The Rules of War

“Pillage of a Village,” Sebastian Vrancx

“There are five dangerous faults which may affect a general… (4) a delicacy of honor that is sensitive to shame.” - The Art of War

“True warriors have no reason to be cruel. They do not need to prove their strength. Warriors are not only respected for their strength in battle, but also by their dealings with others. The true strength of a warrior becomes apparent during difficult times.” - Nitobe Inazou, Bushido

“Thou shalt make war against the infidel without cessation and without mercy.” - Leon Gautier, Chivalry

“But it should be stressed here, once again, that it is prohibited to declare that no quarter will be given, to threaten the adversary with this and to conduct hostilities in such a way that there are no survivors. The enemy who is hors de combat, or who has surrendered, or who shows his intention to surrender, or who has parachuted from an aircraft in distress, shall not be made the object of attack.” - Geneva Conventions

“So... groin kick or throat punch or eye stab and then run like carbonised diarrhea?” - Rikard

“Def don't rely on grounds kicks... so iffy. Take out a knee.” - Integrity & Karma

This one is mostly rooted in a unified thought developed by what I’ve read in the past two days or so, mainly reporting and commentary on the Twitter files, a Kunstler newsletter, and a few things about Ukraine. I wish I had made use of the “archive” function on Substack so I could directly share sources. I dunno. Look at my feed or something. I’ll do better next time.

Anyway, a few themes emerged:

• In internal conversations (whether in the form of ‘leaked’ emails or texts or just ideas that are directly expressed to friendly media sources in interviews or press releases), there has been a steady increase of an idea that largely entered the zeitgeist at the beginning of the Trump-era media and really hit its stride with the emergence of COVID biofascism: sometimes deliberately lying is okay. The trajectory seems to have gone like this:

  

  What I’m currently noticing is that the response to accusations of lying, withholding information, censoring true or subjective statements, and so on has moved away from “we must do this because it’s false” to some variant of “we are doing this to win.” The apologia is gone; there’s increasingly less dissembling about how what we’re doing isn’t lying, etc. It is simply:

  Yep. We’re lying. They’re the enemy and we will do whatever it takes to defeat them.

• A broader sense that, continuing on the “war footing” mentality, other things are okay besides lying, too: breaking the law, sometimes in spectacularly huge ways, weaponizing the law to destroy or literally kill opponents, and so on. Again, I increasingly see the argument shift from “you are misrepresenting what we’re doing/we’re not doing that, it’s misinformation” to “yes, we are doing that because they need to be defeated.”

I was fascinated from a lot of my earliest reading as a kid in history and culture by the notion that there are “rules of war.” Nearly every advanced culture seems to have had them for a long time, and they invariably run into trouble when they encounter a culture that doesn’t have them or has radically different ones (at least until they can leverage what is usually a technological advantage and stop assuming “good faith” on the part of their opposition in formulating their strategy).

The rules of war have progressively become more sophisticated and have, like a lot of societal ratchets, only ever trended towards greater complexity, but the motives have remained the same and fall into a few categories:

• To promote conduct in line with one’s own cultural values (bushido, chivalry, other honor cultures, Christian conceptions of mercy or compassion, etc.) to prevent degradation of these values in the home culture outside of warfare (e.g., if you don’t want your men freely raping your women, you discourage it in wartime so they won’t continue doing it when they get home).

• To avoid doing things that you wouldn’t want the enemy to turn on you (torture, chemical weapons, abuse of prisoners) and create an atmosphere of either “guilt” on the part of the opposition or “shame” inflicted by a bystander community of nations (I played an asymmetric strategy game not long ago called “Brave Little Belgium” where part of Belgium’s strategy is boxing Germany into committing strategy-accelerating atrocities that will galvanize other European nations against it).

• To establish a conflict as having bounded objectives that will usually lead to a compromise resolution and discourage total war.

To be clear, I’m not expressing naive shock that these concepts have been regularly violated by modern governments or just coming to the realization that internal political conflict turned against one’s own citizenry resembles warfare. But until very recently, I’d argue that the bad behavior has been done hypocritically (“well you see, this is different because blah blah blah”) rather than sociopathically (“yeah, so?”). There was generally at least a sense of shame if you were caught in it- you’d vociferously deny it or try to babble your way out of it. Now it’s, “yeah, I kicked Satan in the nuts. You should be giving me a medal instead of lecturing me about dirty fighting.”

