Ultimate Practice

A recurring theme in science fiction or fantasy is the genre trope of a more advanced race with some form of noosphere above them, a telepathic network by which they all communicate and achieve harmony with each other. This works in both directions, the Zerg version of an alternate, insectoid strain in evolution where a humanity-possessing species came into being in the form of hiveminded raw biology, and the Protoss version, where an advanced species has turned into the biological priests of a technological superstructure that supersedes them completely.

The Terran counter-example here of courses uses typical anthropoignorance, where authors forget that they themselves are an organism in total continuity with their technology. Humanity has all of this in spades, with the electricity, written or spoken language, economic systems, etc, making up the same function as the magically simplified psychic systems of the other two races. The idea that humanity does not have the same thing in themselves is from the twofold error of only interpreting the things of the other as being othered in their conception (ie, a Protoss would experience all things of the world not as “X” but as “Protoss-X”), thus making a sort of objectification of all things done equally by all species into only unique to them. This error occurs as an inverse of the error of self-conception in individualistic humans, wherein one cannot perceive oneself as being anything other than an individual floating in a sort of absurd vacuum, not as a part of the larger systems - the classic shock and awe of freshman year debates on free will.

The concept of “total war” was rediscovered just as it was being lost when war, inevitably, emerged under the same laws it had always followed. Previously, war was never considered sovereign beyond the regular state of things, as some separate theatre of political pomp, until the great era of separations after industry began to take over. Several ideological processes undergirded the enlightenment, the most important of which was secularization - not the process of making the sacred no longer that, but apposite - making the profane ecclesiastical. The nation-state emerged as a consolidation of the King’s superstructural central authority, growing to a whole system of superstructural orders emanating from the central authority, across the land, drawing firm national borders, stratifying power, enclosing land into legally ordered plots, etc. All of this was to construct a similar order to that of the church, a discourse which determines the map of the territory. In doing so, the map and territory were brought into sharp focus in a way never done before, where now the consciousness of oneself as territory made an alienating effect. The various movements of legal counter-facts around the world, the Russians who proclaim themselves Soviets, the Germans who proclaim themselves Imperial, the Americans who proclaim themselves Revolutionary, etc, there’s a concept of two selves, the legal fiction of the self and the actual self. There is some truth to this - the self as a part of the state’s discourse is a part of the map, while the actual ego is a part of the territory - forming just that dissonance, often bleeding over when associations are made with others as territory itself, seen in the American tendency to obsessively construct their opponents as “establishment”.

Total War then, was a new concept, as it brought into sharp focus a reunification after the cleft, where map and territory were made complete again. The functions of state had their discourses reduced to the raw systems of political-economy that the state has always functioned as, people found themselves reduced to their place in the truer discourses of self, ethnicity, language, gender, religion, where nation didn’t suffice. It was in the second world war when the last gasps of this were felt by Westerners, when all sides of the war returned to the fact of combat that modern states so often shun - that civilians are no less a part of the thing you’re attempting to inflict damage upon than the so-called “military”, that the difference between the two is of fleeting context.

In later “wars”, though I feel that’s too weighty a word for what often occurred, when a colonial galavanting collided with quasi-genocide, such as in American Vietnam or Soviet Afghanistan, there was a conflict often between the false husks of humans at the top, those unable to comprehend anything but their bishopric, the generals and intelligence agents, would balk in horror as war emerged on a tactical level, for the Kurtz and Balalaikas of the world. Their “country” abandoned them, because what else would it do? They descended through history into war, while their country only wanted intelligence gathering and police action. It was they alone who truly committed war and they were punished for it, as war was never what was wanted.

As long as the Geneva Convention is followed, war is not. After all, what is that, but the empty words of a select few nations, all in alliance with each other? A war is a game of force to make political-economic goals realized. For the upholders of empty documents and moralities, distinctions between civilian and military casualties, between justified and unjustified force - war, when it comes, as it always does, as a rending season of evil that descends and passes every few generations, will come like the Italians experienced the French invasion in the late 15th century, where the hardened brutality of soldiers trained in war met the empty pomp and theatrics of soldiers trained in parades and duels.