It would be more productive to ask whether and under what circumstances people can refrain from killing. That would put an end to the ostentatious demonstrations of horror at the crimes and violence against innocent civilians every time states decide to wage war. Civilian casualties are inevitable because the frame of reference “war” promotes actions and creates temporary structures in which violence, in either a total or partial sense, can no longer be constrained and limited. Like every form of social behavior, violence has its own specific dynamic. This book is full of illustrations of what that dynamic is.

Will it ever be possible for a historical or sociological analysis of violence to develop the sort of moral neutrality a quantum physicist maintains toward an electron? Will such analysis ever be able to describe violence as a social possibility with the same detachment as political scientists approach elections and parliaments? As products of the modern age, history and social sciences are duty bound to follow certain basic assumptions. That’s why they encounter such difficulty when confronted with phenomena that challenge those assumptions.

If we cease to define violence as an aberration, we learn more about our society and how it functions than if we persist in comforting illusions about our own basically nonviolent nature. If we reclassify violence in its various forms as part of the inventory of possible social actions among communities that have come together for mutual survival, we will see that such groups are also always potential communities of annihilation. Modernity’s faith in its own distance from violence is illusionary. People kill for various motives. Soldiers kill because it’s their job.

APPENDIX

The Surveillance Protocols

For as long as there have been wars, combatants have tried to spy on their enemies to gain a decisive advantage. By the late nineteenth century, the world was becoming ever more interconnected, and technological revolutions in transportation and the media increased the possibilities for human knowledge to the extent that surveillance work was professionalized. The first modern secret service arose in Britain, and the world’s other major powers were quick to establish intelligence agencies of their own. During World War I, complexly structured institutions began collecting and evaluating information from a broad variety of sources. That entailed decoding radio messages, carrying out aerial surveillance, and interrogating POWs. Classic forms of spying temporarily faded in significance.

Learning from past experience, the British War Ministry began in March 1939 to set up special interrogation centers for POWs in case the country had to go back to war.⁸⁹⁷ For the first time, it was planned to bug POWs’ cells and systematically eavesdrop on what they said. The idea wasn’t new. In 1918, an interrogation center with hidden microphones was ready to go operational, before being halted by the armistice that ended World War I. With the establishment of the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC) on September 26, 1939, the idea was revived. After being temporarily located in the Tower of London, the center moved to the estate of Trent Park in the north of Britain’s capital. Latimer House and Wilton Park were added as facilities in 1942. In July of that year, the entire CSDIC moved to Latimer House. Wilton Park was used to house Italian POWs.⁸⁹⁸ Trent Park became a long-term internment facility for German staff officers.⁸⁹⁹

^{A drawing of Trent Park made by Lieutenant Klaus Hubbuch. (Neitzel Archive)}

The Americans adopted the British system of interrogations and surveillance, and the Allies soon established a network of secret cross-continental Interrogation Centers.⁹⁰⁰ Those on the Mediterranean and in the United States were particularly significant. By summer 1941, the War Department in Washington had already decided to build such centers, and over the course of 1942, two of them, run jointly by the U.S. Navy and Army, became operational. Japanese POWs were sent to Camp Tracy in California, while Fort Hunt in Virginia housed German POWs.