Description
Published in 1936, Czech author Karel Capek’s The War with the Newts (Válka s mloky) is best known as a satirical indictment of the rise of fascism and Nazism in interwar Europe. Yet, in the current era of the Sixth Great Extinction, rising sea levels, and other catastrophic effects wrought by human exploitation of the planet and its resources, Capek’s work deserves a second look specifically through the lens of the so-called Anthropocene. With focus on his geographical and geopolitical imaginaries of a world terraformed by an ascendent race of salamanders, this paper interrogates the ongoing crisis of Anthropogenic distortions of the global ecosystem for the purposes of making Man comfortable in his ‘home.’ As human dominion over the earth is ended by the rise of the amphibians, Capek’s multimedia narrative presents a distressingly timely history of the future anterior of the ongoing ecological cataclysm. In the text’s climax, the newts eradicate themselves, after having already nearly destroyed the planet; thus the novel offers a prophetic warning of the dangers of unsustainable development nearly a century after its original publication. Suggestively for IR and related fields this is managed not by offering up a desolated world and an attendant bleak future for mankind; instead Capek’s work presents in farcical detail the processes of the destruction itself as it reminds the reader that the developmental gains of industrial capitalism are intimately woven into the national project and the (neo-)colonial agenda of global powers in their rush to securitize land and resources. Moreover, the multi-perspectival narrative and the multi-nodal web of actions in the story suggest something of the eco-philosopher Timothy Morton’s notion that industrial capitalism is itself already a form of crude Artificial Intelligence while also reckoning with climate change as a hyperobject so over-distributed in time and space that it has become nonlocal and both more substantial than its immediate manifestations, and correspondingly impossible to grasp. The irony of Capek making a central character a sea captain from an interior state is stripped away when one considers the fact that climate change recognizes no borders – or as a Bangladeshi Major General noted at the 2013 American Security Project, the US Air Force base at Langley, Virginia ‘will need similar coastal embankments that are currently being used in many rural parts of Bangladesh . . .’ More plainly, as the simple butler at the heart of Capek’s work notes when he sees the glassy head of a newt bob up from the Vltava River, ‘We might as well go home now. We’ve all had it.’
