Weaned Child (@CockatriceDen)

Carl von Clausewitz envisions a trinitarian analysis of power and the nature of war, comprised of the People, the Government, and the Military. Their relative cohesion is codified in his famous thesis that “War is politics by other means.” Totalitarian nations, by contrast, collapse this trinity into an unstable binary composed of arch-authoritarian governments which wield the military as a coercive force against their own people and engage in covert wars of ideological conquest to till ground in which totalitarianism can take root, or more accurately, salt the earth where Liberty once grew. This operative paradigm and the means of contagion can be summed up in an anti-Clausewitzian quip: “Politics is war by other means.” If war-as-politics assumes an intrinsic regard for a plurality of constituents (if not the resources sufficient to accommodate them) then Clausewitz is fundamentally a humanist seeking a place for war within a moral paradigm. Meanwhile there are those content to wage war without regard for the spiritual cost incurred by the victor, who see Power as the only basis for ‘moral’ constructs. Between these two opposing factions - the humanist and the antihumanist - the imperatives of engagement are distinct. While the latter can never abide the former’s coexistence, the former cannot ignore the latter’s endless antagonism. War is hell, but its occupants only think themselves as rulers. Heaven’s entrants, by contrast, need not bother themselves with what warms the floorboards.