There’s a fascinating interview with prominent American sociologist Randall Collins online at the Chronicle of Higher Ed - about his new book, Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory. Collins argues that we have a predisposition against violence:
To make his case that we have no talent for violence, Collins adduces evidence ranging from the low casualty rates in most Greek and Roman battles to photographs documenting how few people in “violent” crowds on the West Bank are actually wreaking havoc. (Modern photojournalism has opened doors for this subfield of sociology, he argues.) He also includes his own voyeuristic accounts of confrontations on the streets of Philadelphia and other American cities, which tend to confirm that most showdowns peter out at the bluster stage.
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He also has few kind words for the reigning evolutionary-psychological interpretation of violence, which sees it as a holdover from a long prehistory in which men competed ruthlessly for status and mates. Collins does not reject biology but cites a different Darwinian drive: the human desire to form social bonds. A visceral aversion to throwing a punch, even if the recipient richly deserves it, he writes, “is the evolutionary price we pay for civilization.”
Maybe there’s something in it, although my intuitive response is that violence is there, only held back by other restraints. Prisons are a good example.
Dickens offers a bit of support for the theory in “Barnaby Rudge”. He was fascinated by the authorities response to the Gordon riots in the late 18th century. Basically, it was to batten down the hatches and let the mob do their worst for a day or two in pillaging, thieving and mayhem. Then after things had burnt themselves out a bit, the authorities would re=emerge to establish order, arrest (and hang) the ringleaders and re-establish order as if nothing had happened to challenge their authority, and people would go about their business.
At the Vietnam protest rallies in Sydney in the late 60s, the police (at Askin’s direction) got stuck into protesters with outright thuggery. Word had got around by the time of the next protest. The numbers had increased about tenfold. The protesters joined arms, making it hard to pick on isolated demonstrators. The coppers hung around, but basically held back and didn’t interfere. In the end they were almost good-humored about it all.
Maybe that confirms the theory, but I think it was the sheer weight of numbers.
Man is an animal with a brain the size of a fist, and I have always thought that our efforts to overcome our base animal nature are closely related to our purpose here in earth.
But as any animal-lover will tell you, even animals do not tend towards violence! Aside from hunting for food, it is a method of conflict resolution, but just one among many.
Anyone interested in Randall Collins might also want to look at the work of Jonathan Schell, whose book The Unconquerable World examines how wars are prosecuted by small minorities, and how the great bulk of the population always tend to say “Enough!” when their patience has worn thin with such nonsense.
But don’t tell Krudd! He unveiled a new War Memorial display last night with the words:
Bad luck all you doctors and nurses, child carers and teachers, peace and environmental activists, etc, etc. Interestingly, none of the media reports I’ve seen about the new exhibit seem to be mentioning the cost to the taxpayer. I suppose that would just be tasteless and disrespectful to even talk about?
We honour the dead by wearing blinkers and pretending that what they pretended was real is still real.
The horror is too stark to be confronted.
In my day job I’m a criminologist, and I’m reasonably familiar with the literature and current debates around violence, particularly in the context of homicide. I don’t think it’s at all accurate to talk about evolutionary psychology as the “reigning” interpretation of violence (I realise this was from the cited report, not the OP). There are really only two prominent groups of theorists taking an evolutionary psychological look at homicide, one of whom is effectively retired, and the other who is very much on the margins of the discipline.
If you look at the main refereed journals in the field (such as Journal of Interpersonal Violence and Homicide Studies, sociological structural explanations of violence are very much dominant. Such theories don’t generally take an explicit position on whether or not we’re inherently violent, but tend to work on the implicit assumption that it’s only when the status quo is interrupted that violence occurs.
Still, the article is interesting, and I think I’ll have to hunt down the book to add to my library.
I took it to mean ‘reigning’ more generally, rather than in a criminological context devoted to research on violence. Or perhaps even that it is the reigning interpretation within evolutionary psych, and thus emerging from it. I agree there is some ambiguity over what that implies.
I’m very interested in the way that photojournalism has created an archive for this kind of micro-sociological research on violence. I’m going to have to take a closer look at this, I think.
