Similarly, recent photos and videos of battlefield atrocities and military misconduct spark outrage in conflict zones and connect global anti-war communities through shared outrage and disgust. Often the barbarism of total war animates and becomes iconic of anti-war sentiment, as Nick Ut’s iconic 1972 photograph of Phan Thi Kim Phuc running down the streets of Trang Bang naked, crying, and burned by napalm demonstrates. However, it has obvious precedents in armed conflicts throughout history and continues into the present (Anderson 2010). Total war was the new official doctrine of combat, enshrined in military documents during the wide-spread destruction and carnage of World War I. War strategically and unapologetically became a conflict of nerves, a test of an entire population, its pugilistic resolve, the depth of its sum resources and reserves-material, psychological, environmental, and affective. The term “Total War” was coined during the First World War, although the military practice itself pre-dates the twentieth century. Most of all, the bullseye of the total war blueprint was the psyche of the nation, its collective will to fight and resist.
The totality of a nation was the new battlefield: its factories, communications, resources, and non-combatants at home, as well as barracks and soldiers on the front lines. Nature itself was not safe: slash and burn gave way to chemical deforestation, and natural resources were wantonly destroyed in aptly labeled environmental terrorism. Civilians became fair game and non-military installations and columns of tattered refugees became strategic targets. 2 Gradually the overt strategic approach to combat changed, antique policies were jettisoned, and Total War became the order of the day. 1 War separated and detached from civilian life eventually faded from ideology, betrayed by the brutality of colonization, and eventually arrived in Europe in the industrial age.
In this narrative the sons of the wealthy and powerful-future elites and civic leaders-sacrificed life and limb for their beloved country in preparation for lives in public good veterans left the theater with meaningful experience and dignity battlefields were removed from vulnerable civilian populations and non-combatants morally off-limits prisoners of war were treated humanely in accordance with international law and the final victor was agreed upon by all parties involved. In the political imagination there is a stubborn fiction of a time when war was a heroic pursuit. This essay analyzes the case in Austin from fieldwork conducted between 20, and ends with a reflection on the anti-war movement’s successes and failures when compared to the Occupy Movement. This comprehensive vein of thinking can be seen in the rhetoric, or lack thereof, in the Occupy Movements. Music was seen as a catalyst for social gatherings rather than as a vehicle that passed on social and political messages. Instead of booking overtly “anti-war music,” organizers recruited popular Austin musicians with the aim of fostering a total anti-war movement that was about gathering like minds together to encourage progressive actions that would proactively prevent the need for war through cultural and behavioral modifications. These metamorphoses are congealed in the altered role that music played in public protests. The Austin, Texas movement against war in Iraq and Afghanistan was correspondingly holistic in nature, conceptually attacking the root causes of war, and not just advocating for an end to the current conflicts. The broad effects of this shift have necessitated a counter approach by the anti-war movement. Since the First World War, warfare has been executed as “total,” actively targeting both military and civilian populations, and altering the character, psychology, strategy, and modes of involvement.