The Expanse

Ome said:

I could agree with this under normal circumstances. Lecturing me right before we go on a suicide mission is not the time for me to give a flying fuck.

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Lithose said:

This was the U.S. strategy is every war since Vietnam. It has never worked. Ever. “Kind-hearted people might think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat an enemy without too much bloodshed.... and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed: war is such a most dangerous business that the mistakes which come from kindness are the very worst . . . This is how the matter must be seen. It would be futile — even wrong — to try and shut one’s eyes to what war really is from sheer distress at its brutality.”----Von Clauswitz

After the industrial revolution began, and the endless wars in Europe really began (The Thirty Years war, Napoleon, Ottoman conquests ect)..People were forced to deal with a simple reality--modern industrialized states could produce enough food and supplies with such a small percentage of the population, that killing the military endlessly could not stop a war. Ever. You could kill millions, and as long as the enemy was resolved to fight, they could continue. (The Romans also proved this against Carthage, btw--and were able to do it due to slave production, rather than industrial). Its why wars began targeting civilians, really WW2 was one of the first since the Roman era where Civilians were targeted specifically (And its not surprise...wars stopped being fought in those areas after that happened.)


Here is General Sherman's take on war and it distills Clauswitz's thinking down to its truest axiom. “War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”


The issue is who is responsible for war? This was really touched with a knife a couple seasons ago when Prax spoke about complex systems. Humans build systems we don't fully understand, because we only understand our tiny part in the system. The Poem I, Pencil is a great illustration of how even the most simple things require immense, interconnected networks in a modern economy. Given these networks, who is responsible for Marcos? If the belt stopped supporting him, he wouldn't be able to refuel, repair and he'd be blind. So clearly he is far more than the people directly working with him. Just like its not the earth military that directly oppresses the Belters, right? Its Earth companies and civilians who do that. Which is why Marcos felt the need to target them to heat the war up and bring its ugliness out into the open--because he didn't see a difference between the slow, 'warm' kind of war that would kill millions over a century (IE cycles of belter exploitation and resultant terrorism as counter attacks), and the hot kind that would kill millions over a decade--except the fact that with the hot kind, people might come to the table to discuss how to end and never do it again.

So what's more cruel? The long, slow kind of war that rarely involves direct conflict, or the quick, brutal kind that brings about a resolution? Who knows. But dismissing one kind as a simple psychopath's view just illustrates an ignorance toward how human conflict plays out. Its a manufactured consent toward war, that relies on it being less direct, and thus more palatable.

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