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Peace Virally
I've been thinking about war. It's something that surrounds those of us who are american. We live in a culture of combat, confrontation, and hierarchy. I think that everyone does, that that is the nature of a government. But especially so with the United States, and it struck me that war is just a matter of perspective. It's not a discontinuous affair. In other words, there is no peace. Globally, there is always war. It is a biological process, and we are always waiting for the outbreak, that pandemic. War is best viewed as an immune response, the clustering of anti-bodies and phages for the removal of a threat. It's a response syndrome. This is important because the biological model makes terrorism comprehensible. It makes economic manuevering visible as a precursor and an adjunct to the military movements. The point is though, that you can't win a war. There is only war. There is no peace in a global sense. The best illustration is the Greek city states, and their historians knew it. What I want to say with this is that it can be fought differently. The future is a combined arms battlefield, war on every front. Economic manipulation, the devaluation of currency, the movement of manufacturing, the shape of human rights. We've been building armies, but the quickest solution as any general can tell you is to use precision. But that's the hitch, isn't it? Even if you ignored Iraq and Afghanistan, America would still be at war. We use war the wrong way. War is any struggle involving armed states. We are using the wrong weapons. Armies instead of commandos, ultimatums instead of back-channel blackmail, firepower instead of famine. This is because as long as you see war in intervals, you will fight it at intervals. Fight constantly, and ironically, you can avoid these intervals. By crippling the opposition using tactical strikes rather than open war and joint action instead of unilateral movement, it is possible to keep opponents at sufficient disadvantage that they cannot pursue overt war. Further, it does not provoke the use of nuclear weapons, because it is clearly not a struggle for immediate survival. Use of economic sanctions, concessions and treaties in concrete materials can eliminate the self-sufficiency of opposing states. Fundamentally, this is the application of real politik.
Guns shouldn't be the only "clean" weapons...Because I've seen the casualties and they're anything but.
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D-rev.
