TheRelegitimationOfWar

Context : OnWar

I write of the relegitimation of war because warfare had been comprehensively – if obviously not finally – delegitimised during the course of the twentieth century. In 1914-18, the trenches of Flanders gave us the paradigm of 'senseless slaughter' that helped frame a 'structure of feeling' about war that remained influential throughout the century.[3] So the new resort to war in 1939-45 in Western democracies was heavier-hearted, accompanied by less jingoism, and motivated as much by anti-fascism as by nationalism. True, this did seem to many like a good war, a perception that has been greatly accentuated in more recent times by the misrepresentation of the war almost as a crusade to halt the Holocaust. But this increasingly appeared very much as an exception. The threat of nuclear extermination created an overwhelming perception, during most of the second half of the twentieth century, that major war was to be prevented at almost all costs. Vietnam reinforced the anti-war structure of feeling by showing how even the limited kind of war that could be fought despite nuclear weapons would also involve senseless slaughter. The importance of this experience was that it affected the most powerful Western state, the only one (apart perhaps from Britain and France) in which the use of war was not already delegitimised by the horrors of 1939-45.

– Martin Shaw

https://web.archive.org/web/20050206080612/http://www.theglobalsite.ac.uk/press/402shaw.htm