I find this hard to believe. Perhaps I’ve met too many petty criminals whose first resort to problem-solving is their fists. Nor does it explain the continued recurrence of domesatic violence and violence towards children.
Don, good point re the Gordon Riots. Interestingly, Rude’s work on the riots which analysed the class structure of the rioters, so far as that was possible, showed that the Gordon Riots, among other things, were an expression of middle-class violence. I think they still rank as one of the gretest mass expressions of p-ersonal violence and property destruction in English history. Hope all is well with you, btw.
I don’z think it’s too surprsing, and it certainly isn’t at odds with a Darwinian view of animal behaviour. All those bright feathers, big bits and dancing in male vs male competition is about demonstrating superior reproductive fitness without actually having to fight. Fighting usually follows only when the non-violent displays produce a stalemate.
Whenever I read the word “hardwiring” I reach for Wilson Tuckey’s length of 100A cable. Now that that cheap joke’s over…
This looks like interesting stuff, though I wonder how an analysis that included domestic and sexual violence would treat his theory. The prevalence of both would tend to suggest that it’s not that hard for ‘normal’ adults to become violent despite strong very social bonds, in fact, as part of them. And his argument that the LA cops who beat Rodney King were ‘panicking forward’ rings hollow when you do the thought experiment—would they have beat just as much shit out of a white guy?
I’d be surprised if there wasn’t just as strong evidence for socialised violence as a source of social bonds; thinking especially of homosocial bonding, contact sport, hazing rituals, and intra-group conflict. Violence certainly has a potentially cathartic effect.
My curiosity about the use of the photojournalistic archive can also be related to the Rodney King situation, and specifically to the ability of jurors to ’see’ King as a continuing threat to the officers in that footage. The use of an archive of visual data for research would have to involve some scrutiny of the process of interpretation.
“I’d be surprised if there wasn’t just as strong evidence for socialised violence as a source of social bonds; thinking especially of homosocial bonding, contact sport, hazing rituals, and intra-group conflict. Violence certainly has a potentially cathartic effect.”
This is a very interesting point, as is the domestic violence point also raised by Paul. I wonder how context-specific Collins conclusions are.
What is the status of Rene Girard in scholardom? He wrote a fair bit on violence and its relationship to primitive religion, before using his theories to attempt to prove the distinctive virtue of Christianity.
A little off topic but Gene Sharps three volume work on the politics and methods of Non Violent political action is well worth a peek for those interested in this area.
Looks interesting, but probably rubbish. Collins has apparently sifted through a veritable orgy of violence to demonstrate that humans are not violent, using the very flimsy argument that, you know, we’re not that violent. Compared to what? Klingons?
Also, the interpretation of historical data sounds highly dodgy. “Low” mortality rates in ancient battles reflected the highly rational preference for survival over glorious death: once you see that your side is losing a battle the inclination is to run rather than bump up the other side’s kill ratio. Likewise, I gather studies of tribal “warfare” have found that, whereas the ritualised skirmishing tends to appear like pantywaists on parade, tribal societies tend to have an horrifically high rate of death due to violence.
I think Norman Mailer who, due to his personal hangups about masculinity, studied violence in pretty lurid detail, best encapsulated the psychology of combat and violence in his comment on boxing:
Because humans are social animals endowed with empathy, to willingly hurt another human is psychologically difficult. The abundance of violence suggests it’s not difficult enough.
As for “the evolutionary price we pay for civilization.â€??
*cough*bullshit*cough*
The history of civilisation is a history of coercion and conquest from Sumer and Gilgamesh onwards.
Tell that to the Skinnies and Arachnids.
From my experience, the biggest risk factors for Domestic and Family violence, are having been exposed to violence during formative years, and/or poor communication skills.
Violence is certainly multi generational, but I’m not sure if that’s the same as being ‘hard-wired’ for violence.
And this lasted until relatively modern times, which brought with it “total war” with its increased use of technology, especially aircraft, leading to the increased number of civilian casualties.
Dropping a bomb on a city or firing long-range artillery or missiles also detaches the perpetrator from the effects of the violence. It’s somewhat different to facing your opponent with spears or swords.
