| From: | Gurth gurth@******.nl |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Spirits of War |
| Date: | Thu, 15 Jul 1999 11:02:51 +0200 |
the street was...
> To be honest, I think War of these days is almost always toxic. If not
> ever. Has it really ever been "honourable"?
Very strange things happen in war. Honor is a matter of personal
interpretation, of course, but in plenty of wars, soldiers one moment try
to kill the enemy at all cost, and the next treat them extrenely
honorably. What has made modern wars much more horrific is the de-
personalization of the whole affair.
Sure, wars have never been pretty, but it tended to be over relatively
quickly -- a battle would last a few days at most, ending with lots of
dead and wounded, but at least it was over.
Verdun (to stick with that earlier example) lasted from 21 February until
November 1916 and saw near-constant artillery fire (9 hours worth out of
1240 guns just as the German opening bombardment), rifle/machinegun fire,
gas attacks, ... End results? Over 300,000 casualties on either side, and
a few kilometers of ground gained by the Germans. (Where it should be
noted that Verdun wasn't about terrain; it was fought, in the words of
general Falkenhayn, to bleed the French white.)
Hell, even the Gulf War of 1991 saw so many Iraqi's get killed that nobody
knows how many -- estimates at the time ranged between 10,000 and 100,000,
but I can't remember more recent/accurate figures. And that war got
stopped pretty damn quickly when the real face of war (the so-called
"highway of death") flashed across TV screens in the western world...
These are just examples, but they're a major part of the reason why I'm
saying the same thing Quindrael is, namely that spirits of war would
virtually always be toxic. Fighting for The Cause (hm, a NOFX song :) may
seem or even be the right thing to do, but I don't think it would produce
"good" spirits.
--
Gurth@******.nl - http://www.xs4all.nl/~gurth/index.html
Cooking with the devil, frying down in hell.
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