*Authors note: i had thought my next post was going to be a defense of the first Adam but other topics rose to the fore and so instead, here's an open letter i wrote to my eldest son in response to a conversation we had last night about Israel and Hamas. i don't know if it's wise or just an outdated, antiquated viewpoint of a fading generation, i only know it's what i think.
Ah, thoughts that come in the middle of the night. Ah, answers that come long after the conversation is over. :)
A few thoughts on war and the nature of war. Wars are not only and some would say, not really, won on the battlefield. They are won in the will. Yes, soldiers go fight but they must have the collective push, they must feel the people they represent behind them leaning with them into the traces, the whole nation must be willing to do what it takes to win. Sacrifice to support the effort, not give up till its over, believe in the cause. This is why the narrative is so vitally important. This is why governments curate the information. Censorship and propaganda. What news gets out. What news do we give. Keep this in mind. It is key to understanding much.
In the forties it was much easier for governments to do this. It explains why Hitler and Hirohito and Mussolini were able to create cults of fanatical people convinced of their own racial superiority and therefore right to rule and were able to start the war in the first place and why they were able to keep fighting the war even when the tide turned against them and it became defensive. It explains why when we were finally able to take the war to these nations and show their people what the awful cost would be, they, eventually, lost their will to keep fighting. But it was atrocious.
The other thing to keep in mind is that war is evil. All war. It is the unleashing of hell upon the earth in order to achieve a goal. All sane men try to limit that unleashing but there is no way around it, it is pure violence. To break the will of the people, we use violence (and propaganda) to change the narrative of their leaders. Which means waging war on the general populace. We annihilated Germany. We razed Japan. The fire bombings of Dresden and Tokyo were horrific and killed thousands of civilians. Women. Children. But unlike the Italians who read the writing and surrendered early, the Germans and the Japanese were more fanatical. More trusting of the narrative. The Germans were sending nothing but old men and underage boys to the front by the end because that is all they had, they would have fought to the last man or so they thought, and so we had to wage total war on them. The Japanese were even more culturally convinced of their need to fight until their own annihilation due to bushido and the samurai cults. And so we let loose the ultimate destruction on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And their will finally broke.
But here’s the question to ask yourself: would we have had the will to do all of that, to win the “last just war” as people call it, if the modern free press and television, and smart phones and the internet had existed then? If our people had seen the suffering of the people of Hamburg, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Hiroshima, would they have had the stomach to finally eliminate the armies and leaders that had started the war no one asked for and committed the death camps and the rape of Nanking? i don’t know, but what i do know is that news and media changed war.
The other thing about this is winning the war MUST be followed with winning the peace. After WWII we did not abandon Germany and Japan. We used our own resources to rebuild them. We won over their people with our care of them and our true intention of helping them. And the crazy thing is that it worked! Those nations did not become fermentation beds of future wars. They became stable nations in an increasingly global world. And its interesting to see how this contrast played out in Berlin and Germany. Divided between the Russians and the West. The same generals and airmen who once bombed Germany into oblivion were tasked with trying to airlift enough food to feed a besieged city when Russia tried to starve out West Berlin! And they did it! It’s an amazing feat to this day.
But the stage was set now for the Cold War, and we see now how wars changed from Korea to Viet Nam, the first true war showed in living color on American tv sets every night. How the government no longer controlled the narrative and even the attempt to do so made them look like the bad guys in the eyes of many. Guys like Nonno to this day still don’t know what happened. We were America. We were the good guys. The police of the world, so convinced of our own power and the nobility to wield it for the right reasons that we must. And here he was being shipped home to a nation who hated him, called him baby killer and the such. Who slammed doors in his face when he tried to visit the relatives of the friends he lost there. There will probably never be another war that can be fought with such monolithic fervor as the ones of old. But maybe not if they are won quickly as in Afghanistan and Iraq. There we lightning fast won the war but never had a plan for the peace and so it dragged out into an occupation. One in which we are all holding court over every little nuance and detail that makes it out, not knowing any better than our ancestors which ones are true and which ones are spun or even entirely false. The media savvy ones will win the will regardless of who wins the battlefield. Hearts and minds control the purse strings. A people who no longer believe in their government or their cause will not join the military. In this kind of arena terrorism makes sense in its own pitiless economy. And they have convinced enough hearts and minds of their own to support their cause. It’s not just that some men want to watch the world burn, it’s that, yes, they do, but maybe more importantly, they also know you don’t.