Principally the first, compounded by the second.
The same could be said about sexual violence. Although there is not a “cause-effect” relationship between being a child sexual offence victim and being an offender later in life, there is a correlation.
Actually, running awy in battle wasn’t a very bright idea. More people got killed while pursued while in flight than in the heat of battle apparently.
True, on the latter point, but it doesn’t support the first. When one is on the losing side one’s choices aren’t great. Faced with a choice between almost certain death (i.e. fighting on) and a chance of survival (i.e. surrender or flight), most men chose the latter. This doesn’t show an aversion to violence so much as an inclination towards self-preservation.
Oh, I dunno. Not for want of trying. Large-scale massacres of civilian populations were reasonably common throughout history. The Romans obliterated Carthage and when they took the terribly civilised Corinth in 146BC they put every man to the sword and sold the women and children into slavery, pour encourager les autres. C. Julius Caesar directly and indirectly killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of civilians in his Gallic campaigns. Very labour-intensive, executing civilians with spear and sword, but they gave it a lash anyhoo.
It’s a bit of a myth that warfare has become more unpleasant in recent times, and the myth persists only because we view the couple of centuries of well-ordered European limited warfare in the aftermath of the Treaty of Westphalia as representative, when it was actually anomalous. Genocide, f’rinstance, has been around a long, long time.
But how “common” was “reasonably common”. It would make more economic sense for Rome, a slave-based society, to capture rather than kill. And I wouldn’t count Corinth, where as you state more than half the population was taken as slaves. I am thinking of more modern examples such as Guernica or Dresden, where slaughter was deliberate and indiscriminate.
Carthage was deliberately destroyed because two years after Hannibal’s banishment, the Carthaginians organised and conducted armed resistance against the occupiers. The destruction of Carthage was a consequence of this.
So I am probably looking for such examples of deliberate policy, rather than acts which could be almost interpreted as “collateral damage”. So that would include the saturation bombing I mentioned above.
Sorcerer, on the subject of Guernica, it’s still disputed whether the bombing was an act of policy or an act of airminded enthusiasm. Even as an act of retribution, the rebels would have justified it by pointing to the Republicans’ atrocities, which were also deliberate and indiscriminate—and, I should point out, largely committed by “civilians”.
As a matter of history, it’s only pretty recently that there’s even been a distinction between the categories “civilian” and “soldier”, and I’m with Martin Van Creveld in expecting that it won’t be around forever into the future.
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Actually, as killer (ahem) evidence against the proposition that humans are hardwired against violence, I present the pre-modern phenomenon of public corporal punishment and execution. Civilised Westerners used to love a bit of hanging, chopping and burning before we got all squeamish. F’n Victorian era. Is there anything that didn’t go wrong then?
[TEH INTERNET]?
Alice Babbage tried but she couldn’t get the metal counters through the rubber tubes.
Guernica the attack, described in intent and effect:
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I agree with Graf von Schützen Spree about misunderstanding the:
Not just in time, but also space. It’s amazing how quickly the centuries of that quaint Irish game of killing all your neighbours gets brushed out of “European” history.
We could trade atrocities, if you like. If you can produce more than me, you’re the winner. Deal?
It might make more economic sense for Rome to capture rather than kill, except Corinth would have produced more ongoing revenue as a tributary than as a one-off slave auction. However, the Romans CHOSE to destroy Corinth, one of the largest and richest cities in Greece, as a lesson to other uppity Greek cities [hence pour encourager les autres]. Corinth was totally depopulated, with (let’s say) half the population executed outright. The city only exists today because the Romans re-established the city in 44BC. Dresden lost, what, 5-10% of its population in the bombing campaign? And it survived the war. Not to downplay the nastiness of the respective situations, but there’s no comparison. Guernica was horrible, but gets more notoriety than it deserves because of the - then - novelty of bombing civilians from the air (though it’s arguable whether terrorising civilians was its real objective), and possibly the painting.
