18 - “The Fellows Can Just Starve”: On Wars of “Pacification” in the African Colonies of Imperial Germany and the Concept of “Total War”

Summary

War is the collective and organized use of three basic forms of domination (Aktionsmacht): material harm, absolute violence, and total violence. The destruction of the enemy's material resources is one of the most evident elements of war, and in many especially modern cases it captures the imagination of later generations long after the dead have been forgotten. The essence of war is the use of absolute violence. It means killing the adversary. In war, absolute violence goes along with total violence, which brings together the glorification of violence, the indifference toward the suffering of the victims, and the mechanization of violence.

As part of its collective and organized character, war is directed against collectivities. It destroys or appropriates the material resources of the adversaries, limits or destroys their political autonomy, or harms the enemy physically and materially to such a degree that the whole society of the enemy collapses or the enemy ceases to exist (in the case of genocide). The combination of total violence, collective organization, and the violent confrontation of collectivities themselves involves the strict distinction between “the internal and external group (‘we’ and ‘they’) and a related separation of the internal and external morals.” In war, people follow two types of moral codes, one that applies to the members of one's own group and one that is valid for the confrontation with members of the “enemy” group.