‘Copyrighted Material War and Shughter 23 Bax 1.3 The face of bartie Battle is the moment of war in which armed combatants face each other inv the final test of their collective and individual strengths. Keogan (1976: 297) wrices that ‘one would like to say that “a battle Is something which happens between two armies leading to the moral and then physical disintegration of ‘one-¢F the ether of them’ But this definition fails to encompass the quintes- sentially human as well as inhumon reality of battle: ‘the behaviour of men struggling to reconcile theit instinct for selfpreservation, their sense of honour and the achievement of some aim over which other men are ready to kill them’, Battle is a brutally messy social clash —a mix of fear, courage, leadership, anxiety, uncertainty, misinformation, violence, cruelty, self-sacrifice and com- passion. ‘Above al", Keegan (1976: 298) argues, the study of bartle is always a study of solidarity and usually also of disintegration ~ for it is towards the disintegration of human groups that battle is directed’ Moreover, this forced disintegration of enemy armed forces that is the end of battle proceeds through the physical and personal disintegration of individuals. The soldier's view of war is always much more complieated than the com- mander’s or the politician's. For the combatant, battle takes place in an unstable physical and emotional environment. For him, Keegan (1976: 48) argues, battle ‘isa small-tcale situation which will throw up its own leaders and willbe fought bby es own rules — alas, often by its awn ethics’, The destruction of ather human beings is also destructive, therefore, of those wha do the destroying. For a ‘mieture of reacons, including éelf-preservation, confusion and brutalization, the realty of battle constantly fudges the roral line between legitimate and illeit- Imave killing. “improper violence’ is pars and parcel of the meaning of barde. However noble the politcal intentions of governments, and however rational the strategies of generals, kiling flelds are never morally ‘clean’. The most just ‘war will be sullied by the harsh reality of battle. Degenerate war Although the general legitimacy of war has been accepted through- out human history, particular wars have still had to be justified = indeed, many have been widely regarded as unjustified. Moreover, the methods of each war have required justification: battle has always contained a tendency towards killing in ways that have been regarded as morally questionable, Moral theory has recog- nized this dilemma in the classic distinction between iis ad Bellen (the justice of war, i.e. of its ends) and its in bello (justice within war, i.e. of the means used). Unjustified aggression is the common source of the outbreak of war, so the first of the two remains Copyrighted Material(Copriesited lateral 24° War and Slaughter important. However, in modern times the means of war have given even greater cause for concern. Even where the ends of war could be seen as just — for example, in defeating aggression ~ the means have often been increasingly questionable. Although the basic structure of war remains as it has been throughout several millennia, the process of war has changed enor- sly. At the heart of the changes is the altered character of mass yg. This has two principal dimensions. First, it has become cally possible to kill on a vast sole with unprecedented iy. In presindustrial times, great slaughter was committed in hand-to-hand fighting and other more or less proximate encoun- ters, But with each modern advance in the technology of weapons, delivery and communications, mass killing has become ever easier to inflict, by more and more remote means. Thus, by the time of nuclear Weapons and intercontinental missiles, it had become possible to kill, instantaneously, immense numbers of people ever enormous distances. It has been suggested that in auelear war, a whole war could be concentrated in a single, brief battle (i.e. an exchange of missiles), Friction would barely be part of actual war, but would be transferred back into war preparation — for example, bottlenecks of weapons production and political mobilization. Second, it became increasingly seen as militarily necessary to define the enemy to include society as a whale within a given territory or space, rather than limiting, it to the opposing armed forces. In the Second World War, even the Western democracies defined German and Japanese civilian populations as a major part of the enemy. Violating established prohibitions on the d killing of civilians, they inflicted slaughter on a vast scale. This was a huge degeneration of war into killing that was illegitimate by war's own historical standards. In the theory and planning of nuclear war, morcover, this was taken even further. The killing envisaged was not simply massive but virtually ubiquitous. If ever practised, it could have amounted — indeed, could still amount = to a catastrophic destruction of human society as a whole. This extension of the logic of escalation was, in the end, a huge problem for the theory and practice of war. If war became