War Is Hell

War is an “unpleasant business.”  That two-word euphemism reflects the divergent experiences of two separate groups: those who profit from violence and those who experience violence firsthand.  For anyone in the latter group, war is hell.  That’s how Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman described it, and he was an expert in the subject.  He set everything ablaze on his marches through the South.  Scorched-earth conquests are meant to break the spirit of opposing soldiers and civilians alike, and Sherman broke everything in his sight.

Sherman’s effectiveness in demoralizing Southerners influenced military minds around the world and shifted military war planning toward tactics that would define the “total wars” to come.  Psychological warfare, industrial sabotage, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, and even the targeting of noncombatants became standard practices of war in the twentieth century.  The First Great War introduced the terrors of trench warfare, mustard gas, mechanized weaponry, and widespread use of explosives that left many survivors permanently “shell-shocked.”  Civilians faced their own horrors as the slaughter of livestock and ruination of farmland spawned famine and disease.

When hostilities officially ended on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, nations around the world marked the cessation of atrocities with annual observances on November 11, known as Armistice Day or Remembrance Day.  For years, people not only took time to remember those who had died during the Great War, but also took time to remember the terrifying carnage.  Because the violence and death of WWI were so horrendous, survivors wanted to make sure future generations would never walk down the same terrible path.

The unthinkable could be avoided only if people thought about the horrors of war; the indescribable could be prevented only by describing the evils of war in detail.  In the United States, successive presidents issued annual proclamations reminding Americans of everything that had been lost during the Great War, and in May of 1938, Congress made November 11 an official holiday.  In the statutory text, lawmakers designated Armistice Day as “a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace.”  World War II was in full swing sixteen months later.

After a second global conflict that mass-produced death on a scale never before seen — including through the firebombing of entire cities and the annihilative power of nuclear weapons — a kind of nihilism ate away at the souls of survivors.  In the United States, Armistice Day was eventually replaced with Veterans’ Day — a wonderful occasion to remember the sacrifices of all service members, but an inversion of Armistice Day’s original intent nonetheless.  Rather than reminding survivors of the horrors of war and dedicating Americans’ efforts toward “the cause of world peace,” Veterans’ Day proffers a patriotic message that subtly encourages the uninitiated to march off to war, too.

Eighty years after WWII and over a century since the conclusion of a conflict so savage and awful that witnesses simply called it the “Great War” out of an expectation that there could never possibly be another so vile, we sit on the precipice of a third world war that will eclipse the twentieth century’s mass slaughter.  Some military historians believe that war has already begun.  They have plenty of evidence: the Hamas terror attacks on Israeli civilians, Israel’s defensive response in Gaza and the broader region, Iran’s nuclear brinkmanship and proxy wars throughout the Middle East, the fall of Bashar Assad’s Syria and the ongoing Christian genocide, the Russia-Ukraine War, civil wars raging in parts of Africa and Asia, rebellions brewing in parts of Europe, North Korea’s saber-rattling, China’s advanced preparations for seizing Taiwan, and the hybrid warfare now common between the Chinese Communist Party and the United States.

Some forty countries are today in a state of armed conflict.  Many other countries, such as China and the United States, are directly funding or arming sides in those conflicts.  With fewer than two hundred sovereign nations in the world, that means somewhere between twenty and twenty-five percent of the planet is already fighting.  We are one Franz Ferdinand assassination away — one flick of the infernal lighter — from global conflagration and a level of bloodshed never witnessed by anyone alive today.  One military miscalculation, one technical snafu, one errant drone, one stupid provocation, or one unmeasured response could send the world spiraling toward chaos.

We have not sufficiently remembered the last two global wars, and because we have forgotten that war is hell, we are galloping toward the Devil’s gates too fast to heed Dante’s eternal warning atop Inferno’s entrance: “Abandon every hope, who enter here.”

What makes this moment in history particularly dangerous is that so many weak and unserious global “leaders” seem to believe that foreign wars will save them from domestic problems.  For nearly a century, Canada and Western Europe have depended upon the United States to provide for their actual defense.  During that time, they have declared “war” on all the wrong things: “global warming,” “hate speech,” secure borders, patriotism, dissent, Western civilization.  They’ve gotten really good at fighting ideas.  They punish citizens who reject man-made “climate change” for the “crime” of “denying Science.”  They jail citizens who object to mass immigration for engaging in “illegal speech.”  They censor political dissent.  The United Kingdom is excellent at imprisoning Christians who silently pray.  Western governments love waging “war” on their own peoples, and persecuting unarmed civilians has apparently convinced some of these tyrants that they would excel at the real thing.  Or at least they believe that it makes sense to send unhappy citizens off to foreign battlefields before those citizens decide to overthrow oppressive governments at home.

The U.K.’s Keir Starmer and France’s Emmanuel Macron talk of war with Russia like prep school boys who got beat up at recess and now want to prove their toughness to the world.  Germany is openly calling for the return of mass conscription.  Glossy magazine covers picturing young Germans wearing combat uniforms implore teenagers to fight for “New Germany.”  What is “New Germany”?  It’s a “woke” world of “political correctness,” censorship, and Christian persecution, where socially conscious soldiers are expected to take up arms “to defend diversity.”  Forget fighting for freedom, free speech, patriotism, or any other antiquated “obsession” of the “fringe far-right.”  “Climate change” warriors who despise their own countrymen for being “systemically racist” are now the very model of a modern major-general!

Unserious people start wars, and unserious leaders end nations.  Europe is filled with an unhealthy supply of both.

While European politicians inch closer to waging war directly with Russia over Ukraine’s thirty-year-old borders, perhaps it’s worth remembering who Ukraine’s leaders are.  A former adviser to holdover-president Volodymyr Zelensky says Ukraine has a secret last-ditch doomsday plan that involves blowing up all of their nuclear power plants in an act of self-destruction that would make the Chernobyl disaster look minuscule by comparison.  Calling Zelensky and his senior staff “a group of deranged people,” the whistleblower explains the suicidal rationale as “we all bite the dust, but so will they.”  European governments wish to conscript boys and girls and send them off to war to defend Ukrainian madmen who would scorch their own country — and irradiate much of the continent.

If nobody lives, no problem!  In an effort to mitigate Ukraine’s demographic death spiral after sacrificing the country’s healthy, young men, business leaders want to relocate more than eight million migrants from Africa and Asia to provide cheap labor for all the post-war rebuilding.  That’s nearly twenty percent of Ukraine’s population.  As Raheem Kassam warned last year, Ukraine will soon be Europe’s “first African nation.”  Now, that’s a model Germany, France, and the U.K. would love to follow!

Western globalists seem to enjoy the “unpleasant business” of war.  They won’t find hell so satisfying.