Christopher Shea: New scholarship on the origins of 'total war,' from the French Revolution to World War II, helps explain the war on terror
[Mr. Shea is a Boston Globe columnist.]
... Two scholars have just published studies -- one on Napoleon's Europe, the other on the annihilation from the air, by German bombers, of the Basque city of Guernica in 1937 -- that trace the roots of total war. These works, and others, argue that total wars have been, in part, a product of modern technology (poison gas, bombs, etc.) and the modern economies that can produce these weapons on a mass scale. But, this burgeoning work suggests, total wars are also very much a product of modern ideologies that contribute to the idea that a nation at war should hold nothing back.
"I think the rhetoric that is used today has opened us up into being dragged deeper and deeper into a series of conflicts," says David A. Bell, a historian at Johns Hopkins University and author of "The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It."
In his book, Bell stresses how ferocious nationalism and revolutionary fervor led the French to view their enemies as people who needed to be exterminated, not just defeated -- a decisive shift from an earlier Great Power style of warfare. The conscription of hordes of French civilians into the army, too, swept away aristocratic traditions that placed certain limits on war's conduct. Anti-revolutionary opponents, whether French peasants or Austrians, were now "sanguinary hordes," "barbarous," and "vipers": all deserved disembowelment.
It's that kind of invective Bell has in mind when he hears phrases like "the evil ones" today.
Omer Bartov, a historian at Brown who specializes in 20th-century European conflict, says he partly agrees with Bell's broader thesis: French mass mobilization and all-or-nothing ideology were harbingers of future total war -- but only harbingers. "Total wars don't just mobilize people -- they mobilize all the resources of the nation-state," he says. "That can happen only after the industrial revolution."
Bartov's own work stresses those mechanical and industrial aspects of total war. In "Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation," for example, he argues that many aspects of the Holocaust -- poison gas, mass slaughter, bureaucratic efficiency -- built on "innovations" of World War I, for him the first true total war.
Ian Patterson, a Cambridge University literary critic, points to Guernica as the source of a different innovation in the evolution of total war: primal fear of death from the skies. Armies bombed civilians during World War I, but not efficiently. In "Guernica and Total War," he argues that it was the Spanish Civil War, and specifically the attack on Guernica, that created the template for the later bombings of London, Dresden, and Hiroshima....
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... Two scholars have just published studies -- one on Napoleon's Europe, the other on the annihilation from the air, by German bombers, of the Basque city of Guernica in 1937 -- that trace the roots of total war. These works, and others, argue that total wars have been, in part, a product of modern technology (poison gas, bombs, etc.) and the modern economies that can produce these weapons on a mass scale. But, this burgeoning work suggests, total wars are also very much a product of modern ideologies that contribute to the idea that a nation at war should hold nothing back.
"I think the rhetoric that is used today has opened us up into being dragged deeper and deeper into a series of conflicts," says David A. Bell, a historian at Johns Hopkins University and author of "The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It."
In his book, Bell stresses how ferocious nationalism and revolutionary fervor led the French to view their enemies as people who needed to be exterminated, not just defeated -- a decisive shift from an earlier Great Power style of warfare. The conscription of hordes of French civilians into the army, too, swept away aristocratic traditions that placed certain limits on war's conduct. Anti-revolutionary opponents, whether French peasants or Austrians, were now "sanguinary hordes," "barbarous," and "vipers": all deserved disembowelment.
It's that kind of invective Bell has in mind when he hears phrases like "the evil ones" today.
Omer Bartov, a historian at Brown who specializes in 20th-century European conflict, says he partly agrees with Bell's broader thesis: French mass mobilization and all-or-nothing ideology were harbingers of future total war -- but only harbingers. "Total wars don't just mobilize people -- they mobilize all the resources of the nation-state," he says. "That can happen only after the industrial revolution."
Bartov's own work stresses those mechanical and industrial aspects of total war. In "Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation," for example, he argues that many aspects of the Holocaust -- poison gas, mass slaughter, bureaucratic efficiency -- built on "innovations" of World War I, for him the first true total war.
Ian Patterson, a Cambridge University literary critic, points to Guernica as the source of a different innovation in the evolution of total war: primal fear of death from the skies. Armies bombed civilians during World War I, but not efficiently. In "Guernica and Total War," he argues that it was the Spanish Civil War, and specifically the attack on Guernica, that created the template for the later bombings of London, Dresden, and Hiroshima....