Total War
Recently, I had an argument with a certain personage on the subject of Total War, not the game, the practice. The modern idea of modern war dates back to William Tecumseh Sherman, a Union General in the Civil war famous for his destruction of Atlanta and his march to the sea. Sherman believed that for the war to be won, everything of any value to the enemy must be destroyed. While this initially meant “everything necessary for the enemy to produce articles of war” it eventually expanded to include anything that might support morale. After the war, Sherman toured Europe teaching European generals his doctrine of total war. They took his teaching to heart, and in World War I, France was almost completely destroyed by massive artillery barrages, and millions of soldiers were killed or permanently injured by the use of poisonous gasses. Total war was taken to new levels in World War II when airplanes enabled governments to send immense levels of destruction over long distances. In fact, it could easily be argued that Britain still exists because of Adolf Hitler’s idiotic resistance to building long range heavy bombers until it was far too late.
The modern Doctrine of Total War has two main problems. First, it has a tendency to spiral out of control, and as soon as one side no longer fears the opposing side’s destructive capability, the only limit on Total War, the ideal of mutual destruction, goes out the window. The second problem is that Total War is essentially Fascism relegated to warfare.
Fascism, boiled down to it’s bones is the belief that the end justifies the means, that we should pursue not that which is right, but that which we think works. If the Twentieth Century taught us anything, it was the danger of this idea. Under this belief, Hitler and the Nazi Party killed thousands of Jews and began one of the bloodiest wars in mankind’s history to safeguard the German people, Stalin wiped out millions of Russians to create a better Russia, Neville Chamberlain signed thousands of Czechoslovakians over to Nazi Germany to save lives, and the U.S. Government supplied weapons and military aid to dictators such as Saddam Hussein in order to prevent the world from being oppressed. Every single one of these attempts failed.
The problem with fascism and its various branches, is that man simply cannot see far or wide enough to see the consequences of our actions. We may solve the problem at hand, but we often cause a thousand more problems that never existed before. When we stop seeking out the right thing to do, and pursue the “efficient” thing to do, we have fallen off the path of reason because we can’t define what is and is not efficient! The world was designed one way, good actions cause good results, bad actions cause bad results no matter how well meaning the doer may be. This is the point that Tolkien makes in “The Lord of the Rings”, that good can never come out of evil.
A smaller and more minor problem that plagues advocates of Total War is their claim that you must do “whatever is necessary” to win the war, or something of that sort. I severely doubt and fervently hope that the personage with whom I discussed this topic does not wish to return to the use of poison gas in war, or wants to start nuking Afghanistan and Iraq.
Once one decides to pursue what they deem to be efficiency over what is known to be right, they have started on the path to fascism and foolishness. They draw lines based purely upon what they feel, and as soon as “necessity” drives them across the line, they happily draw another, and on ad infinitum.
