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One of the most fearsome developments of the twentieth century was the concept of total war - the belief that the most effective way of winning wars was through the obliteration, or the threat of obliteration, of entire civilian populations. The first, and in some ways still the most striking illustration of this theory, occurred in April 1937 during the Spanish Civil War, when the ancient Basque hilltop town of Guernica was almost completely destroyed by the German Condor Legion. Since then, civilians have increasingly been targeted during wartime, as mass casualties, destruction and demoralisation have become an accepted military tactic. The US Government's strategy of shock and awe in their attack on Baghdad in the Spring of 2003 clearly shows that the same approach is still around in the twenty-first century.
GUERNICA is not a work of military history, it's a book about how modern men and women have responded to living with a new kind power and a new focus of fear. Fear of death itself is hard-wired into all of us and always has been, but the way we imagine death changes, and therefore its role and presence in our culture changes too. Fear of death has its counterpart in aggression, too, so our capacities for imagining and enacting aggression equally shape, and are shaped by, this new and developing culture. This book enables anybody interested in culture and its survival to follow the birth of the locationless terror that so many people feel today. |