A Philosophy of War and Conflict

[The Grand Nudger]

That’s just my opinion. Ukraine is in war. So if they are bombing the “Wildberries” depots I think this is a terrible waste as well. But it’s ok because they have to push the Russian people to stop denying the realities of this war. But there are 2 billion food insecure human persons in this world. + the Russians are not hitting Ukrainian grain ships anymore. So is it too much to ask Ukrainians to leave these ones alone?

Who told you the russians stopped hitting grain ships and infrastructure?  They've struck 50 ukranian cargo ships since june.  Cargo vessels won't even approach Odessa anymore, which russia struck 126 times just in the month of july.  Is it too much to ask for the russians to go home and leave ukraine alone?

- That’s what I wanted people to say when I started this Thread. To this I could add that terrorism is not warfare. Another thing that can’t be done (even in asymmetrical warfare) is using your own population as a human shield against the enemy. Again: If you are a soldier, that’s not how you fight.
 
And I might also add that wars are gradually becoming more civilized. The Japs released plague infested fleas on Chinese cities. That’s what they did in the middle ages, catapulting plague infested bodies into cities and then raping, torturing, murdering all they can as there was no modern press to document their crime.
 
Today we say for instance that “when they fight democracies have to fight with one hand tied on their back” just as you said, Ukrainians cannot bomb Russian shopping malls on a daily basis. That’s not how they operate.
 
So back to the Middle East: This is not how Iran is fighting. Therefore Iran is not a hope against Israel. On the contrary Iran is what gives legitimacy to Israel’s activities in Lebanon and Palestine. + I don’t know where Israel is going breaking all the above mentioned rules of engagement.

We might have released thrips over cuba in 96.  No one can prove it.  We have much more deadly biological weapons than a diseased corpse nowaday...though quite a few remain diseased corpse-based!  I agree with you on every point...but I want to offer an alternative view to the civilization of warfare. 

Perhaps it's actually fetishization.  It seems great to the in-group.  Feudal lords, for example, could and would mow down any number of peasants.  Burn villages.  Rape their way through counties.  However...when they found themselves in a bind...unexpectedly dismounted or surrounded....they could count on another person of the same caste enforcing the martial rules of their time.  Capture, bounty, release, reengagement.  This is the reality to the fantasy of chivalry...but it was also believed to be (and must have seemed..to them) to be a more refined and civil way to engage in combat.  It is often (perhaps always) the case that the civil way to engage in conflict privileges the skills, tactics, resources, and cultural mores of the constructing martial state or body.  Making it all but impossible for a smaller or less powerful or poorer nation to fight the right way.  Terrorism is absolutely warfare - it's the collection of possible military responses we deem taboo.  A huge part of the idea of a professional military as we now know it actually arose as a form of then-asymmetric warfare itself...taking the business of killing out of the hands of landed lords and military caste members and democratizing slaughter.  No longer could said horse raider from before count on being captured, housed, and sold...he was going to be unceremoniuosly pried of of his horse by one guy with a purpose built implement, so that another guy could cave his plate in around his lungs, before yet another guy showed up with a spike to finish of the immobilized and suffocating warlord.  All of them peasants.  The british eliminated almost the entirety of the french administrative state when a bunch of commoners with shameful weapons executed the mounted nobility at agincourt.  The words their enemies used for them then read exactly like terrorist now.

Just food for thought.  As I said at the start, I agree with you....but the question I have..is do you think that democracies -do- fight with a hand tied behind their back?  Is democracy itself a martial weakness?
 

- What I had in mind was everything happening in the Middle-East in general. In the Arab insurrection of 1916-1918 Ottoman soldiers were keeping their last bullets to their selves and it was not a joke. Being taken alive by those desert-dwelling Arabs (in that Era) was not the smart thing to do. But this is not what I am referring to either. The type of violence we are witnessing in this region since decades is simply inhuman. + The perpetrators of this violence are actually the descendants of great civilizations. So even in this context, I find it difficult to understand that type of warfare that is happening between closely related ethnic groups (if you look at the demography of it).
 
You know: Before the Bronze Age collapse, Assyrians had the best trained soldiers. They had subdued the entire Middle-East at some point and they even took Egypt for a while. So how does that turn into some leader dropping phosphorus bombs on its own women and children? And how do some people (even in my country) still hope that they can impose this on us?
 
And finally: What is this Crazy-Hair of yours doing? (He cancels Military drills with Koreans in order not to upset Kim Yon Un?)

Preaching to the choir man.  The cradle of western civilization has been turning into it's grave.  In fairness, they've had alot of help from western democracies when it comes to their destabilization and impoverishment in the modern era.  How's that for one hand tied behind our backs  

Anywho..where to start with the mad king.  We all know somebody like him.  You know the guy that will ruin a party if he's not invited, or if you ask him to leave?  It's over for him so it has to be over for everybody?  That's what's going on with that guy.

- I mean really, as a spiritual person, I am worried about the state of the world. And I believe in this “Aquarian age” thing. I see it as the natural evolution of our kind. That's because there is no other way forward. 

Natural, Evolution, and Aquarian age don't go together.  Nothing about the latter in an extension of the formers.  We've always been this way.  If you read good war authors you come away with the sneaking suspicion that we will always be this way (and a whiff of their seething contempt for the states they fought for).  It was a good survival strategy once upon a time.  I share your concern, probably about different things but in general the same.  I think we need a global abolition movement focused on poverty.  It can't be based in spirituality, because spiritual truth is regional.  I get that your spirituality means something to you..and that you want the things that mean something to you to be The Solution..but lets allow for the possibility that they aren't and maybe even cannot be?  The US means alot to me (the idea, the place, the culture...that's my analog...all the things you think about your spirituality, the way it makes you feel..how obviously true it all seems...that's america to me)...but I don't think the US can be a part of unfucking the middle east anymore.  At least not as we are.