The Center for Science Writings

In this week’s New Yorker, Adam Gopnik critiques David Bell’s book The First Total War, the subject of my last post . Citing Genghis Khan and other masters of destruction, Gopnik points out that total war—in which huge conscripted armies seek not merely to defeat but to destroy each other, along, often, with civilian populations–preceded the Napoleonic era. Gopnik also faults Bell for overstating the analogies between post-revolutionary France and our era.

“[F]or all Bell’s commendable desire to write living history," Gopnik remarks, "we may be at the end of the era of total war. Whatever the war in Iraq is, it is not a total war in any of Bell’s senses… Ours is a typical piece of colonial closet-cleaning gone badly wrong—a war with limited casualties (for the imperial power), remote operations, and men used as pieces on a chessboard rather than as blood cells in a hemorrhage.”

On the other hand, Gopnik adds, “All wars are total to the people they kill.”