No, wrong. The Romans manufactured the casus belli for annihilating Carthage, just as they did with every enemy of Carthage’s calibre. It wasn’t “collateral damage”. The deliberate and total destruction of Carthaginian civil society proves my point, not yours.
I was very curious about that too. And then I saw video of the sumations of prosecution and defense. The prosecutor was, I think, lazy. The defense was excellent. He described the video evidence, stage by stage, as the use of legitimate force by trained professional and was able to sound very convincing that they were not exceeding their authority.
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Of course they were. But they had good lawyers.
The legal context is certainly an important one, and I would argue that the defense had the advantage of working with a whole lot of popular assumptions and prejudices about criminality and blackness. More generally, the point I would make is that it is possible to ’see’ evidence in photographs or videos in a manner partly determined by interpretive habits or by how it is framed, which makes photojournalism-as-archive an interesting thing to deal with.
Reminded here of Full Metal Jacket.
I’m also reminded of that movie’s realistic albeit black comic portrayal of the boot camp process by which a recruit’s former identity is stripped away and replaced with the hard heart that kills.
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I read this book On Killing by Army Ranger and psychologist Dave Grossman. He tends to vouch for this duality of man business. One thing he notes is that there is an instinctive aversion to killing which must be overcome by training. One of his examples is of the Nazi’s death squads that were comprised of middle-aged men. There was a very high rate of misses which cannot be explained by error; it’s very difficult to miss at point blank range. Killing becomes harder the closer you are to your victim:
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One of his arguments is that video games of the first person shooter variety have resulted in a much greater willingness to kill amongst military recruits than existed in WWII were it’s estimated that a large percentage of US soldiers deliberately missed their targets. He argues that there is a strong impulse amongst mammals not to kill our own. To do so requires training. As we’ve applied science to training methods we are getting better at it:
Unpleasant but so is war. As he says in this interview often being willing to kill means not having to.
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Incidentally he’s also a big campaigner against first person shoot-em-up games for kids:
He believes the companies that make these games will find themselves liable in murder cases. Cops who’ve commented on the increasing accuracy of high school shootings like Columbine have expressed similar views.
Absolutely. The defense managed to eliminate all African-Americans from the jury and gave a rationale for the cops’ behaviour. Two of them did serve time.
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I’m reminded of the Time magazine coverage of the OJ Simpson verdict. Before the main feature began there were two double page photo spreads: one of black men in Compton, the other of white women in Orange County. The former was all cheers and fists in the air; the latter was alarmed eyes and hands clasping agape mouths.
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Them Sephos definitely got a deeply ingrained problem with the black folks.
I didn’t say Carthage was “collateral damage”. I specifically used it as an example of deliberate destruction as against collateral damage.
I was making two points with Guernica and Dresden. The first point was that of the issue of indiscriminate bombings against targeted bombings. Many raids in WWII (yes I know Guernica was pre-1939) from both sides were targeted raids on shipyards, industrial infrastructure and defence installations. Others were indiscriminate and designed to provoke fear in the civilian population.
Guernica and Dresden were the latter. There were no shipyards, industrial infrastructure and defence installations in either city.
You may be able to attempt to argue both ways for the Blitz. I’ll be conventional and say that it was indiscriminate.
The second was a follow-up to where I had said that one of the features of modern warfare was the physical detachment from the target afforded by aerial bombings, guided missiles and the like. One might argue that post-gunpowder naval warfare was “detached” by virtue of the use of cannon, but hand-to-hand combat was still a feature in the case of boardings.
I love my Point Blank II. Best arcade game ever. Next time there’s a war between humans and cutout ducklings, give me a call, US Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Seriously now, I call rubbish on the idea of an “instinctive” aversion to killing. Those soldiers Grossman talks about having to be trained in the 40s into shooting person-shaped targets came from exactly the same generation of Americans who perpetuated lynching as a Southern institution. The early stages of the Spanish Civil War, at the same time—as I mentioned earlier—involved a great number of acts of spontaneous atrocity. The anti-clericalists and the Rebel forces didn’t have to be trained into it; they wanted to.
Aversion to murder is a socialised thing, and it’s dependent on context, most importantly, the existence of ‘them’ and ‘us’ categories.
