A Brief Diversion on War

[tyrannosaurus vex]

A BRIEF DIVERSION ON WAR

Ever since humanity had the capacity to craw out of its caves, stop wandering around the landscape hunting things in groups, and put down roots at the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution, there have been at least two buffers between any two peoples at war with one another: namely, their respective governments. As cities became established and their populations grew, eventually branching into nations, it became impractical to do everything on a strictly democratic basis. Too many people with too many opinions was a hindrance to getting anything done, especially the large projects that come with sedentary rather than nomadic societies. Tribes were merged and blossomed into whole populations, and some kind of arrangement had to be made for the administration of daily life.

Until the 18th Century or so, these governments were just outgrowths of the populations in geographically separated nations. As the populations grew so did their administrations, reaching the decadence of Empire with the Romans and the top-heavy monarchies of the Middle Ages. Eventually some of them became unwieldy and awkward for the citizenry to maintain, based on flawed philosophy or corrupted by bad judgment, and around the time of the Enlightenment there began to arise signs that these systems would have to go away somehow — some of them by schism, some by revolution. It was also the Enlightenment that did a lot of damage to religion, which had been used to glue these otherwise fractured governments together.

From the time of Greek city-states until the time of the American Civil War, war was almost always the result of insult or necessity; using Religion as a main motivational factor for the masses was a good way to maintain support for various wars but the drive for war itself was normally rooted largely in the population itself, anyway. War was waged when the people of one region hated the people of another region because of an insult or transgression, or needed some hoarded resource that someone else controlled. During this period it was common for the governments of warring parties themselves to be bitterly at odds with one another and for high-ranking government officers themselves to take part in battle. It may be a valuable boost to morale to know you are fighting alongside your king, but many historical accounts of internal strife after a nation's king suffered a deadly blow in battle show that it was not altogether practical. The practice shows that whole societies could be diametrically opposed to whole other societies during a war.

With a few exceptions in the cases of large empires, that is the way war was fought until something changed, gradually, between the 18th and 20th centuries. With the expansion of government bureaucracy and the further removal of the citizens of a country from the underlying reasons for war with other countries, the need for a government to be so morally invested in a war waned. That is not to say the government's interest in war waned — that has actually grown stronger with the removal of the power class from the line of fire.

War became a matter of executive officers commanding armies from a distance rather than fighting with them in the field; then came advances in weapons technology, and with this came a predictable shift toward cannonfodder-based warfare, or the shoveling of enormous quantities of disposable soldiers into the hellish pits of war while commanders who were suddenly too "valuable" to throw away like that directed the action from behind the scenes.

Today, governments of peoples at war with one another need not be at war between themselves. Wars are still fought for the old reasons of course but governments increasingly use the threat of war, and even outright military conflict, as bargaining tools at the ever-important table of diplomacy. In a modern first-world nation, the military is less about self-defense than it is about the capacity to back up and enforce the wild declarations of a government. While this shift in the official paradigm of a state means that a lot more might be accomplished without having to resort to war, it also means that a state's capacity to wage war is always under scrutiny and must be exercised from time to time, even if no real need for it exists, just to show that when a government says it means business, it has the power to back itself up. War is quickly becoming a replacement for the reliability and straightforwardness of government officials and what they say, and because it is easier for a government to blow things up than it is for it to tell the truth all the time, war is now one of the most often used tools in the diplomacy trade.

Large wars the likes of the two "World Wars," have likely gone the way of the dodo. Not because humanity has made any especially admirable advances in the field of avoiding war, but because large states already have an idea of each other's military means and the bargaining between them is based on those universally known facts. Even the two World Wars were not entirely intergovernmental wars (or even wars between peoples), but were more indicative of the transition into the current configuration of Western governments — from more-or-less republican institutions at least somewhat accessible by the population at large, to absolute aristocracies masquerading as republics. The wars sealed that deal by proving to the people, at least subconsciously, that they did not have to approve a war to fight one, and their place in society was secured (later to be enforced) by their government.

War today is beginning to show signs of its eventual status as a tool not only for the protection of a government against external threats, but against internal rebellion as well. The increased militarization of domestic police forces in both appearance and privilege is no accident. Intergovernmental relations are actually closer than ever before, in spite of war or the threat of war, as is evidenced by the "Cold War." Populations are being conditioned to believe that their individual well-being is second to the well-being of the State (which is for some reason now indistinguishable from the "government"), and war is used not only to fuel further government expansion but to keep troublesome populations under control.