is indeed a form of fairness with historical and
philosophical roots. Such a justification can in fact be seen in Hugo Grotius’ seminal work. 22
Referencing Cicero’s “first principles of nature” 23 as derived from observations of humankind
as well as animals - one of them being a zealous consideration for its own condition 24 and for
those things which tend to preserve it - a form of natural justice derived is the right for one to
keep oneself in the condition with which nature gave to him. This justification of self-
preservation that harks back to Cicero is not conceptually foreign to the current international
political community; it is, in fact, encoded in Chapter 1, Article 2(1) of the United Nations
Charter of 194525 - viz., all members shall refrain in their international relations from the
threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or
in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations - and is thus
mandated by international law. Perhaps, then, if we narrow Vegetius’ view of preparing
for war to that of preventive deterrence of other sovereign powers from invading one’s
land, successful forms of military deterrence which maintain self-preservation prevent
the possibility of a jus ad bellum situation and thus create peace by preventing the forms
of injustice amongst nations.

Nonetheless, an empirical methodology to finding means of achieving peace does have its
limitations. Indeed, if we take one step further in problematizing a historical or statistical
analysis of the issue at hand, we see that historical documentation does not accurately reflect
all human behaviours, but in fact focuses primarily on infractions from the norm - namely
disputes and wars. This is precisely the point that Gandhi makes in his claim that “History
then, is a record of an interruption of the course of nature.”26 Gandhi provides us with the
example of two brothers who quarrel: “one of them repents and re-awakens the love that was
lying dormant in him, the two again begin to live in peace, nobody takes notice of this. But
if the two brothers, through the intervention of solicitors or some other reason, take up arms

22
Whether ‘tis ever Lawful to make War. In Grotius, The rights of war and peace (pp. 180–239). Liberty Fund.
23
Grotius.
24
Grotius.
25
United Nations. Charter of the United Nations, 1945.
26
Passive Resistance. (2009). In Gandhi, Indian Home Rule (pp. 72–80). Floating Press, The.

7
or go to law [...] their doings would [...] would probably go down to history.” 27 Therefore,
even reference to historical events on a larger and more comprehensive scale may be
inescapably insular and circular - in this case likely pointing us toward an
unpreventable human disposition to wage wars - due to the inherently problematic
nature of historians documenting what are primarily infractions from the norm.

Indeed, the gradual downplaying and forgetting of injustices - rather than the overt
documenting and acting upon them - such as that propounded by Lee Kuan Yew with regards
to the Japanese occupation - is perhaps a necessary solution to achieve cultural peace. The
then Singapore Prime Minister privately refused to accept further demands from the
Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce for further apologies from Japan, instead
famously claiming that building a better future with Japan was more important than being
“weighed down by the bad memories of the past”. 28 This shift of focus to future prospects
rather than to salve past injustices is perhaps the only way out of the Marxist trap of
infinite injustice, and more consonant with the seemingly ahistorical means of achieving
peace noted by Gandhi. It is thus perhaps necessary to redefine and reframe
relationships rather than allow them to be contaminated with Marxist war-preparation
that spawns more injustices. Such attempts can also be seen in attempts to de-emphasize
racial elements29 of the Bukit Chandu site in Singapore by framing the Malay regiment’s
bravery as a model to be emulated for Singaporeans, 30 rather than a display of the Malays to
de-emphasise potential conflicts regarding racial claims about the site.

In the final analysis, while Vegetius’ view may hold more credence with regards to military
defence, problematising and preparing for war against issues of cultural injustices, as I have
demonstrated throughout the essay, may never afford us with the peace we desire. In such
cases, it is perhaps instead necessary to let go of past injustices, and to live and let live, while
letting future developments and successive generations steer the course away from past
trauma by reframing situations for our purposes.

27
Gandhi.
28
Singapore: Commemoration and Reconciliation. (2018). In Yang & M. Mochizuki, Memory, identity, and
commemorations of World War II: anniversary politics in Asia Pacific (pp. 89–108). Lexington Books.
29
Muzaini, & Yeoh, B. S. A. (2005). War landscapes as “battlefields” of collective memories: reading the
“Reflections at Bukit Chandu”, Singapore. Cultural Geographies, 12(3), 345–365.
30
Muzaini, & Yeoh, B. S. A.