Navigator wrote: ↑Sun Nov 14, 2021 12:03 am
tim wrote: ↑Fri Nov 12, 2021 6:51 pm
What you just described is a political non-crisis war.
Why didn't we use the same tactics we used on Japan in the Korean War, Vietnam War, Desert Storm, and War on Terror?
How is using nuclear weapons against solely military targets a political non-crisis war?
Straight from John's book:
Crisis wars are the worst kinds of wars -- the genocidal wars.
Some people would argue that America has never fought a genocidal war, but indeed we have -- twice since the nation's founding.
The most recent crisis war was World War II. Before it was over, we firebombed and destroyed major cities like Dresden and Tokyo, with the intention of destroying the cities and their inhabitants, including millions of civilians. And we dropped nuclear weapons on two Japanese cities for exactly the same reason.
I'm not blaming the Allies for taking these genocidal actions. But I'm making the point that genocidal actions like these always occur in crisis wars. In fact, I don't assign blame to anybody for the actions I describe in this book. I'm simply describing what happens, what always happens.
By contrast, the Vietnam War did not exhibit any of this kind of genocide by the Americans. Let's face it: We could have beaten the Vietnamese if we'd been willing to use nuclear weapons on Hanoi, but nothing like that could ever have happened. (Incidentally, the Vietnam war was a genocidal crisis war for the Vietnamese, which explains not only the Tet offensive, but also the massive civil war that engulfed Cambodia in the mid-1970s.)
Nor did World War I exhibit this kind genocidal behavior in western Europe. I've found that those who compare WW I and WW II rarely have the vaguest idea what WW I was about, and simply assume that it was identical to WW II. I'll give just one stark example of the difference between the two wars: In WW II, Germany and Japan refused to surrender, even when it was certain that they would lose, and even when their cities were being firebombed and millions of civilians killed. But in WW I, Germany capitulated long before it had to; there was no genocidal climax, which is what characterizes a crisis war.
Prior to World War II, America's previous crisis war was the Civil War. At the climax of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln OKed a "scorched earth policy": General Sherman marched through Georgia killing not only everyone in sight, but also destroyed all homes and crops so that any survivors starved to death.
This kind of genocidal behavior did not occur in any of America's other wars -- the Gulf War, the Vietnam War, the Korean War, World War I, the Spanish-American War, or the Mexican-American war.
Non-crisis wars are political wars -- they come from the politicians. They can start at any time a politician decides, and they can end at any time.
Crisis wars come "from the people" rather than from the politicians. They're almost like sex in their emotional ferocity. The recur in any society at roughly 70-90 year intervals. Crisis wars may get off to a bumpy start, but once they pick up speed they can't be stopped, and end with a genocidal fury.
Here are some other examples of crisis wars:
When a historian uses the phrase "spiraled out of control" to talk about a war, then it's probably a crisis war. The French Revolution is a good example: A general desire by the French people to punish the aristocrats who had brought the country to bankruptcy in 1789 spiralled out of control into a massacre, a Reign of Terror where anyone who had even been associated in any way with an aristocrat became a victim of the guillotine.
In the early 1990s, Serbs launched an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Croats and the Bosnians in the Balkans. These were all people who had lived together in the former Yugoslavia. They were neighbors, they had intermarried, their kids went to school together, and so forth. But the Serbs launched a campaign to mass-murder the men, bury them in mass graves, and mass-rape the women.
In 1994 Rwanda, not only did the Hutus mass-kill and mass-rape their Tutsi neighbors, but they went a step further and hacked off their arms, legs and heads, and made piles of various body parts in different places.
The fact that historians have been unable to generalize this concept into an understanding that there are two different kinds of wars is a source of constant amazement to me, because the difference between crisis and non-crisis wars is as plain as the nose on your face.
The genocidal nature of World War II and the Civil War is clear and stark to anyone who thinks about it. The political, and decidedly non-genocidal nature of Vietnam, WW I, and other wars, is just as clear and stark.
Even professional historians have difficulty understanding this distinction, and that may simply be because of the nature of historical study itself.
Historians get their kicks out of validating the tiniest details about past times. Did Lincoln have fried eggs for breakfast on the day he signed the Emancipation Proclamation? Proving or disproving that claim would be a major find in the world of historians. Thus, if a 1920s book says that he did eat fried eggs, but a more modern discovery showed that he had pancakes instead, then it's worth throwing a party to celebrate.
This attention to the tiniest detail is both the strength and the weakness of historians. The distinction between crisis and non-crisis wars is a big picture kind of thing, but historians miss the differences because they can't step back and look at the bigger picture.
This was illustrated in a discussion I had with a history professor. I compared World War II to the Vietnam War. I said something like, "We dropped nuclear weapons on Japan in WW II, but in the Vietnam War we prosecuted soldiers for harming civilians."
Well, he got all excited. "No, we didn't prosecute all the soldiers who harmed civilians in Vietnam. There were a lot more soldiers who didn't get prosecuted."
Listening to him I got this weird feeling that I always get that people are sometimes totally oblivious to what's going on. I stared at him for a second, and then raised my voice a little. "WE DROPPED NUCLEAR WEAPONS ON JAPANESE CITIES!"
I hope he got the point. It's like not being able to tell the difference between a summer drizzle and a raging typhoon because you're focusing on only one raindrop at a time.
I was trying to explain that it didn't matter how many dozens of soldiers were or were not prosecuted for harming civilians in the Vietnam War, because the number was tiny compared to the huge masses of civilians who were killed in the explosive ending to World War II.
This little anecdote illustrates some of the difficulties I've found in explaining Generational Dynamics to a general reader, even someone with the background and discipline of a professor of history.
I've now had over three years of experience in understanding and evaluating crisis wars, and I've found that if you look at the big picture about a war, then it's rarely difficult to evaluate it as a crisis or non-crisis war.
“Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; - Exodus 20:5