Is It World War IV? Or Just World War I?

Before launching into this several post assessment, there is one thing the Geek would like to make quite clear.

The Geek is not a lover of war.

I don't have any affection for war. Like the vast majority of those who belong to the great fraternity of those who have been shot at, I fear and loath war, the miserable snuffing out of human lives, the turning of human beings with hopes and fears, loves and hates, strengths and weaknesses into a massive sanitation problem. No. I don't love war.

I study it. I think about it. I write about it in both the virtual and real worlds. I teach about it in both the electronic and physical universes.

But, I sure as hell don't love it.

No one can love it. At least not if they are reasonably well oriented as to reality.

In reality a person can love another. A person can love life. A person can love beauty. Or art. Or the sight of a dawn, the smell of rain, the feel of a touch.

A person cannot love the boredom of war, or the fear of a firefight upcoming or just concluded, or the pulling of a trigger as the sights line with the body of another human. A person can live with fear, live with boredom, live with the knowledge that he has killed another. A person can even learn to live with seeing a buddy die, or be splattered with the horrid goo which a split second before was the buddy's brains.

But, a person can never learn to love war.

The Geek no more loves war than he hates Muslims--even those of the Islamist category. Hating the men who have so dehumanised themselves that they become mere machines of death as they trigger the explosive laden vest they wear or the bomb filled vehicle that they drive or the passenger laden aircraft that they pilot toward a target is a waste.

Get a grip on the Islamist suicide bombers. Take a grip on their fundamental nature. No. Not their psychology. Nor their beliefs. Nor their motivations. Get a grip on their basic existential nature.

They are not men.

They are not human.

They are machines.

That's right. Machines.

You can't hate a machine. All you can do is figure out why the machine runs the way it does--and, if necessary, determine the best way to break it.

Now there is something terribly ironic in this understanding. In a way it's a perfect fit, as the modern and, even more, the post-modern periods, have adopted irony as the central feature of life and art alike.

Consider for a moment the Great War. The Great War is the old name for World War I. Not until after Hitler started its successor, all Europeans and Americans called the bloody fifty one months between August 1914 and November 1918 The Great War. It was the greatest blood letting in the entire history of the human race up to that time.

It was something more. It was the great red dividing line between the last days of the pre-modern world and the first moments of the true modern world. It was the fault line between all the old orders of life, of politics, of art and literature, of the very understanding people had of their own power, their own control of forces, of personal destiny.

The Great War not only wiped away four dynasties, not only started the US and Russia on the rise to global power status, it assured the Europeans would fight again and launched the new Japanese Empire on a collision course with the US.

The Great War did two other things as well. It started moving Islam, particularly the austere and expansionist oriented version located in Saudi Arabia, toward the center of the world's political and economic stage. And, the Great War redefined war as an impersonal contest between mass forces dominated by machines.

The Great War in a real sense made the suicide bomber, the man-as-machine not only possible, but inevitable.

So, we are not engaged as some allege in the opening battle of World War IV. We are fighting the last battle of World War I, the Great War.