Hello. It's now time for the third level of aggregation. We started the course by talking about the war of, the warrior and what it felt like for the individual. We then moved on to talk about the complexity and the organization required for war of armies. Now this time we're going to be talking about the war of societies. That is, the aggregation of war to a whole new level and the kinds of dynamics that takes place when societies rather than simple individuals or armies are at war. Now some of us might confuse the war of societies with the arrival of total wars in the 20th century. It may appear that along with the sort of analytical distinction that we have made, that this is actually, the war of societies are a progress of aggregation of historical culmination: from warriors to armies, and culminating in the industrial competition of the World Wars. So it might appear that indiscriminate killing and the erasure of border between military and civilians, is actually a historical anomaly. It's a product of, let's say, the new technologies of killing. The kind of technologies that can raze whole cities. So we're, tend to think of total wars as this new development. I want to argue that perhaps we have to be a little more careful, that in studying the wars of the last 500 years of the military evolution, particularly in Europe, that really are the exception. For most of history, societies have not drawn a distinction between combatants and civilians. They have not distinguished between those who can be killed and those who cannot be killed. The very point of war, the Roman way of war, was often the displacement and the eradication of a society. So at least in terms of this level of destruction, it is not really a 20th century event. Simply that the twentieth century has made this eradication and the destruction technologically more feasible. I want to argue that this is an essential paradox, yet another one, into development of war over the past century. As the reach of military destruction expanded and the productive capacity of home societies, and the legitimacy of the circle, remember, the social support for that war as these became critical strategic considerations, normative sanctions and guidelines arose which made the division between legitimate and illegitimate targets more explicit. So, I want you to think about this: we have created a technology which can erase these targets through bombing, mass bombing, artillery, whatever, yet we also have also come up with new normative sanctions that say you are not allowed to do that, you cannot do that. For soldiers in past years, even many today, the idea that women and children, for example, should be spared and that the defeated should retain some level of dignity and property, would be absurd. So again, the mass killing that we observe in the twentieth century doesn't reflect so much a change in the ethos of war, so much as, the change in the technology of war. In the 21st century we have a contradiction. We have a contradiction between a technologically driven destructive capacity and the kind of normative constraints placed upon it's exercise and use. We live in a society in which some military players can eradicate the world, can use a level of violence unprecedented, yet we also live in a world where at least so far there have been some kind of normative limits on the use of that. And perhaps no one said it best than president Lyndon Baines Johnson, he quote, he said, and I quote here: the only power I have is nuclear, and I can't use that. In a sense, this is one of the limits we're going to talk about later on, about war in the 21st century, and the challenges facing industrial societies such as the United States: having this capacity for destruction that is unprecedented, yet being politically unable to utilize it. So what do we mean by war of societies? What I mean by this is that they are characterized by dependence on the home front for military success. That is: back them up. These soldiers cannot succeed. Achilles could survive, Odysseus could survive for nine years without any communications through, to Ithaca. This is no longer possible. The society must back the soldiers up, so these artillery pieces keep coming, so the ammunition keeps coming, so the uniforms keep coming. So there is a dependence of the home front. And there is an implicit permission to target civilians. It's a strange paradox beginning in the 20th century. At the same time that we have come up with all these regulations of what we're allowed to do and what we're not allowed to do in a war, we have also accepted the reign of destruction on civilians in a way that we had not seen for four or five hundred years. Total wars and wars of society involve the continued flow of logistical and personal flows, as the struggle continues between a single battle or campaign. These are wars that take a long time, these are wars about every single sinew, every single muscle of each respective society working on this. What I want to do is make sure that we don't have identify wars of societies by the technology or the kinds of destruction that they're capable. What I want to talk about is that a more ominous and historically significant type of war that involves the clear intention of displacing or eradicating the enemy. That is, that the intention is not to defeat the enemy, the intention is not to take away some resource, the intention is not to punish the enemy, but to literally destroy everything. And what we are going to see is that we can find historical examples of these three. We're going to be looking at specific ones, but we're going to be looking at, you know, you can see that this kind of war, again is not unique to the 20th century, although the 20th century is a particular development in it. And the three types of these wars of societies we're going to be talking about are conquest, then we're going to look at genocide, and finally we're going to look at strategic bombing. Now, I want to make sure that I am not establishing any kind of normative parallel between these three. There is a difference in each one of these. I am merely suggesting that conquest, and genocide, and strategic bombing share certain characteristics that we can use to understand this new level of war, this ultimate, rather than new, this ultimate level of war, the war of societies. [BLANK_AUDIO]
