The End of Honor, the Dawn of Cruelty
Ukraine is the latest step in the retrogression of warfare
I saw it on Twitter the other day. Uncontrolled access to LiveLeak during the Syrian Civil War does much to desensitize a child to these horrors, but this video stuck with me. I saw a Russian man, completely lost to this world, his disposition one of complete pity. The lost man does not even look up, his body language betrays the sorrow and resignation of his soul. He is already dead. Our eyes are those of the cheap lens on that Ukrainian FPV drone. It toys with him as a cat tortures a mouse before pouncing. Backing in and out. In and out. In and… static.
Most humans (which I’m not sure many of the dysgenic NAFO types are) felt only disgust watching this. Yes, I want to taste the glory of combat and adventure and have sought every avenue to do so, but I believe in honor, in chivalry. Death does not scare me, but a death without honor seems worse than hell. Maybe that’s just the Southerner in me. War has always had horrors but something felt different about this. The French walking over their friends’ corpses strangled by mustard gas for the first time probably felt quite similarly. I want to die with my rifle in my hand and bested by an enemy, not a mangled mess surrounded by pieces of an FPV drone. Cruelty has always been a thing in war, but honor is usually what tamed our worst impulses. And the slave morality’s victory over honor is nearly complete.
Honor has died with modernity. There are several historical factors that degrade honor and replace it with industrial slaughter. All of those are present now and not only are they thriving we also have been thrust into a world without meaning and the means to create meat grinders. I yearn for a world of duels, a world of noble warfare. I am no fool, I know we must win with the deadliest tactics possible before such a world can be established. But I can lament on how far Faust’s project has fallen. And what is truly dangerous is that honor’s disappearance has ushered in newfound cruelty.
THE LONG RETREAT OF HONORABLE WARFARE
There exist several preconditions for honorable warfare. I roughly have deduced them to these (though other, smaller factors exist).
1) Both sides must be of a 'high' culture with an aristocracy that has superseded basic nomos. In archaic terms, they must be civilized. If these cultures are similar, (or if they are the same) honor is to be expected.
2) There must be relative parity in military strength (e.g. similar technology); a guerilla war begets dishonor.
3) Both sides must believe that a loss in battle does not equal extinction. At the dawn of the Classical civilization, honor was truly born. The Scytho-Medes likely had some precepts of it, but the genocides of the Assyrians and their ilk make me think that we do not really begin to see honor take its true heroic form until the Greek city states formed.
The Greeks had relative security, a common culture, and had formed perhaps the most robust aristocracy the world ever saw. Apart from sieges, trickery was not commonplace on the battlefield before the Peloponnesian War. Even through this war, truces for the dead were always honored (as seen time and again in Thucydides) and considerations of religious rites were not ignored by enemies. This honor allowed for heroes like Alcibiades and Brasidas to exist.
Brasidas before the Battle of Amphipolis: Show yourself a brave man, as a Spartan should; and do you, allies, follow him like men, and remember that zeal, honor, and obedience mark the good soldier, and that this day will make you free men and allies of Lacedaemon or slaves of Athens
We see a departure begin in this war as both the aristocratic society collapsed and as the stakes grew too high to allow any loss. Athens had turned toward Empire and Sparta feared permanent subservience to the Delian League. War became total. Mytilene was initially condemned to complete death. Mercenaries began to be used. Corcyra turned into 1980s Beirut. Men were slayed en masse after battles.
This may be hyperbolic, compared to today the men of Hellas still operated with great honor overall, but contemporaries noted a clear shift. This trend, would continue to vacillate with a generally downward trajectory until the birth of later aristocracies. The Romans would eventually turn warfare into a complete machine. It was not unnoticed at the time.
Tacitus in the Agricola: To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, [the Romans] call empire, and where they make a desert, they call it peace.
Even in the ruins of Rome, we still can glean honor. Before the Battle of Yarmouk (which forever injured our world), the Muslim and Byzantine commanders engaged in duels before the battle. Unimaginable today. The Mongols even had boundaries. The hordes would not shed royal blood so they ritualistically killed nobles via stampede. Warfare was glorious then, and even in its darkest moments the civilized world retained some level of decency.
With the birth of the Faustian soul a new aristocracy rose. Honor resurged in force as the West took shape. Treatises on chivalry and dueling were common. The Prince was sacrilegious for the time, but reads utterly pedestrian now. Even the introduction of gunpowder did not taint the souls of men as much as the screens of today. One will recall the story of Captain Patrick Ferguson, who had General Washington dead to rights at the Battle of Brandywine Creek. A fine rifleman, Ferguson had a clear shot at close range. The only problem? Washington’s back was turned and upholding the honor of the British (he was Scottish, I know, shut up its the same island) aristocracy held a higher place in his soul than scoring a cheap victory. Once upon a time men pondered these things. Ill gotten gains used to be a phrase that had punch to it.