simple, comprehensive slaughter - nothing but killing — any political meaning would be destroyed. In the twentieth century, therefore, war's chickens came home to roost. The attempt to treat mass killing as an extension of rational polities began to founder in the ling swamps of Flanders and burnt-out German cities, evenCopyrighted tnatertal War and Slaughter 25 before the nuclear age opened up in the irradiated ruins of Hiro- shima. Warfare, on the grandest scale and in the hands of the most advanced, liberal states, repeatedly degenerated into little more than deliberate mass slaughter, first of soldiers and then of civilian populations. Strategy and politics wore very thin in the face of the enormities that their pursuit revealed. These outcomes posed deep problems for the viability of waras a social practice. The reason lay in the fact that these oulcomes were neither accidental, nor deviations from its inner logic. On the con- trary, they were direct and, in a broad sense, inevitable results of a classic practice of war under modern conditions. Located within a competitive interstate system, fuelled by the technology, socio- economic organization and politics of mass industrial societies, slaughter on a huge scale was a predictable outcome of war. Sup- plied with unprecedented resources, destructive logic overrode all others, producing truly total war. Supplied with an ever wider range of human targets, warfare swallowed up (or threatened to swallow up) whole populations in a more or less indiscriminate fashion. ‘The dialectic between discriminating aims and indiscriminate results is the key to the meaning of degeneration in modern war. It involves simultaneously: 1. the extended definition of the enemy as civilian as well as militar 2. the deliberate targeting of elements of the civilian population as well as military forces; 3. intensified means of destruction which killed more people more speedily and efficiently: 4 but also increasingly indiscriminate slaughter which killed people across broader areas and with little precision as to their membership of any enemy group. ‘Thuis, in the name of defeating each other's armies, First World War generals mowed down a generation of young men from across Europe. To destroy Chinese resistance, Japanese troops massacred civilian populations wholesale. To crush Soviet power, Nazi German forces slaughtered civilians and prisoners of war. To attack German industries in the Second World War, British leaders began to destroy whole cities. To crack German civilian morale, they obliterated tens of thousands, refugees and prisoners alongside citizens, soldiers and war-workers, in huge fire-storms. To defeat Imperial Japan, American leaders blew up two entire urban Copyrighted tnatertal26 War and Slaughter populations with atomic weapons. (All of these incidents are cussed further in the episode sections af this book.) In the all-out use of massive force there was, therefore, by the middle of the last century, an overwhelming tendency for targeted violence to produce indiscriminate mass slaughter on.a previously unimagined scale. In the last half of the twentieth century, both theorists and planners of warreluctantly recognized this asadanger to their practices. To avoid redundancy, politicians and generals devised more limited roles for, and means of, military force. On the ‘one hand, they reinvented strategy as deterrence. This meant devis- ing political uses, divorced as far as possible from their military realization, for nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. On the other hand, they have sought new, limited ways of fighting wars, using a combination of computerized targeting and media manipu- lation, which has worked increasingly well in the limited campaigns that the West has fought since 1989 (see episode X). To the extent that they have succeeded, the practice of war appears to have been rescued from its miid-twentieth-century dead end. But warfare remains fundamentally compromised by degenerate tendency. It has led war, I shall argue, ta produce what has come to be known as genocide. Categories of violence Most writing assumes that war and genocide, as categories of violence, can be clearly delineated — even if we might need to investigate the relationships between them, | argue, in ota that the distinctions are only partial, and have been all too eas historical practice. In this sense, the genocidal pode a manifestation of the internal linkages between these types of political violence. For war and genocide are not ‘phenom- ena’ in the sense that volcanic eruptions are natural events. They are, by contrast, general ways of representing different kinds of intentional actions by individual and collective social actors. The nature of the linkages between war and genocide can be highlighted if we bring into the picture a third general type of political violence: revolution. All three concepts have a dual mean- ing, referring beth to the courses of action of specific collective actors and to the clashes of the actions of opposing actors. How- ever, the actors who make war, revolution and genocide, and Copyrighted Material