Sorcy, I agree with the bulk of that. So far we’re agreeing that civilians have been targeted in both modern and pre-modern times.
However, that contradicts your earlier suggestion that,
“Total war” predates modern times, and the targeting of civilians does not require the detachment of modern technology, as I’ve shown. It’d be comforting if that were true, but it’s not. Ask the Tutsis.
Well the natural aversion to killing one’s own is observable as physiological phenomena in many mammal species including our own. The ‘them and us’ dichotomy is also universally applicable in terms if the use of and restraints upon violent behaviour. It’s a well known fact of the dark lore of our species that the enemy is systematically dehumanized. And that this makes it easier to kill them. It’s similarly well-known that societies often have two rules: one for us and one for them. You can do all sorts of atrocious things to ‘them’ and be considered not inhuman, perhaps even admirable.
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To what extent this phenomena are ’socialized’ and to what extend these phenomena are evidence of the lack of socialization is a matter of debate.
Then again a culture which makes owning a real weapon as acceptable as owning a dinghy or a caravan is likely to have a fair number of kids who’ve done target practice in the woods with Dad.
Not really, no. Unless you’re talking about killing resulting from total alienation, or out of some kind of pathology, or just out of ennui. Even if you’re using the term ’socialisation’ to mean ‘brought up right’, you’ll find lots of cases where perfectly civilised people do ‘these phenomena’ to their neighbours, their neighbours’ friends, and their neighbours’ friends’ families.
Funny you should mention that. In the second link to a Grossman interview above he cites the case of a Dad who was successfully prosecuted for manslaughter in the US because he taught his 8 year old to shoot and said kid went off and used a classmate instead of a can.
Well, this thread is several days dead now, but I just want to respond to two comments. Firstly, thank you to Liam for linking to and quoting me (at 20 above) — I agree with with everything I said!
Secondly, I must take issue with something sorceror said:
It’s true that neither Guernica nor Dresden were major industrial centres (though neither did they have zero value in this regard). But they were transportation centres. The ostensible objective at Dresden was its railway system, which was part of the link between the western and eastern fronts, enabling troops and supplies to be shuttled between them. (The American raid on Dresden, which followed the British one, had the railway marshaling yards as its primary objective.) And it’s often forgotten that Guernica was immediately behind the front lines, where the Nationalists were advancing into the Basque country. It too was used to transfer troops and supplies to the front. Blasting villages and small towns just behind the front line was a common tactic used by the Nationalists and their allies in Spain, even before Guernica. There were clearly significant military objectives in both Guernica and Dresden.
This is not to say that the civilian population was not also a target. It most certainly was. Part of the reason for bombing Dresden was to impress the German population with Allied airpower — that there was no place in Germany that was safe any more. At Guernica, the Condor Legion used a significant proportion of fragmentation bombs, which are really only useful against people. Area bombing vs. precision bombing doesn’t map precisely onto military objectives vs. morale objectives. Area bombing was intended (by Bomber Harris, at least) to knock out the whole city, industry and civilians included. Precision bombing was intended to also damage morale through the inevitable collateral damage (often seen as more of an added bonus than a regrettable necessity) and through the disruption of life and work.
Ultimately, practically any population centre could be justified as having some military value, a problem (or an opportunity, depending on your job title) apparent as early as 1915. Attempts to resolve this using international law were not notably successful, and pretty much fell by the wayside from 1939.
Which gets back to my original thesis…that total war basically is a 20th century phenomenon simply because of the increased use of technology and the detachment from the conflict allowed by such changes as the development of aircraft.
One aircraft and its payload can kill hundreds, (even millions) of people. Looking back at pre-20th century wars, to achieve a high kill rate you had to accept a large attrition rate in your own forces. So the emphasis was on what happened on the actual battlefield, rather than any organised attempt at ramping up civilian casualties.
My pleasure Brett.
Sorcerer, that’s a very unique definition of total war. “Total” refers to the militarisation of all facets of Government and life, not the locus of the battle. As to ‘civilians’ not being the main targets of warfare, I’ve already argued that the categories civilian/soldier are themselves products of the modern age, and you haven’t responded to Fyodor’s #28 at all.