Even in the mass mobilization of the Napoleonic wars, honor had its place. After the Battle of Ulm, Napoleon released General Karl Mack on parole. The terms were that he would not take up arms against France again if he were given free passage to Vienna. Mack kept to his word and was a free (yet disgraced) man in Austria.
After this era, things really begin to fall off. Cruelty was still taboo, but honor became a nuisance. The factories of 1830’s Britain did not just pollute the water, they infected the minds of the Empire. Fires became a critical function of warfare. Men became numbers to move across a globe. And honor? Well, sure that was nice but don’t let that stop you from winning. Besides, the natives certainly had none and as discussed, that was a precondition for any sort of honor system between combatants.
The trade of honor for systematic murder was in full swing after the Industrial Revolution. The last American duel occurred in 1859. The Gatling Gun was introduced in 1861. That is not a coincidence. The Brother’s War in Germany within the same decade continued the trend towards slaughter. By 1901, the British had the world’s first concentration camps up and running to place the Boers into.
Vignettes of heroism and honor still found their way through this era. Even in a war of bonesaws and scorched earth there was respect (imagine a NAFO nerd having to read that THIS is how his heroes in Union Blue viewed the Confederates).
General Joshua Chamberlain on the surrender of General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Courthouse:
At such a time and under such conditions I thought it eminently fitting to show some token of our feeling, and I therefore instructed my subordinate officers to come to the position of 'salute' in the manual of arms as each body of the Confederates passed before us.
It was not a 'present arms,' however, not a 'present,' which then as now was the highest possible honor to be paid even to a president. It was the 'carry arms,' as it was then known, with musket held by the right hand and perpendicular to the shoulder. I may best describe it as a marching salute in review.
I may belabor the point to regale you how World War I changed everything. If you need me to explain, read this book. Technology had allowed for industrial extirpation of an entire generation. Mass mobilization enabled it. This is the first time that all three preconditions of honorable warfare seem to have been met, yet honor was scarce. Yes, the Western (Faustian) soul was nearly dead but circumstances had made honor a liability. The top brass stopped another Christmas Truce from happening for a reason (compare this truce with those of Ancient Greece after a battle). Warfare had become a Clausewitzian science, and in a world where God was dead, moral sensibilities only presented a gap to be exploited in an enemy line.
Ernst Junger in Storm of Steel: And yet the strangest thing of all was not the horror of the landscape in itself, but the fact that these scenes, such as the world had never known before, were fashioned by men who intended them to be a decisive end to the war. Thus all the frightfulness that the mind of man could devise was brought into the field; and there, where lately there had been the idyllic picture of rural peace, there was as faithful a picture of the soul of scientific war. In earlier wars, certainly, towns and villages had been burned, but what was that compared with this sea of craters dug out by machines? For even in this fantastic desert there was the sameness of the machine-made article. A shell-hole strewn with bully-bins, broken weapons, fragments of uniform, and dud shells, with one or two dead bodies on its edge . . . this was the never-changing scene that surrounded each one of all these hundreds of thousands of men. And it seemed that man, on this landscape he had himself created, became different, more mysterious and hardy and callous than in any previous battle. The spirit and the tempo of the fighting altered, and after the Battle of the Somme the war had its own peculiar impress that distinguished it from all other wars.
From World War I to the present, warfare has become only more of a science. Every officer (in the USMC at least) has to read doctrine on warfighting. Both the math of achieving relative superiority and the philosophy of successfully breaking an enemy force are repeated ad nauseam. World War II was fought by even greater automatons with even fewer breaks for honor (with the Pacific and Eastern fronts bereft of it entirely).
The counterargument would be the development of ‘human rights’ and the United Nations. Sure, this put ‘rules’ on engagements and hamstrung the US in conflicts like Vietnam and Afghanistan, but it did not return any sense of honor. Marines did not meet the Chinese on an equal plain in Korea, they piled divisions of bodies at the Chosin Reservoir. Green Berets were not engaging in truces for the dead with the Viet Cong, they were letting M60’s rip through the jungle on the Holiday of Tet. DEVGRU was not engaging in single duels of honor with the Taliban, they were sending targeting data for DAS. You could argue ‘human rights’ stopped massacres, but I think its safe to say the American military was not going to carpet bomb Hanoi even if these rules were not in place. Frankly, they made the rules so they could punish those who did not have the overmatch in conflicts to play by them (imagine an Iran-Iraq War where either side tries to show ‘restraint’ and how quickly they lose). Serbia got to feel the brunt of violating American rules and I doubt any ancient warrior would consider the stealth F-117 bomber an ‘honorable’ vessel.
