War's Class Interest
notes on Gladiator and All Quiet
The perks of having an army is that you don’t have to send your friends into battle. But some of those men that are sent are friends of each other.
That’s only an instance of the disconnect between generals and soldiers. One has power and is therefore political; and of all, the producer of knowledge. But the soldiers will only be sold on its truth until they discover that what is true in the castle is just not so on the field.
He can maintain alliance if he’s also on the field, but no true politician is ever one of the people.
The alignment of each class’s interest is conditional to age. In cases where the state of warfare has shifted significantly from what generals may or may not have seen is that difference between the First and Second World War. In hindsight, the barbarous futility of the first was largely prolonged because of the ego of its leaders; but also, the capitulation of Germany—an agreement for peace that was designed to favor the allies with the leverage of the country’s imminent defeat—paved the way for the Second World War.
After a generation of 17 million killed young men and millions more to witness it, the horrors of the mid-twentieth century were enough to align the interests of generals and soldiers alike to commit to killing triple the amount—morality is a powerful unifier.
It was always a side note that the allies’ fathers replaced the exploded powder keg with another awaiting detonation. The excessive force the first time resulted in the excessive appeasement the second. War is continuous and enables extremes.
"War is an act of force, and there is no logical limit to the application of that force. Each side, therefore, compels its opponents to follow suit; a reciprocal action is started which must lead, in theory, to extremes.”
Carl von Clausewitz, On War
The ripples of force to create two extremes in time, here within only a generation, is evidence that “in war the result is never final…the defeated state often considers the outcome merely as a transitory evil, for which a remedy may still be found in political conditions at some later date.”
For this reason alone, the interests of the future are not to be surrendered for the present. But this applies to war and what it determines as political, and not to what politics has determined as war. War is barbarity, tribalism against tribalism; politics is too civilized and, as such, theatrical enough to artificially craft war, in the same way that invasions of the Middle East were crafted for oil and secondarily oriented toward terrorism, if not for the fact that terrorism’s survival meant the amplification of political conditions for political opportunity. The propaganda to sustain belief in its justness was short-lived when the people realized they were deceived: this was not war at all, just a massacre.
But this is what war is anyway. With barbarity comes politics, and with the tribal terrorism that came with the First War came the politics that led to capitulation and the Second War. The inverse, however, is the worst of the two because when politics crafts war, there is no end in sight, no honesty to history, and no lesson learned, just consequences for actions reaped, and generations of darkness. Look at where we are.
It can be argued that war is as natural as its most natural human characteristics: ego and greed is not the least of humanity’s sins that is incapable of killing. These are very capable at crafting warfare. But that would be the issue with this definition. War is not the product, but itself prolonged or suspended by human sin, of which war is the sum total.