War, Violence and Modernity (1): Faces of War

War, Violence and Modernity (1): Faces of War

MMW lecture

Lecture outline

• The relationship between war and the Enlightenment

• The emergence of industrial and “total” warfare in the nineteenth century

• The age of the World Wars

Violence, Enlightenment and Modernity (1)

• Modernity more violent that supposedly “barbaric” pre-modern times?

• Organized violence in the twentieth century accounts for 75% of all war deaths

• Modern technology and state-craft create new ways of killing

• See Malešević, Sociology of War and Violence (2010)

Violence, Enlightenment and Modernity (2)

• Critics of modernity falsely accuse it of being the most violent age

• But deaths from wars and terrorism in decline

• The Enlightenment ushered in a more civilized and less violent age

• See Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011)

Paul Nash The Menin Road (1919)

The French Revolution/Napoleonic Wars

• Subjects of the old regime become citizens of the new nation

• Reconstitution of the military—development of a volunteer army drawn from the citizens militia of the revolution

• Levée en masse of 1793• Jourdan law of 1798: system of universal

conscription

Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831)

• Highly influential military theorist

• “On War” his opus on warfare, published after his death in 1832

• Concepts of absolute war (similar to total war), limited wars (wars with more narrowly defined objectives)

• “War is a continuation of politics by other means”

• The “fog” of war

The American Civil War, 1861-1865

• “Test of will”—two states at war over “way of life”

• Rise of Industrial War—Railways, telegraph, machine guns

• War of attrition—North has more people and industrial resources

• Over 600,000 Killed

Sherman’s March to the Sea (1864)

The Franco-Prussian War: Total War?

• Total war, in which every aspect of state and society is mobilized towards the total destruction of the enemy, arguably not achieved

• But mass mobilization• Women and children involved in

humanitarian effort • New technologies – step towards total war

World War I• Shocking violence—end of

enlightenment hopes• A war in which technology

changes rapidly• Trenches, stalemate—leads to

bigger, deadlier guns, poison gas, tanks and planes

• Total War: Home front mobilization, power of modern propaganda, strict censorship of the press to ensure one nation’s interpretations of the war and of “the enemy”

A theory of total war

‘Prevailing forms of social organization have given war a character of national totality – that is, entire populations and all the resources of a nation are sucked into the maw of war. And since society is now definitely evolving along this line, it is within the power of human foresight to see now that future wars will be total in character and scope.’Giulio Douhet (1921)

Japanese Invasion of China

• Starts in the early 1930s, formal war of invasion launched in 1937

• By 1945—20 million Chinese civilians dead, along with 2-3 million military deaths

• Major atrocities committed by Japanese military against Chinese civilians:

• The Nanjing massacre-December 1937• ‘3-All’s campaign’—Kill all, burn all, loot all= mass

death and pillage in the Chinese countryside

U.S. Strategic Bombing of Japan

• Architect of the bombing campaign: General Curtis “Bombs Away” Lemay

• Incendiary bombing of Tokyo: 9-20 March 1945, kills 80,000-100,000 civilians, 51 square miles of Tokyo destroyed

• Dozens of Japanese cities systematically bombed

• Nuclear bombs dropped on cities of Hiroshima and Nagasak—87 percent of the urban targets are residential areas as part of the bombing campaign

General Curits Lemay: ‘Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time... I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.’

DDT spraying in Burma

DDT spraying near Naples

• “Ultimately, war is still an art, and like all artistic endeavours, human imagination will continue to drive inventive forms and executions of its subject. In a sense, the most basic of the principles of war is the need to constantly challenge, re-evaluate, and modernize all of them. The job is never done.”

• Brigadier General Charles J. Dunlap, Jr., U.S. Air Force, 2006