15th March 2010: Breaking the Taboo on Targeting Civilians

Morning meeting: get people face-to-face on sensitive issues, avoid escalation by email, and remove roadblocks. Some interesting anecdotes on what really happens on an overseas consultancy.

Late afternoon meeting over tea and donuts with collaborator Ben Eltham in Melbourne’s Nicholas Building. Discussion: EMI’s troubles; how ERA will affect two articles we are working on; Australian academic and zine maven Anna Poletti; why journal workshops have bad percolator coffee; sick buildings; and the psychological impact of glass desks in offices.

Evening: PhD ‘background research’ viewing the first episode of Gwynne Dyer‘s mid-1980s series ‘War’: archival footage of World War I nationalist mania, the Western Front trenches, machine guns, German zeppelin raids, and World War II aerial bombings, ending in the Trinity nuclear test and Hiroshima. The nationalist mania, and generals’ decision that led to the sacrifice of 60,000 English in one day to German machine guns and no-man’s land, are examples of George Gurdjieff‘s ‘terror of the situation’.

An insight whilst viewing Dyer’s series: the Napoleonic innovation of national conscripts and total war, and German air-raids, broke the taboo on targeting civilians. Prior to this, 19th century Russian anarchists usually targeted police and political leaders. After this, many groups acted on the taboo, for different reasons: anti-colonialist and nationalist revolutions, radicalisation in the shadow of the Vietnam War and other conflicts, strategic tactics such as during hijack negotiations, and religiously motivated violence. This hypothesis appears to be a close fit to David Rapoport‘s waves thesis and to Mark Juergensmeyer‘s research program. Is this testable using the Correlates of War data-sets?