Agonal Autism in the Syrian Conflict: Unterschied zwischen den Versionen

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 One plausible hypothesis would be the following: while it has always been difficult to to change from sword to talk, this has become much more complicated in our new age of small, asymmetric, and unconventional warfare with its recurrent complaint by state parties that they suffer from a "lack of partners for peace". It may sound terribly nostalgic of traditional warfare to say that it was a great advantage of "old" wars that they were culturally embedded in a network of practices, customs, rules, and meta-rules that allowed for institutionalized communication even with soldiers still fighting. Ethnologist Wilhelm E. Mühlmann (1940) had referred to such phenomena as "agonal partnership". The existence of a meta-level of partnership in the middle of armed conflict produced things like the Christmas Truce 1914 and similar episodes all but impossible to imagine taking place in the present-day Syrian conflict:
-:While German and British fighter pilots in World War I were the deadliest of enemies, stories of chivalry are not as rare as might be expected. In one case, German pilot Oswald Boelke shot down a British plane in January, 1916. Boelke then landed and was delighted so see that he had brought down the enemy plane with its two-person crew alive. He had a long talk with the pilot, saw to it that they were both taken in a car to the hospital, and later visited crewmember Fomilli in hospital, who wrote a letter to a Captain Babington of the Royal Flying Corps telling that they were alive and wanted their families to know that. The Germman pilot took the letter and dropped it over the British lines where it reached the captain and ultimately the crew member's family ("Gentlemen of the skies: German flew behind enemy lines to deliver letter from Brit he shot down. MailOnline 8 September 2012).
+:While German and British fighter pilots in World War I were the deadliest of enemies, stories of chivalry are not as rare as might be expected. In one case, German pilot Oswald Boelke shot down a British plane in January, 1916. Boelke then landed and was delighted so see that he had brought down the enemy plane with its two-person crew (Somervill and Formilli) alive. He had a long talk with the pilot, saw to it that they were both taken in a car to the hospital, and later visited a crewmember in hospital. He even offered his services to deliver a letter. The crewmember addressed it to a certain Captain Babington of the Royal Flying Corps. In it he said that both members of the crew were alive and only slightly wounded, and that they wanted their families to know that. The German pilot Boelke took the letter, flew over the British lines and dropped it from the air. The letter did reach the captain and ultimately the crew members' families ("Gentlemen of the skies: German flew behind enemy lines to deliver letter from Brit he shot down. MailOnline 8 September 2012).
 In the Syrian conflict, there is no such thing as agonal partnership. Much to the contrary. Like other "small" wars, it is characterized by deep hatred and lack of empathy, the absence or violation of humanitarian law and rules of engagement, a lack of distinction between combatants and non-combatants, and even between war and peace. Small wars like the Syrian one are almost by definition wars of blurred boundaries and de-civilizing vicious circles of brutality. Not only the other side's combatants are being defined as enemy, but the ethnic, religious or national group in its entirety. Civilians are seen as legitimate objects of sub-state actors in small wars - but even regular armies tend towards assimilating to the irregular ways of fighting they see in their counterparts. Moreover, small wars are being fought everywhere: in deserts and urban centers, on battlefields and the bridges or Christmas markets of European capitals. In addition, long-distance weapons like killer drones guided by far away armchair "pilots" and/or impersonal computer software ("disposition matrix"), the use of makeshift weapons like trucks or cars, etc., contribute to a chaotic situation in which nothing is harder to imagine than chivalry as part of agonal partnership.