A few weeks back, a friend passed along an interesting Boston Globe article looking at scholarship on total war.

I feel that one of the complicating factors in these sorts of discussions is the lack of precision used in distinguishing from new mechanisms of killing and new threats to civilian life. While the mechanisms of killing have repeatedly remade themselves, the threat of death faced by civilians is not necessarily unprecedented in human history.

For example,

Ian Patterson, a Cambridge University literary critic, points to Guernica as the source of a different innovation in the evolution of total war: primal fear of death from the skies. Armies bombed civilians during World War I, but not efficiently. In “Guernica and Total War,” he argues that it was the Spanish Civil War, and specifically the attack on Guernica, that created the template for the later bombings of London, Dresden, and Hiroshima.

At Guernica, whose horrors were immortalized by Picasso, German pilots even lingered to strafe the civilians (and sheep) who fled the firebombing. Guernica, Patterson says in an interview, “brought home to people that there wasn’t anybody anywhere who wasn’t vulnerable, who wasn’t potentially part of a future war.”

While the mechanism of death from above was new, the basic lethal threat to the civilian population (whether the mechanism was aerial bombardment or a spear through the neck) was hardly new. While it might have reached a local maxima during the mid-20th Century, the global maximum threat to civilian populations almost certainly resides deep in our human past. As Lawrence Keeley has documented (among others), early humans lived under a significantly greater risk of violent death than we do today.

I think this goes a long to explaining why we are so gripped by the idea that we are living in an era when a new type of conflict threatens us with something freshly horrifying. It is gripping precisely because it is not freshly horriying and rather taps into our deep-seated evolutionary fears of death at any moment. Keeley and Stephen LeBlanc have documented how the small size of early human groups meant that lethal raids and ambushes (as opposed to battles where the opponents lined up and fought) aimed at any vulnerable member of a group constituted most fighting. Thus, the fear that at any moment we are at risk of a violent death is very old, even if the proximate cause of our fear is a very modern mechanism such as aerial attack or poison gas.

We need this perspective if we are to maintain our balance as we reconcile the superficially contradictory realities that we are safer (relative to our evolutionary ancestors) even though modern technology is introducing new threats to our lives.

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For those of you scoring at home, the title is a reference to an apt Moxy Fruvous song.

Weekend protests over Chavez’s plan to shut down opposition television network RCTV may appear to be challenging Chavez’s rule, but he simply hold too much power for them to save the network. Stratfor, however, ended its analysis of the situation with this summary:

In the long run, however, Venezuela is likely headed for the kind of mass social unrest no government can withstand without brutal repression. This is because while Chavez props his government up with oil revenues and ideology, he is rapidly dismantling the very government and market institutions that could give Venezuelans a chance at maintaining a decent standard of living when oil prices finally fall. That time, however, remains months — possibly years — away.

This structural weakness of Venezuela makes it, like Iran, a regime ripe for collapse through connectivity… which is important to keep in mind when Chavez next tries to pick a fight.

The response to last week’s bombing in Hyderabad demonstrates a root challenge in developing resilience against disruptions of cultural, social and religious schwerpunkts. These types of attacks seek to create riots, which will in turn produce more casualties when police and rioters clash, leading to resentment of the security forces and the government. In order to mitigate the effects of this cycle, some approach needs to be found that redirects the rage of the crowd against the actual perpetrators of the violence and not the proximate symbols of authority. It frustrates me to no end that some anonymous asshat kills innocent people, yet the popular outrage that results seems to immediately focus on people with only secondary or tertiary responsibility. We need to find a way to connect the moral outrage of the mob with the individuals/group/movement actually responsible for the violence and death.

Finding non-violent ways to control the resulting riot is essential, but I’m wondering if there aren’t some more specific best practices already used by public safety officials in Core states. What are our best practices for dealing with riots here in the US, for example?

Again, this is a issue where the skill set of domestic law enforcement and public safety officials converges with the needs of international security professionals.