What War Is

From a posting by Bill Faith on Old War Dogs from an e-mail written by "Gene Harrison," (a nom de guerre, like Abu Nudnik). Note what Sergeant Harrison reports on the Basil Faultyesque British education system: "Right. Nothing about the War!" This is how perverted pacifism can get: only by teaching about war do children see the downside of it. The pantywaist education ninnies worldwide eviscerate their very best argument: that war is its own best deterrent!

First of all War is not the resolution of conflict by threat or use of deadly force; that is police work. War is not the final stage of diplomacy. That is diplomacy. War is not establishing defenses against attack—there are no defenses that cannot be breached. Stronger defenses simply change the cost to the enemy of the breach.

War is a national response to a threat of death or destruction to the people or structure (in every sense) of a nation. The purpose of war is to eradicate and so completely destroy the enemy that the threat to the nation disappears. The destruction of an enemy by war includes destroying every asset of the enemy, political, social, religious, economic, psychological, biological, and human. You may choose not to destroy a hospital, but only because it uses the enemies resources that could otherwise be directed toward you. [i.e. used by you later -AN]

Not only must you kill the enemy, you must render it incapable of recovery in any form that had led to the threat or deed that brought war on. The devastation the enemy faces must force complete compliance by the entire enemy polis; civil and military, to our demands that lead to total surrender. I can’t count the number of Churches we shelled into oblivion in Germany. They were terrific artillery observation posts. I can hardly remember whether we killed 150,000 or 200,000 civilians in Dresden, and that was the work of the Greatest Generation. Nagasaki and Hiroshima demonstrated that in the face of overwhelming destruction, an Empire could be brought to heel.

We aimed to destroy every avenue of communication that fostered resistance by the civil population. My battalion alone would have silenced al Jazeera on the first day of an attack. No news reporter who had not been screened and whose reports had not been reviewed by censor were transmitted, either to our homeland or to the enemy. As one of my culture heroes, Winston Churchill said, "we will make them bleed and burn." I wore that patch. My regimental motto was "Death before Defeat."

I note, here in England where I visit my daughter and my five grandchildren, that none of the children have learned in their schools of the Battle of Britain. They find it hard to believe that children like them living in London, where sent away to the North to escape dying by the Blitz, the buzz bombs and V2s of 1940-41, so that a remnant of a great nation would remain. They thrill to hear me speak with praise and reverence of young British airmen, flying their Spitfire "kites," against Messerschmitts and Heinkels.