As to acceptance of casualties, aerial bombing and nuclear deterrent theories *implicitly* accepted civilian casualties.
Liam reread my quote:
They didn’t have the foggiest about the Bomb in the 19th century, though knowing Einstein, he’d probably thought of it by then
Now in true obedience to you, Your Beretness, I shall address Fyodor (complete with a licked stamp)
I recall I used the words:
because I was drawing a comparison between , say, WWII and medieval conflicts between countries such as the Hundred years War, where infantry bore the brunt of fighting and technology was limited. And there is an argument in the last century for both the Abyssinian-Italian War and the Sino-Japanese Wars to be included as examples where modern powerful military states took on weaker, less technologically advanced states and waged total war on them.
The Tutsis/Hutu conflicts in Rwanda and Burundi, ghastly as they were, are both a direct result of the original African colonial carve-up which ignored local tribal boundaries and a result of ancient tribal emnity. In my discussion I left out civil war, which technicaslly these conflicts are, except insofar as the Spanish Civil War’s Guernica involved the German Luftwaffe strutting their stuff.
What? So it doesn’t count as “Total War”? (The expression may be C20 but the reality of homo sapiens periodically wiping each other out with gay abandon goes back to day one. Check out the Good Book.)
I was actually talking about wars between nations, using the term in the conventional military sense.
Regrettable though it is and as is is often the case Rwanda-Burundi didn’t even raise an eyebrow at the UN, let alone amongst most of the world. Dafur is in the same category. The UN response in these instances is to have a few meetings, generate lots of paper, then have more meetings. A few years later and after thousands of deaths, they might decide to intervene. With limited Rules of Engagement so they don’t upset the local warlords.
That’s not a response, sorcerer. WBB is right that the Old Testament provides all the evidence you need of pre-modern genocidal total war.
In mediaeval conflicts the infantry did *not* bear the brunt of the fighting; ideally the chivalrous classes duked it out between themselves, in reality the art, science and pleasure of city-sacking was entirely inflicted on ‘noncombatants’. That’s not even taking the Mongolians into account.
No, there’s not. You’re still demonstrating ignorance of what ‘total’ war entails. It’s not *about* how people are killed, the specific weaponry is irrelevant to it. Totality is a state of politics. John Boyd reminded militarists against weapon-fetishism by insisting that wars were not made by weapons, but by people, using their minds. It’s as useful a reminder to anti-militarists.
Demonstrating ignorance? That’s a bit strong.
I save that sort of description for Windschuttle apologists and Hanson supporters.
Maybe we went to different playgrounds of higher learning at different times.
Anyway, here is a conventional definition. The one I remember.
Wikipedia agrees:
This is probably the part where we are in conflict.
But “demonstrating ignorance”? Please!
I am in conflict with nothing. My argument is consistent and coherent, it’s your own which has a missile gap of definition. You said:
Even the wikipedia definition you’ve used disagrees with you. Is it about aircraft or about citizenship, or spears or African lines on paper? When you have a set of goalposts that don’t move, come back and we’ll have a discussion.
Total war, as such, is about mobilising and militarising your own society, not destroying the enemy’s. Liam’s right about that. The Italian conquest of Abyssinia, for example, is not usually seen as a total war, since winning it did not involve the Italian home front so much. (I don’t know so much about what the Abyssinians did: but I would argue that it possible for war to be total for one party in a conflict, and not for the other — Vietnam might be an example of this.)
But, to the extent that civilians therefore play a much greater part in the war effort than previously, in total war they are now seen as more or less legitimate targets in and of themselves. And the new killing technologies of the 20th century did make it easier to kill large numbers of people, and so required further societal changes in response, accelerating the dynamic of total war. This goes more to sorceror’s definition, but I would say it’s an important characteristic of total war, not the defining one.
The other classic example would be Israel during the Six Day War.
