I. Wars in General

Wars are about killing and getting killed. This makes them passionate affairs, bordering on the metaphysical. When it comes to combat on the ground, there are no technocratic wars, clean and cool, conducted on the battlefield with the Hague Land Warfare Convention in hand. If the choice is between committing a war crime and dying, soldiers don’t think long. They also cannot but ultimately hate those who are out to kill them, which makes it easier to kill them first as a precaution. Families back home will forgive; it is better if the enemy dies than their son, husband, or father. Prosecution of soldiers by their country for war crimes is rare; even rarer is conviction, morale being more important in war than morals.

Wars feed on themselves. Wars produce ever new reasons for continuing them, among them the war crimes inevitably committed by or attributed to the enemy and the hate they engender, on top of conflicting interests. Since the event of a war is uncertain – the battlefield being a stochastic source – there is always hope or fear that luck will turn; being irrational may, in this sense, be the rational choice. Fortuna and virtú, as in Machiavelli, become indistinguishable; field marshals can be fired for lack of fortune. The outcome is never certain. Losing parties have an incentive to fight to the last man, the last bullet; the enemy may be ante portas, but on our side of the gate, there may be a Wunderwaffe (a miracle weapon) almost ready for use.

Wars tend to take longer than expected. Wars are started expecting that the boys would be home by Christmas. Then it takes a little longer until the next spring offensive. And so on. As a war drags out, its original purpose is forgotten, enriched, or gets hidden under a welter of additional purposes, some to do with the course of the war itself – the desire for revenge, for restoring ‘justice’ by punishing the enemy for his crimes, mistaking the battlefield for a courtroom – and more purposes are thrown into the famous ‘garbage can’ of political decision-making: now that we are already at it, can’t we also do X on top of Y, like show the Soviet Union what a nuclear bomb can do, in addition to defeating Japan. The more purposes, the longer it takes to achieve enough of them so that the bloodshed can be called off. Also, remember Heraclitus’s quote: ‘War is the father of all things’, where things may include a new arms industry built up in record time by the enemy.

Wars are fueled by hate and fear. Once they are on, with killing and dying required on a large scale, hate and fear become indispensable means of destruction. Their generation and cultivation is the job of propaganda, a term that entered politics first during the French Revolution. Propaganda is as important for a successful pursuit of war as armaments, and therefore absorbs equally extensive investment, financial and political. Its main tool is the demonization of the enemy, preferably by way of his stylization as a single devilish individual – the Kaiser, Stalin, Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Putin – an individual that is both unendingly mad and unendingly bad and therefore ‘understands only the language of the fist’ (quoting one of my Gymnasium teachers in the 1950s on ‘the Russian’). To justify large-scale war by people on people, the devilish individual may be made to look representative of his people, or certainly, his army.