I’m talking about things like the now infamous Sam Harris’s “corpses of children in his basement” statements in which he asserted, with full sincerity, that the revelation of a coverup of multiple child murders by Biden would be a small price to pay compared to stopping the evil that is… the alleged fraud committed by Trump University. Yep. A scam is apocalyptically evil; dead children is Tuesday, you naive thing (and who gives a fuck about kids anyway?).

I also want to be clear that while the tone of this sounds like a well-trod criticism of the Democrat Party and their associated apparatchiks, especially their media and deep state allies, I’m really talking about everyone- Republicans and “the right,” Democrats and “the left,” and all the other false binaries represented by political entities in other countries across the modern world. It’s simply that right now this behavior seems overwhelmingly represented by the political left and neoliberal entities. Why this is the case is equally interesting to me:

• You could make the argument that because the left has overwhelming control of communication channels like the media and the switches of the Internet (AWS could basically turn off access to a substantial majority of the web for any size population it wanted to), they see themselves as ascendant and are engaging in a kind of arrogance that “the rules no longer apply to us because we are just so elite, and anyway, good guys vs. bad guys.” I call this the Winner Take All option- your victory is so overwhelming, you might as well teabag the corpses of the other team while you wait for the round to reset.

• But the more natural explanation to me is the Desperate Times option- still “good guy vs. bad guy” framing, but the Political Left And Friends do not actually see their position as ascendant but instead as tenuous and desperate- defeat lies around every corner, there is opposition everywhere, and if they are defeated, it will not only usher in an Age of Darkness but they will suffer particularly. This aligns with the somehow-persistent mentality of #Resistance espoused by individuals identifying with this half of the conflict- terrorist tactics are the only viable ones against a Leviathan but they somehow remain blind to the fact that the people they’ve allied themselves with are Leviathan.

Most of what I’ve been talking about thus far is “culture war” shit and “wars of words” or political or economic maneuvering, but there’s plenty of actual violence and force waiting in the wings (no one has explained yet- at all- what the IRS need all that new military hardware for or how they envision it being practically used), and you can see this by the effort the Dem/Left expends to particularly demonize “political violence” or any talk of “civil war” or even simply things like private gun ownership. I sense this is simply because there is a fear that, if not absolutely certain, there’s a strong possibility that most of the entities on that side would lose if the conflict with their opponents became kinetic- if you actually had social collapse or an organized civil war with seceding states or military elements. The goal is not to actually stop violence but to keep the conflict in a winning venue until they can obtain a genuine, assured monopoly on violence. This, too, connects with a constantly evolving narrative around political violence that follows the same exact framing around lying (don’t worry, I won’t do the clown meme again):

• We’re not violent, they are;

• We’re only violent because we’re defending ourselves against their violence;

• Their violence is illegitimate;

• The enemy is evil and deserves our violence.

I see the violence thread moving towards my darker predictions in one particular avenue: a lot of talk about criminalizing things that weren’t criminal before, or making certain kinds of crimes punished more seriously (while standing down on crimes most likely to impact your supporters), particularly the push to create federal crimes around “misinformation.”

When you criminalize something, you are making a de facto statement that you are ultimately fine with killing someone for it. I know this sounds hyperbolic to some, but the libertarians in the audience are probably nodding heavily. The kinds of behaviors that Dems are loudly calling to criminalize, like “election denial” and “COVID misinformation,” to say nothing of building ever more elaborate mousetraps to box currently legal gun owners into illegality, are the kinds that you can see someone standing their ground on to the point where state force will be used on them, and this logically seems intentional: goad your opposition into “defensive biting” so you can flatten them with a SWAT team.

If the next few years see the emergency of state military actions, especially as regards Russia/Ukraine (but also Taiwan and a few other predictions I have that I haven’t fleshed out enough to flash), it will be interesting to see how “dirty” states act in upcoming conflicts with each other, and whether the justifications will be hypocritical dissembling or the stony faces of remorseless killers.

The consequences of this mentality infecting the nations of the modern world- Western and otherwise- are obviously very dire.

What do we think? How does the mindset change? Can it?