NEWS ON THE GLOBAL CIVIL WAR

There are signs that there is a growing interest in the global civil war and global guerrilla warfare. An important starting point is V.I. Lenin. His enemy was the class enemy, the bourgeois, the western capitalist and the social order in every country in which they ruled. Lenin was the first who understood that a national guerrilla or revolutionary could be made a figure in every national or international civil war. He tried to make him an effective instrument to be used by the Communist central leadership in the Soviet Union. Thus was born as an outgrowth of the extreme Enlightenment ideas of the French revolution from 1789/1793 partisan warfare in the realm of the methods of civil war. Partisan war was an “unrestricted warfare” (this term returned to be used by Communist Chinese military writers at the end of the 1990s. In Lenin’s view the methods must be legal or illegal, peaceful or violent, regular or irregular to achieve its purpose which was communist revolution in all countries of the world. Whatever served this purpose was good and just. This was a universal war against an absolute enemy. Again according to Lenin only revolutionary war was true. The basis was absolute enmity against a class, against the bourgeois, the capitalist. After World War II, when the Communists emerged as victors in the civil war in China, Mao Tse-tung aimed a global struggle against the world-wide class enemy. The global civil war’s have a large number of aspects from the international terrorist of jihad to the moral politics of the Enlightenment. It could not govern without using terror and the total state. In that total state sovereignty of the individual was hidden behind the mask of an anonymous government by morality. Civil war played an important part in the seemingly purely moral argument of the French revolutionary fanatics. Then enemies of their project were not only “enemies of humanity”. Like pirates they were criminals to be placed outside common law. Enlightenment philosophy is therefore connected to the global civil wars in the early and mid-twentieth century. What began at the end of the eighteenth century in France by inner dynamic had to resort to increased (and finally) unlimited violence. Already in the French Revolution moral politics had led to civil war. This was only a prelude to what was to come, the global civil war in the twentieth century and what can in the twentyfirst century become an even more violent struggle between stateless terrorists and states of the Westphalian system. Ultimately this hyper-violent struggle could mean the decreased influence of the state, a state does not any more is the sole owner of the instrument of violence. Roman Schnur has described the coming global war as war that knows not battle of states against states, but that of global parties warring amongst one another…the measures in this war are not those used between different states, but those of civil war. Initially, of course, it will be war of the stateless entities against the states. Should these entities gain strength it might grow into a global civil war. It is important to study the development of the global civil war and how states can better defend themselves against initially, since 2001, the terrorists of the Muslim jihad.