Conceptual Wars

I’m going to preface this reflection by saying that much of our discussion from this class focused on concepts that I don’t know much, if anything, about (ex. European history, which I have never studied, and other political theories or conflicts that I’ve not heard of). Because of this, I can’t really comment well on our discussion, so instead I’m going to bring up in more detail one of the points I found interesting in the text.

As Sarah mentioned, our society has become much more likely to declare war on an idea than on a group of people, for example, the war on terror, or the war on drugs. I think this relates back to Schmitt’s discussion of a pacifist movement gaining enough hostility toward war to declare a war against war on page 36. Long quote, bear with me:

If pacifist hostility toward war were so strong as to drive pacifists into a war against nonpacifists, in a war against war, that would prove pacifism truly possesses political energy because it is sufficiently strong to group men according to friend and enemy. If, in fact, the will to abolish war is so strong that it no longer shuns war, then it has become a political motive, i.e., it affirms, even if only as an extreme possibility, war and even the reason for war.…This war is then considered to constitute the absolute last war of humanity….[the enemy] must not only be defeated but also utterly destroyed. In other words, he is an enemy who no longer must be compelled to retreat into his borders only.

Though practically, this would be a war between pacifists and nonpacifists, the war would be more accurately described as a war against war, and in order for war to be defeated, the pacifists must utterly destroy anyone who is not a pacifist so that no possibility of another war could exist.

The same could be said of any of the wars we have declared on concepts. The war on terror will never be complete until we have completely annihilated every terrorist in the world. Simply pushing them back into their “borders” would not work both because we would have to determine what constituted the border of a terrorist organization, and also because once pushed to that border, the remaining terrorists would be unwilling to admit defeat, and continue to participate in terror acts. Similarly, the war on drugs is in all practicality impossible to complete unless all drugs, and people involved in the manufacturing and distribution of illegal drugs were destroyed.