Brett, I argue that the only characteristic of total war unique to the twentieth century is that which applies to Government/military control of industry, not of the specific character of warfare; otherwise pre-industrial total wars such as that of the Mongolians across present-day Russia and Ukraine, would fit the modern definition. Civilians were *always* legitimate targets; to Fyodor’s challenge, I add: ask a Viking.
sorcerer: “Demonstrating ignorance? That’s a bit strong.”
Nah, I’d say it’s a pretty good fit.
“Wikipedia agrees:”
See what I mean? This stuff writes itself!
Ah, I’m teasing. But let’s look at the Wikipedia entry anyway, just for fun.
“…in order to destroy another nation’s ability to engage in war. The practice of total war has been in use for centuries, but it was only in the middle to late 19th century that total war was identified by scholars as a separate class of warfare (my emphasis). In total war there are no non-combatants; everyone is a soldier.”
I think many would agree that, if we focus on “destroying ability to engage in war,” General William Tecumseh Sherman can be studied as a leading 19th-cent. exponent of the proto-’total war’ practice. See his famed march through the South (”I will make Georgia howl.”) Yet Sherman focused on things like ripping apart railway lines and wrecking supply stores and communication systems, not wholesale massacres. He actually tried to be pretty careful about the welfare of non-combatants, as far as he was able (see his letters to Gen. Hood outside Atlanta; he evacuated the city of its civilians, instead of butchering them). His tactics did cause civilian hardship, it is true, but he certainly did not massacre civilians indiscriminately with the idea that “everyone is a soldier”. I think it’s possible to come down either pro or con about his methods. So it seems at the very least that there’s a fair bit of room for differences of tactics within these terms.
But this is a largely academic discussion anyway, since wars and techniques of war vary widely with times and circumstances, and I bet it’s pretty hard to formulate a consistent pattern that maps with a theory or definition through all time (20th-cent. participants in low-level Third World armed border dispute, to one another: “Don’t you know we must destroy each other’s entire societies? This is the era of Total War, Wikipedia says so!”).
Still, it’ll do, for the stuff of a time-wasting argument. Personally I look forward to Total Custard-pie War, where two blog combatants must destroy one another’s capability to fight using temperamental erudite insult comedy.
Fire at will, cap’n!
Well, yes, except back then civilians weren’t at risk because they were essential elements of the enemy total war machine. They were at risk because they (or their possessions) were of intrinsic value to those attacking them. Or because they were of the wrong ethnicity/culture/religion/what-have-you.
…you beat me to Sherman, JPZ. I’ll bring up the Crusades, though, if it’ll make you happy.
Erudition is not required for temperamental blog destruction. I know what kind of stoush I like, and it looks less like cocktails with Dorothy Parker than a barbecue at Wayne Rooney’s house.
“Brett, I argue that the only characteristic of total war unique to the twentieth century is that which applies to Government/military control of industry”
Hey, don’t weaken your argument unless you need to!
There’s plenty of historical precedent for government/military control of industry - say, to make weapons instead of ploughshears out of scanty supplies of iron.
Brett at #45: I agree, but value isn’t necessarily a measure of totality. For instance, by the 1970s, nuclear strategy had deteriorated/developed into simple arithmetics of missiles and casualties (and anti-missiles of course in the 80s), leaving actual industrial potential to the wayside.
BTW, have you ever played DEFCON?
Yes, but industrial potential correlates fairly well with population, does it not? Maybe not on a fine scale, but when you’ve got a few thousand nukes to spread around across all the enemy’s cities, there’s not too much point in trying to make precise calculations.
Not that industrial potential matters in a nuclear war. I would argue that this is moving outside total war, at least as we’ve defined it above. A full-scale nuclear war would be over so quickly that there’s no time to mobilise, to crank up the factories to build more ICBMs, to bend society towards a maximum war effort. Unless the very destruction of society itself is held to qualify it as ‘total’, but then that’s very similar to sorcerer’s definition.
Yes! Though I must admit I’m not very good at it, and generally prefer to spectate other players’ games. The end of civilisation is so pretty. (With a WarGames mod installed, of course, for that old-timey global thermonuclear war flavour …)
Hee hee. I’ve never played a game so fun to lose.