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urocyonVia the_future_modernes: Surprise -- The Very Dark Side of U.S. History
This ties in nicely with some things I've been reading and have mentioned here: Barbara A. Mann's The Tainted Gift: The Disease Method of Frontier Expansion and especially George Washington's War on Native America. That "total war" approach--with a very explicitly genocidal twist--is kinda what George Washington's War on Native America is all about. And it was going on well before the 1860s. (Heck, AFAICT Cornwallis was about as destructive as Sherman almost a century earlier.) Very purposely looting and burning to wipe whole populations out, abusing and slaughtering noncombatants, etc.? Hardly that new.
BTW, I think that kind of thing--really in the 1860s, in this case--has also contributed to the misguided appeal of continuing to use Confederate imagery (by people who aren't flaming bigots). Some of the stories still passed down in my family--e.g., exactly how Old Aunt Sarah died, trying to take down a gang of marauding soldiers before they could reach the extended family's house--are enough to curdle your blood. (Very similar situation to what's detailed in Sallie Watie and Southern Cherokee Women in the Civil War and After: 'the tribulations of those “who must stay at home” more resembled the situations of people living in combat zones than those of women keeping the home fires burning', because they were deliberately made into combat zones.)
And, yeah, I find it extra-disturbing that this history has been brushed over well enough that people writing about the dark side are apparently totally unaware of it. Even more than the later stuff, which is given a pretty good introduction in this piece.
the_future_modernes: Surprise -- The Very Dark Side of U.S. HistoryOver the decades, congressional and journalistic investigations have exposed some of these abuses. But when that does happen, the cases are usually deemed anomalies or excesses by out-of-control soldiers.
But the historical record shows that terror tactics have long been a dark side of U.S. military doctrine. The theories survive today in textbooks on counterinsurgency warfare, "low-intensity" conflict and "counter-terrorism."
Some historians trace the formal acceptance of those brutal tenets to the 1860s when the U.S. Army was facing challenge from a rebellious South and resistance from Native Americans in the West. Out of those crises emerged the modern military concept of "total war" -- which considers attacks on civilians and their economic infrastructure an integral part of a victorious strategy.
In 1864, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman cut a swath of destruction through civilian territory in Georgia and the Carolinas. His plan was to destroy the South's will to fight and its ability to sustain a large army in the field. The devastation left plantations in flames and brought widespread Confederate complaints of rape and murder of civilians.
This ties in nicely with some things I've been reading and have mentioned here: Barbara A. Mann's The Tainted Gift: The Disease Method of Frontier Expansion and especially George Washington's War on Native America. That "total war" approach--with a very explicitly genocidal twist--is kinda what George Washington's War on Native America is all about. And it was going on well before the 1860s. (Heck, AFAICT Cornwallis was about as destructive as Sherman almost a century earlier.) Very purposely looting and burning to wipe whole populations out, abusing and slaughtering noncombatants, etc.? Hardly that new.
BTW, I think that kind of thing--really in the 1860s, in this case--has also contributed to the misguided appeal of continuing to use Confederate imagery (by people who aren't flaming bigots). Some of the stories still passed down in my family--e.g., exactly how Old Aunt Sarah died, trying to take down a gang of marauding soldiers before they could reach the extended family's house--are enough to curdle your blood. (Very similar situation to what's detailed in Sallie Watie and Southern Cherokee Women in the Civil War and After: 'the tribulations of those “who must stay at home” more resembled the situations of people living in combat zones than those of women keeping the home fires burning', because they were deliberately made into combat zones.)
And, yeah, I find it extra-disturbing that this history has been brushed over well enough that people writing about the dark side are apparently totally unaware of it. Even more than the later stuff, which is given a pretty good introduction in this piece.