“War is hell,” as William Tecumseh Sherman famously observed, but it is also theater. War is a staple of movies, literature, and religion due to its ability to encapsulate universal themes of good versus evil, courage, sacrifice, and the human condition. It is ubiquitous in human history. Who has not heard of the War in Heaven? War features in the Iliad, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, not to mention Shakespeare, War and Peace, The Lord of the Rings, and countless movies and drama serials. It’s definitely theater: ironically it's the history of our lives.
Not surprisingly warfare itself employs dramatic devices. One of the oldest is performative cruelty. Theatrical cruelty refers to acts of violence or punishment designed not only for military effect but also to publicly intimidate and demoralize target populations through dramatic or exaggerated viciousness. The Romans, Mongols, Nazis, and modern terrorists all used theatrical cruelty to break the will of their foes.
Romans left the defeated displayed on crosses along roadsides, left to die slowly as a warning. Only Vlad the Impaler topped the Romans at this grisly game. Genghis Khan massacred entire cities to deter resistance. Tamerlane took this further, building pyramids of skulls (e.g., 90,000 in Baghdad, 1258) or burying captives alive in walls. The Mongols’ reputation for brutality often led cities to surrender preemptively.
Closer to our own times the Nazis employed performative cruelty to enforce ideology and eliminate opposition. Public executions, such as hangings or shootings in occupied territories, were staged to terrorize populations (e.g., reprisal killings in Poland, like the 1942 Warsaw executions). The Soviet reputation was just as terrifying. Thus, “during the final weeks of Nazi Germany and World War II in Europe, many civilians, government officials, and military personnel throughout Germany and German-occupied Europe committed suicide.” There was no need to shoot the Nazis; they feared Stalin so much they shot themselves.
Modern terrorists have mastered the art of dramatic death, endlessly producing video of buildings crashing to the ground, pilots being burned alive or infidels being beheaded by stern jihadis, the better to paralyze those who would resist them. In Iraq the warlord Abu Deraa, nicknamed “the Shiite Zarqawi,” according to reports “is thought to be responsible for the murder of thousands of civilians, mostly Sunnis, and is said to take personal delight in killing — sometimes with a bullet to the head, sometimes by driving a drill into the skulls of his victims. On other occasions, Iraqis say, he gives them a choice of being shot or battered to death with concrete building blocks.”
This is a textbook example of theatrical cruelty. A gun is a better instrument of killing but an electric drill may be a more effective instrument of war. The Oct 7, 2023 attack is another example. As a strictly military act it was completely pointless, but as performative cruelty it was a masterpiece. Following a showing at the World Economic Forum of footage of the Oct. 7 atrocities “People walked out of the room in silence simply crying or shell shocked.”
But there is another dramatic device that is useful in warfare: performative masochism. This involves deliberately embracing or exaggerating suffering, pain, or defeat to achieve strategic goals, such as gaining sympathy, moral legitimacy, political leverage, or psychological advantage.By enduring suffering visibly, a group or individual can claim the moral high ground, portraying themselves as noble or righteous in contrast to the “winner.”
Mahatma Gandhi’s strategy of satyagraha (nonviolent resistance) involved willingly enduring suffering—such as beatings, arrests, or hunger strikes (e.g., Salt March, 1930)—to provide a contrast to the Raj. IRA prisoners, led by Bobby Sands, undertook hunger strikes in British prisons to demand political prisoner status. Buddhist monks protesting Chinese rule have burned themselves in protest. Perhaps the most famous example of political self harm is Hamas in Gaza, which has shown how deeply it can suffer, or rather its population can suffer, rather than surrender to hated Israel.
Pity is the weapon of the weak or the chronic loser. No one feels sorry for the USA but many feel sorry for those who lost to it, no matter their guilt. Nazi Germany killed about 20 million civilians in Eastern Europe and Japan about 18 million in China, but people remember the 150,000 civilians killed by the US in Germany and the 600,000 in Japan. The sympathy that was formerly Israel's is withheld from it by a change in circumstances, not necessarily because it is wrong but because it is strong.
Ironically, for strategic masochism to work, it must be employed against foes with a modicum of pity and shame. Gandhi and Sands were fortunate that the British felt some shame, and so their actions had an effect. By contrast the Chinese government probably doesn’t care how many Tibetan monks immolate themselves any more than Genghis Khan would be moved by victims volunteering their skulls be added to the pile. Performative cruelty and theatrical masochism are potent weapons, but they do not work equally in all directions.
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