Much Ado About Murder

"War, war never changes", intones narrator Ron Perlman during the intro sequences to both Fallout and Fallout 2. Widely regarded as classic PC role-playing games (RPGs), the Fallout series places you and your character (your in-game persona) in a retro-futurist post-nuclear apocalypse. As one might expect from a game with such a gritty, nasty setting, there is a great deal of violence and death as you blast your way through armies of mutant monsters, vicious raiders, opportunistic slavers, and religious fanatics. There are plenty of games that seem to trivialize the value of human life, but games like Fallout somehow manage to trivialize all life, if only out of necessity. Killing over 90% of everything that moves is the only way to survive when civilization has collapsed around you and the very wilderness has been warped and twisted into a giant death-trap.

What's funny is that so few of us would consider the killing in a game like Fallout to be amoral. Yes, there are those with negative knee-jerk reactions to all video game violence, but few of them have even heard of the now-defunct Black Isle Studios, much less any of their formerly-edgy productions. To a certain extent, killing creatures, humans, and formerly-human mutants just makes sense when your life is on the line, be it real or virtual. People stop asking questions about the means when the end towards which you are working is survival.

Consider how it must have felt to be alive during the second World War. Few of us remain with any recollection of wartime America during the 1940s, requiring the vast majority of us to rely on history, stories, and our imagination when contemplating such a matter. When seen through the eyes of the victorious Allies, one might be inclined to see the Allied war effort as a moral crusade born of necessity and fought to conclusion with great valor. In a way, it was, though our fond recollection of Allied victory ignores the terrible human suffering inflicted upon the Italians, Germans, and Japanese during the Allied campaign. Even if you ignore the Soviets, who were not exactly great humanitarians when wielding military might during the war, one can still find grim evidence of American and British military actions leading to the injury and death of civilians and non-combat military personnel. There are plenty of reasons why the high-and-mighty English-speaking powers of the Allies killed civilians; collateral damage is a favored term to describe the result of unguided, "dumb" munitions dropped from thousands of feet in the air on factories, fuel depots, railways, and other sensitive Axis targets. But, the reality is that, in order for the Allies to defeat the Axis, it was necessary to destroy more than the Axis military which was often too formidable to be confronted directly. The Allies only found victory by destroying each and every element of German, Japanese, and Italian society that supported the Axis military juggernaut. Or, more to the point, the Allies won their war against the Axis by ripping entire nations, and their people, to shreds.

Certainly the Allied powers should be commended for their efforts in rebuilding war-torn Europe and Japan. However, the fact still remains that so much lay in ruin and so many lay wounded or dead from a war that the Allies knowingly fought to its brutal conclusion. And, even knowing all this, most of us still forgive the Allies, forget the travesties wrought by incendiary weapons upon cities like Dresden where thousands died gasping for oxygen consumed in a firestorm that encircled the city, and rationalize other moral outrages inflicted by Allied powers as having been necessary, back in the day, out of the need for simple survival. At times we still debate the wisdom of "nuking" Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but in truth, the death-toll from deploying Little Boy and Fat Man is minuscule in comparison to the number of lives lost elsewhere in Axis territories from Allied carpet-bombing campaigns against military and civilian targets. Both then and now, few seem to want to see the second World War as a colossal tragedy wrought by both Allied and Axis powers. We still lavish praise upon the "greatest generation" that brought victory to America all across the globe. We praise them for good reason; without them, we would likely not exist as an independent, sovereign nation with power and wealth.

Attitudes towards modern warfare have shifted greatly. No longer will the American public tolerate wanton massacres of people in the name of victory, the greater good, or some other lofty goal. World War II was fought under an unspoken presumption that America was worth military service and the ultimate sacrifice. Today, few are willing to sacrifice themselves for the United States, despite the fact that we, as a nation, are fundamentally better than we were sixty years ago. We are more tolerant, more fair, more wise, more technologically advanced, more learned, and more interested than ever in self-improvement both as individuals and as a society. In an age when we should be more ready than ever to bias ourselves in favor of the United States, many of us would rather question every action and motive of the federal government. Given the duplicity, deception, and outright lies the government has foisted upon its citizens (and the entire world) since World War II, perhaps this attitude is understandable. The fact remains, however, that we are a better nation than we were then, yet we see ourselves in a light more negative than that cast by our counterparts decades ago.

One can not rationalize foolish military campaigns and acts of senseless violence against innocent human beings who pose no threat to American society by simply noting that we did some nasty things sixty years ago in order to survive. However, were we lead by a cunning war-hawk of a leader who, unlike Bush, utilized aggressive air campaigns against our enemies in an attempt to extinguish opponents and all those sheltering them in one fell swoop, would we offer support? Our modern foes hide in civilian communities more often than not, sheltered by friends and family who knowingly put themselves in harm's way. Sixty years ago, it would have been acceptable to bomb out an entire neighborhood of German civilians to kill a handful of Nazi leaders or a division of SS troops. Today, it is generally not acceptable to bomb out a mud-hut shantytown in pursuit of Al-Qaeda operatives lurking along Afghanistan's border with Pakistan. Even "precision" strikes against homes known to house enemy operatives are seen as unnecessary by some since women and children frequently die in such attacks.

War never changes, just as Mr. Perlman said, but people do change. Sometimes change isn't for the best. If you really want to know why the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan still linger or why Iran and North Korea still haunt us to this day, you need only look at our attitudes towards war in the geopolitical theatre to see why. During the Cold War, our willingness to lash out at our enemies was tempered by our fear of an escalating conflict with the Soviet Union. Following the collapse of the USSR, the United States had (or could have had) the freedom to "wrap up" lingering conflicts with its enemies all across the globe, not that men like Clinton were willing to take advantage of such freedom. Today, we are instead plagued by leadership that sees the foreign-policy freedom we still enjoy yet lacks the aggression and intestinal fortitude to use our full military might in the pursuit of victory. Our current administration would rather use infantry and armor divisions to babysit contractors than let our absurdly-powerful bomber fleets destroy our foes in a matter of weeks. Once one makes the commitment to declare war, one must be willing to destroy anything and everything that directly impedes one's path to victory. Without that commitment, one can not reasonably expect to be victorious, calling into question the value of any "limited" military engagement based on civilian-friendly "precision" strikes that only kill a few civilians rather than scores of them.