Thread by @m_older

reminder that countries do not decide to wage war, and nationalities do not decide to wage war. Individuals or groups of individuals with access to the resources of a country decide to wage war.

https://twitter.com/lapatina_/status/1496411507470610433

They may have access to those resources through use of force, or through an election of varying degrees of fairness and freeness, or through heredity, meaning one of their ancestors won them through use of force. They probably depend heavily on propaganda to keep them.

They may convince many or most of the citizens to support the war. But it was still not the citizens who decided or the country as a monolithic whole that is doing it. Imagining that it is leads to international feuds, generational distrust based on nationality, etc, etc, AND

ignoring the real culprits, their incentives and motivations. Pretending that war is a matter of countries rather than individuals diminishes responsibility and means that the intn'l community almost always* ignores the possibility of punishing individuals as deterrent

*I say almost always because we see that starting to happen in cases considered genocide or crimes against humanity, but we also see how often that fails, imo partly because a) we maintain reverence/inviolability of heads of state to such a degree it is hard to escape that reflex

and b) war is a crime against humanity. the definition of genocide is purposely narrow. it is hard to prosecute those monsters because it would make it more obvious that we're not prosecuting the less obvious egregious monsters.

and b) war is a crime against humanity. the definition of genocide is purposely narrow. it is hard to prosecute those monsters because it would make it more obvious that we're not prosecuting the less obvious egregious monsters.

The shift from feudal to modern systems of government meant that leadership could no longer force vassals/serfs/inhabitants/citizens to fight (or leave their homes). This potential problem (for elites) was solved, heartbreakingly, by propaganda.

Duty; patriotism; honor; the idea of the nation-state itself, as something inviolable, eternal, inevitable, & worth defending as your only possible home; all of these lies were manufactured and refined so that people would volunteer to kill & die even when not directly threatened

In the history of WWI it is very clear, although the process started long before. Tricks of propaganda personify the nation, vilify and dehumanize the enemy, create false rationales for fighting, make heroes of the dead. They are all familiar in our more recent wars; they've

spilled over into peacetime too. And all of it is a way to convince people that they owe more to "their country", meaning their leaders, than their country/leaders owe them; to convince them, in fact, they owe it to the abstract idea of a country, and not to fallible individuals

Mercenaries used to be a common way of fighting wars; they don't fit very nicely into this ideal of people fighting for their country but probably the main reason they became less common was: why pay for what you can get free & then underpay? Until of course leaders worked out

how to make money of mercenaries themselves, so now they're back, with their own set of specialized propaganda, while at the same time not obviating the need for underpaid, underequipped, meaninglessly lip-service lionized volunteers.

But what galls is that journalism, political science theory, all of the elaborate structures of our international community have bought the idea that it is the "countries" waging war, regardless of whether the country has a even a pretense of democracy, regardless of what the

opinion polls say, regardless of the damage this does and the mistakes it causes in analysis and response. It's regressive to when countries were aligned with Cold War ideologies, though it was inaccurate even then; regressive to old comemierdería ideas about "national character"

and it ignores all the cross-country allegiances: among the elite, conspiring across nationalities to make money and/or status from their war; as well as all the international friendships, collaborations, and understandings among communities, friends, colleagues, students...

the way that companies work across, or under, international borders, financially supporting both sides of conflicts; the way so many groups, linguistic or religious or hobbyist or academic, coalesce virtually without even knowing where their members are located or nationalities.

Countries are marginally appropriate as a unit of analysis for some things, mostly I guess the effects of their own policies as compared to those of other jurisdictions.

But not for this.

tl;dr