Warfare is manifest horror.

At the heart of war on the umpire-free land­scape of the battlefield resides a dark truth that few care to dwell on: it is about killing and injuring people in any way imaginable.

Generic military capabilities around the world exude similar character­istics because the levels of isomorphism (DiMaggio and Powell 1991, 66) among soldiers are very high and typically the twenty-first century war­rior carries an assault rifle with an assortment of sighting aids, wears body armour, a distinctive beret or helmet, and also possesses grenades, rockets, and a bayonet. A cursory glance at the modern accoutrements of a soldier today, the very simplest technologies of violence, reveals much. The ubiq­uitous standard 30-bullet assault rifle based around the M-16/AK-47 and derivatives is designed for optimal engagements of 300 yards, but infantry bullets will travel a mile or so if unhindered or simply missing their target. The latest generation of bullet typified by the American M855A1EPR

(Enhanced Performance Round) has improved penetration capabilities that will punch holes through steel. Simply put, a modern bullet on hitting an organic target such as a human being will produce a small entry point with shock effect before travelling through vital organs and smashing out the other side of the body with a much larger exit hole that facilitates rapid blood loss, incapacitation, and in some, but not in all cases, death.

If a soldier runs out of bullets or engages in close-quarter combat, then a carefully designed knife or bayonet can be affixed to the end of the rifle to enable soldiers to close with the enemy and physically poke holes in them.

Alongside of these precise killing technologies, soldiers also carry less discriminate personal explosives in the form of grenades and anti-tank missiles. These powerful explosive charges either tear limbs from bodies, kill through concussion, or cause significant burn damage, if someone is unlucky enough to be caught within their effective radius. Grenades are designed to fragment into hundreds of little pieces in order to chop up bodies; others are comprised of phosphorus that burns victims alive and even if doused with water will not stop the chemical from burning inces­santly deeper into the flesh and using the fat of the body to maintain the combustion process. These awful realities of combat, modern and ancient, are rarely considered by people (the majority around the world) to whom war is an abstraction, a place where the minority conduct their profession and where battle damage/destruction is impersonal, distant, and of little concern to their daily lives that are far removed from the sounds/effects of war.

Myth plays a very important role in mediating, negotiating, and legiti­mising the horror of contemporary warfare to societies in the West, espe­cially in the twenty-first century. In this sense, it fits well with Roland Barthes’s idea that ‘myth is a system of communication, that it is a message’ (Barthes 2013, 217).¹ The ‘messaging’ of war, of applying violence to another society, on first glance should be difficult within a democracy.² Its intention is almost antithetical to a democratic nation-state built on the peaceful social principles of freedom, individual rights, and social order, unless in the direst of emergencies when facing a war of national survival in which the fabric of their state is threatened by another, such as Britain against Germany in World War II.

Nevertheless, even extreme danger carries with it surprising caveats for democratic states that need to be mediated by powerful myths that possess remarkable longevity into the modern age.

The main victims of attacking a city, then and now, are the very people who inhabit it: civilians in the form of the old, the very young, and their mothers/fathers (justified as targets as workers contributing to the war effort) who are either baked, incinerated, or suffocated to death once the firestorm unfolds. The Royal Air Force killed 40,000 people when they bombed Hamburg in this way in July 1943 (Overy 2010, 47). Seventy years ago precisely, the United States took this approach to warfare to another technological and ethical level by dropping two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Hiroshima bomb alone killed approximately 75,000 people instantly, reaching a final death toll of 200,000 people (DeGroot 2004) over a five-year period due to the long-term effects of radiation poisoning.

‘Mature’ democratic states such as the UK and the USA maintain their own social stability by means of peaceful enforcement institutions such as the police and the law, but also through the normative marginalisation and regulation of violence through sport (boxing, for example) within society via educational establishments and public information campaigns. This is not to claim that such states are a peaceful ideal, because their citizens are shot dead by police on a worryingly regular basis and unregulated violence does exist though criminal acts be it murder, aggravated assault, or simply fighting between males and females in competition or out of jealousy or revenge. Nevertheless, persuading democratic states to fight in the twenty-first century is no easy matter and requires a campaign of mes- saging/persuasion by decision-making elites that span political and social realms, including academia, often simultaneously. As Malesevic notes, ‘most violent actions require intricate and sophisticated processes of col­lective motivation’ (2010, 130). In the past, ideology in the form of fas­cism, for example, provided such a vehicle, but in the post-ideological age with the end of the Cold War that some described as the ‘end of history’ (Fukuyama 1992), other means are necessary.