24 - At the Nihilist Edge: Reflections on Guerrilla Warfare during the American Civil War

Summary

As defined in our times, total war is a twentieth-century outcome of twentieth-century capacities for social mobilization, ideology, and technology applied to war-making ends. What look, in certain respects, like its predecessors, such as the American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, prove on closer examination to be markers on an undulation in levels of wartime violence reaching far back into the history of warfare, rather than developmental stops on a simple linear and progressive development of modern war that culminated during the twentieth century. Many “premodern” wars reached horrific levels of destruction. Perhaps the most dramatic example of a much earlier war that reached a far greater level of violence than did those of the 1860s was the Thirty Years' War, which destroyed much of Germany during the period from 1618 to 1648.

The story in the reports is repeated a hundred times: the bands of mercenaries destroyed domestic utensils, tools and furniture, ruined stores and seeds, slaughtered or took away cattle and the domestic animals, inflicted cruel tortures on the inhabitants or killed them and set fire to the farm. ... This was expressly forbidden by all the rules. In addition, it also frequently happened that young plants and ripe corn were deliberately trampled down by the armed plunderers or military detachments on the march and not without the senseless killing of the village inhabitants either. It is likewise occasionally reported that the healthy and able-bodied inhabitants were driven away and sold... for eternal labor, far worse than death.