Quote:
Originally Posted by KirStang
But in here lays a subtle contradiction that bothers me. War represents a breakdown of diplomacy and other means of pressure.
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I'm going to agree with Mr. Clausewitz and say that war is just the continuation of politics through other means. nobody goes to war to indiscriminately level every building and kill every human in the way. violence is a very interesting means of international politics because as soon as politicians agree that violence is the answer and the generals take over, no amount of cleverness from their words is going to take back the people they've killed. going to war is a massive undertaking of imposing one's will upon another through physical force.
some would argue that abandoning words for weapons is the barbarian's way of solving problems, but its effective. all niceties and diplomacy aside, at the end of the day you're either dead or you're not. the difference being how you handled a situation presented to you. Like the Red Baron said: there is a fine line between cleverness and cowardice.
should noncombatants be killed? this might sound cold, but it all depends on the desired effect of whoever is doing the killing. the people/group/country responsible for those deaths need to be willing to accept the consequences, diplomatic, violent, or otherwise from doing exactly that but look at Gen. Lemay. he was a racist genocidal war criminal but there was some genius in the simplicity of his war strategy: kill enough of them and they'll stop fighting. so what'd he do? firebombed swaths of Japan. did the deaths of hundreds of thousands of noncombatants demoralize leadership? believe it. Lemay was the goddam Voldemort of the skies and he did terrible terrible things, but he was really good at it.
tl;dr: if you're going to go to war, be prepared to get alot more than you originally thought you were going to get.
---------- Post added at 02:02 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:50 PM ----------
also, Starship Troopers (the book) taught me more about war theory than clausewitz, mao, and Sun Tzu (for more interesting stuff through read Boyd, FM 3-24, and Douhet). if you want to learn about how to kill people with more of an effect than just providing more worm food, check out as many different theorists as you can.
---------- Post added at 02:04 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:02 PM ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by roachboy
Clausewitz famously defined war as the continuation of diplomacy by other means---the reverse of a state of exception---in the sense that there’s no logical suspension of all law. Rather, there’d be the creation of a separate legal space within which war was permissible. That’s kinda how I’d see at least the conventions that try to define war.
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dammit roach you beat me to it