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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28734 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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Hmm.

People fight wars, and sometimes they approach the war in a civilized fashion. When they do this, sometimes tame war gets them the result they're looking for: the enemy caves, they win. For a fictional example, see this speech from King Henry V:

Therefore, you men of Harfleur,

Take pity of your town and of your people,

Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command;

Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace

O'erblows the filthy and contagious clouds

Of heady murder, spoil and villany.

If not, why, in a moment look to see

The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand

Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;

Your fathers taken by the silver beards,

And their most reverend heads dash'd to the walls,

Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,

Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused

Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry

At Herod's bloody-hunting slaughtermen.

What say you? will you yield, and this avoid,

Or, guilty in defence, be thus destroy'd?

The offer of quarter, of peaceful surrender, is an attempt to civilize war, no? And the threat of wanton rape and destruction is the recognition that the savagery is still waiting in the wings. In the play, Harfluer surrenders, and its people are spared. If they'd resisted, they would not have been so lucky.

And then sometimes, the people trying civilized war don't get what they want, and they decide it's not worth going further, and they eat the loss. I was recently listening to some analysis of the Rhodesian Bush War; the Rhodesians fought with unparalleled ferocity on a tactical level, racking up one of the highest kill ratios ever recorded, but eventually the strategic and political situations grew untenable, and they capitulated to their enemies more or less completely.

But what happens when you try civilized war, you don't get the win, and you can't accept the loss? You can try again, but what if you still don't have an acceptable resolution? ...Well, evidence suggests that you escalate. The civilization starts slipping. In the Civil War, we saw Sherman's march to the sea, which was a pretty serious escalation in savagery from what came before, in that it deliberately targeted the wealth and property of the general southern population. In WWII, we saw strategic bombing, firebombing, then nuclear bombing. Civilization is costly, and when the cost gets too high, we cut corners.

All of the above is probably obvious, but it's to point this out: are the civilized wars actually civilized, or were the combatants just lucky to get a resolution before the civilization slipped too far? I agree that Kurtz is insane. He's insane because he can't quit. Killgore and the others are trying to quit; they've personally folded out of the game, they aren't actually trying to win any more. They're fortunate to have that option.

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