The last war of its kind...

My favorite history channel is History Time, it's run by a brilliant man named Indy Neidell. Really well researched and evidence based, and his narration skills are top notch. He did a really interesting video about the last gasp of war as we know it.<br><br>The best example of this is the final years of World War II. It’s hard to imagine a more intense and absurd period than the end if the war. We had atomic bombs, ballistic missiles, long range bombers, jet airliners, napalm, fire bombings, flamethrowers, and widespread use use of poison gas. It was the peak of industrial era warfare, and in many ways it marked the end of the battlefront as we knew it.<br><br>The final years of WWII were the last time that we saw this kind of brutality and tactics on a widespread scale. Sure, we still have long range bombing and missiles, and we've even seen ballistics missiles for years now, but the Cold War marked the beginning of war as we know it today. Proxy wars, information wars, propaganda, cyber warfare, etc. The end of WWII was the final gasp of mechanized industrial war. The bomb marked the end of large scale troop mobilizations and the widespread destruction of war. <br><br>We still have these kinds of battles, but they’re in small hotspots around the world. But we are slowly moving towards a new kind of warfare, the digital info war. Don’t get me wrong, this is still a brutal form of war, and it is leading to a huge resurgence of fascist ideologies around the world. But when you zoom out, it is becoming increasingly obvious that our wars are becoming more digital and less industrial. <br><br>This is mostly a good thing, but the down side, as I mentioned, is the resurgence of fascist ideologies. As a historian once said, ‘the past is another country, and they do things differently there’. What that means is that you can’t judge historical figures by the standards of today. We do that a lot, and it can be a bad thing.<br><br>But the flip side of that is that we also tend to whitewash history and reduce it to simple good vs bad tropes. The problem with that is that it is easy to imagine history repeating itself in a simplistic way. Like some uniformed idiot getting all excited about how cool war is. Or how we will face a wave of hatred and intolerance that mirrors the yesterday. <br><br>Certainly, these are real dangers, but the threats we face today are not like they were in the past. The threats we face are more like a slow rot, a cancer that is eating away at our societies. It’s not some invading army, or a charismatic dictator. It is the creeping fascism, the fear and uncertainty, and the manipulation of information. <br><br>What I mean by that is that if you watch any of the videos about the end of WWII, or any major war, you see that it is very obvious who the bad guys are. It is a known quantity, a known enemy that you can take action against. But the enemies of today are the subtle enemies. The enemies that are within us, and the ones that we can’t see. The propaganda, the disinfo, the manipulation of our emotions and our own psychology. <br><br>The final years of WWII were the last time that we had a known enemy, and a known war. The battle lines were drawn, the good guys and the bad guys were obvious. The challenges we face today are much more subtle. They are the manipulation of our emotions, the resentment and the fear, the propaganda and the hatred. These are the challenges that we face today, and these are the enemies that we will be fighting for years to come.