Total war shifting the battlefield from trenches to the cyber domain.

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The division at the heart of America once led to a civil war fought with muzzle loaded rifles and muskets and cannons. Then the Republicans, radical abolitionists at their forefront, fought the Southern states whose Democratic Party defended slavery. Now the sides are reversed, the Democrats are the radicals prosecuting a new revolution, a “progressive”, half insane, anarchic revolution to reinvent the very mind of humanity and enfold it into a new technocratic slavey; the Republicans are now the force for tradition and for the US Constitution and the rule of law. You can tell what side I’m on and I am proud to declare it.

This conflict is taking forms as unrecognizable to us today as the new warfare of the 1860s was to the people of that time but despite its strange appearance the fundamental divide is strangely persistent. The Civil War rages on. It will be the death of America.

The great and terrible future general William T. Sherman wrote this to a close friend and secessionist upon hearing of the secession of South Carolina in 1861:

"You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it... Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth—right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail."

And fail they did, exactly as he predicted. But that war, and Sherman's prosecution of it, gave birth to the particularly American concept of so-called total war, that war is won by first destroying civilian infrastructure and only secondarily by defeating enemy forces in the field. The inevitable corollary becomes that the civilians who depend on their infrastructure for life itself are to be damned with the excuse that they are enemies just as much as the enemy soldiers. Sherman didn't mean to invent that, and his campaign was matched by the wastage of the Shenandoah Valley which he had nothing to do with. But the invention of total war marked American destiny. It led to the atomic bomb. And it also led to the primacy of the US Air Force and the fecklessness of the American Army. Today the world is face to face with the terrible truth that murdering civilians is the way not to end war but rather to perpetuate it. The spectacle of the floundering US army in the Middle East today would break Sherman's heart. He had meant to bring peace by ending the war as rapidly as possible to avoid disunion and the "... fate of Mexico, which is eternal war…”

In the last waning days of the Civil War he said:

"I confess, without shame, I am sick and tired of fighting—its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands and fathers ... tis only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated ... that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation." – William Tecumseh Sherman. May, 1865

I fear that the dark spirit of total war is changing its shape from a total war with steel and bombs into a total war of cyber warriors who desolate the very mind of humanity. War has been recognizable for a long time as war, even though civilians have progressively become more involved as victims and refugees and then guerrilla terrorists have arisen from civilian ranks. These changes have been gradual but there was still resemblance to historic forms. But this new internet and digital AI, deadly as it is, is not recognizable as war. And so we all drift into disaster. It used to take bombs to desolate infrastructures, strangle food distribution, starve and freeze millions. It doesn’t anymore. Now you can do it with a keyboard. And as for borders? There are none. And where is the enemy? That’s classified.

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