Ms. Smarty Pants Know It All

I don’t mean to be harsh, but I’m surprised that Olive Kitteridge was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. I did not enjoy this read at all.

It is probably the most depressing book I have ever read. Every story is about how life is miserable and that the best one can do is “manage.”

I do not like the structure, a series of short stories that are supposed to build into a novel, or Olive Kitteridge, the designated link between all these stories. I found her unsympathetic and infuriating.

Besides the idea that life is miserable and that everyone is settling, the book also takes on parents messing up their children as a theme. Man, this is a depressing read.

Elizabeth Strout is a strong writer. If I had read any of these stories in a self-contained format, I would have loved it. She builds good characters, settings, and moods. But all these stories back-to-back… all depressing and a little bit hateful. Ugh.

The editor who suggested this needs a check-down.

Tags: Books by Ms. SP
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Continued from Part 1

Demonization and Wars of Annihilation
To make people fight with the will necessary to win, the other side must be demonized, often dehumanized. We must fight them because they want nothing less than to wipe us from the face of the earth. Within such a framework, it is hard to see the other side as having honor and accept the idea of innocent bystanders. Within such a framework, logical goals and acceptable stopping points get lost.

Since “they” want to kill you, it is better for you to kill them first. The world of limited warfare gives in to the world of total war.

Civilian-Military Split

Ironically, the rise of “civilian” armies ended up segregating the “civilian” world from the “military” world. Before Napoleon, Bell argues, soldiers were civilians. The officers were the nobles of the land. The grunts were part-time soldiers. When not at war, they had to go find other jobs in order to get paid. Every person in the military, from the kings on down, was fully in the civil world.

Then, with the start of total warfare, the “military” world came to be thought of as its own sphere. It has its own rules and status. People would and could do things in war that they would not do as “regular” people. Wars became fought by specialists, by soldiers and warriors. The military became professional.

This last point is extremely interesting to me because it is the opposite of what I had previously learned.

Summary
That’s what makes total war so destructive and desperate. The line between combatants and noncombatants are blurred. Almost everyone is fair game. The levels of hatred and destruction are ratcheted up but they are compartmentalized as exceptional feelings.

These feelings and actions are not acceptable in the normal world, but in a state of war, everything is ok. The actions by “0ur” professional fighters are rationalized as necessary in a state of war when all of “them” are trying to annihilate us. The actors are excused while the targets are undifferentiated and many.

In the meantime, the other side is applying the exact same standards to us.

Tags: Books, History, Politics by Ms. SP
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It’s been a while, but back in my post about The First Total War by David A Bell, I mentioned that he has some really interesting ideas that are worthy of consideration. Here I go…

End of War
Bell points out that our world has a lot in common with Napoleon’s world. For us, before the Communist block broke up, there had not been armed conflict between the major world powers for a while. Then, once the Soviet Union fell, there seemed to be a sense that large-scale world peace may be possible. After all democracies do not fight democracies, right?

We’ve seen how quickly that idea crashed and burned as we’ve been in almost non-stop warfare for the last two decades.

The same pattern occurred with the success of the French Revolution. The thinkers of the day saw the fall of the “old world,” a world of royals fighting for greed, power, and territory. With the people in charge, surely we would not fight amongst ourselves, right? The Enlightenment idea that Man and Man’s history were perfectible was demonstrating itself.

Then Napoleon and his Republican army brought into Europe warfare of a style and scope that they have never seen before.

Civilian Warfare
In fact, it seems that putting warfare into the hands of “the people” only escalates the affair. This is something that the majority of today’s people do not understand.

Tyrants and dictators are relatively easy to deal with. Even if they are “crazy,” like a Gaddafi or a Kim Jong Il (or a Napoleon), they have one goal in mind. They want to remain in power. Everything else is negotiable. Accordingly, they may be scary or dangerous, but you can put them in the rational actors category because what they want is easy to understand.

When the kings of Europe fought each other, the civilian population was, more or less, left alone. There were rules, and it was to no one’s benefit to decimate the population or destroy the lands that the fighters wished to rule. The nobles fought each other, and it was better to capture one of your social equals alive for the ransom that they would bring than to leave them dead on the field.

When “people” fight, they don’t use warfare as a tool. It often becomes an expression of hatred and irrationality. To make the people fight, when they have little to gain from the endeavor, you have to make a very strong “Other.”

Continued in Part 2…

Tags: Books, History, Politics by Ms. SP
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