Strategy: A History

by Lawrence Freedman

He described the war fever of the future, as priests “pray on behalf of murder” and newspaper editors “set to work to arouse hatred and murder,” and described how thousands of “simple, kindly folk” will be “torn from peaceful toil” and trudge off to war, until these poor souls “without knowing why, will murder thousands of others whom they had never before seen, and who had done nor could do them any wrong.”19 In this respect, war for Tolstoy was an extreme version of a much more general malaise, of unnatural divisions within humanity, which it both reflected and aggravated. And to explain how men could allow this to happen to them he deployed his own version of false consciousness—men had been “hypnotized” not only by their governments but, most tragically of all, by each other. Only by exposing the myth of patriotism could the spell be broken. At the heart of his antistrategic vision was the belief that divisions within human society were unnatural, and so if they were healed there would be no need for struggle and conflict.