Agonal Autism in the Syrian Conflict: Unterschied zwischen den Versionen

Here is one hypothesis: while it has always been difficult to make the step from sword to talk, communication is much more difficult in the new age of asymmetric and unconventional warfare with its recurrent complaint by state parties to be suffering from a "lack of partners for peace". 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 (meta-) communication even while the fighting was still going on. That permitted phenomena like the Christmas Truce of 1914 (Blom Crocker 2015) to happen - or the story of a German flying behind enemy lines to deliver a letter written by an enemy he had shot down himself (Seamark 2012):

:After shooting down a British plane in January, 1916, the German pilot Oswald Boelke followed the enemy plane to the ground and was delighted so see that its two-person crew of Mr. Somervill and Mr. Formilli were alive. After getting them to a hospital he engaged in conversations and finally even volunteered to take a letter that Formilli had written to tell a certain Captain Babington of the Royal Flying Corps (and, indirectly, his family) that they were alive and relatively well. Pilot Boelke then flew over the British lines and dropped the letter that did indeed reach its destination, only to be auctioned almost a century later together with pictures taken of the incident ...

In the Syrian conflict, stories of just how gentlemanly combatants behaved, even in grim battle, do not abound (to say the least). There seems to be no such thing as agonal partnership. Quite to the contrary: like in other "small" wars, there is a distinctive lack of chivalry and empathy, of respect for humanitarian law, of a willingness (and ability) to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants. All this creates a vicious circle of de-humanizing stereotypes and activities such as rape, torture, and arbitrary killings. The irregularity of the partisan militia also affects conventional forces who tend to assimilate their own behavior to match that of the others. With blurred boundaries, these wars are fought in deserts as well as on bridges and market places in Central Europe. With blurred boundaries between war and peace, battle zone and hinterland, with distance weapons like killer drones guided by far away armchair "pilots" and/or impersonal computer software ("disposition matrix"), countered by the use of makeshift weapons like trucks or cars against civilian targets the situation is chaotic, and in the midst of this chaos nothing is less likely to flourish than agonal partnership.