AMBUSH MENTALITY
Only an idiot would train a modern warrior to approach battle like a knight at Agincourt. Yet, there is something truly despicable about the absolute scientific brutality of training in the 21st century. You are trained to always initiate attacks from a position of stealth or with such overwhelming power that no resistance can survive. In a previous era, this was fit for killing a rat in your cellar, not a battle.
Direct confrontations are to be avoided. You are to kill by using mortars, machine guns, CAS, and anything else you’ve got to get close enough to slit the throats of the survivors. You learn to kill like a doctor learns to cut an organ out of a body. Its methodical, and requires a certain coolness and calmness that is rare in the general population. Even in the military, most cannot lead troops in combat.
Even in this era of scientific warfare, cruelty is discouraged. Killing prisoners is a BAD thing (although passions still exist) and rules of engagement are to be followed by all lest they be prosecuted by their own government. Reuters bitches to this day about their journalists getting killed in a gun run, but lets be realistic with ourselves, no top brass was ordering hits on them, it was a mistake and people were punished. War is full of mistakes and its full of passion and righteous anger. The ubermensch is not known to torture and toy with his victims, he kills with a happy heart and a clear mind and respects kindred spirits who he hath slain.
CRUELTY IN UKRAINE
We have established to this point that honor is dead. Faust was killed by cluster munitions in the middle of the night, Seal Team Six dead checked his corpse. The American juggernaut has not been exceptionally cruel (and frankly has gone far in the other direction), but the war in Ukraine has unlocked something new.
As World War I announced the death of honor, I fear that Ukraine has heralded a new age of cruelty. All warfare is deception, true, but not all war has begotten gleeful torture. Lavrentiy Beria used to be a novel figure, now I see his progeny everywhere I look.
In 2014, Russians obtained targeting data by spoofing the calls of soldier’s wives. Routinely in this war, POW’s have been tortured. ‘Human Rights’ has been proven thoroughly hollow. Total war lends itself to trickery, yes, but that video, that fucking video. It triggered something deep within me. I know it is not a one off event. If it were, they wouldn’t have broadcast it. The evil, (likely) dysgenic operator recreating Ender’s Game fits perfectly with the zeitgeist of the establishment. You see it in the way the ‘f(l)ags in bio’ twitter users talk. Everything is about extermination of the enemy. That 18 year old dying in a trench who shot himself in the head so he wouldn’t die a slow death? Well he fucking deserved it because he totally should have known that ‘Kama_Kamilia’ and all his autistic friends said that was immoral. He should have been on the internet reading Western opinions, not listening to his teachers and everyone in his society. Stupid orc. Don’t even get me started on the cruelty IDF soldiers display openly on their social media.
You might ask: why does this matter مشكلجي? Because I know it doesn’t end here. I’m not even worried about the next war… we already know the Chinese are going to be absolute monsters. I’m worried that the dehumanization and cruelty being seen will bleed into everything. Most technology is born from wars, why wouldn’t the technics be as well?
There have always been cruel miscreants, but despite what a 2000s Green Day song would tell you, this has not previously been a feature of the neoliberal ruling class. They might scheme up grand plans with disregard for human life, but they did not relish the extinguishment of it. NAFO is very obviously pushed by the levers of Western power. I’m not claiming they are all secret agents, but I am saying some algorithms and narratives have been tilted to assist them since they’re message is useful to the current elites. I’m not even saying they’re unique, you seem the same shit on Russian Telegram channels and every time you hit translate on a Hebrew tweet. Now, the liberal world order is greenlighting cruelty.
The West has historically turned successful tactics abroad in to domestic policies of repression (read this book). As these tactics of dehumanization are perfected in the Donbass and Gaza, they will be adopted by our governments. Our governments are fully divorced from honor, now they look to weaponize incivility onto us.
The bugman has gotten his filthy hands even on man's most basic profession.
The breakdown of the distinction between civilian and soldier may be next and woo-boy is the average normie utterly unprepared for that. We may see levels of unrestricted warfare not seen since the roman conquest of israel.
On the bright side, clownworld would probably implode if that happened. Or maybe gen alpha kids will make gas chamber memes while exterminating enemy civilians.