Ideology and Location During Wartime

While at Penn I did an independent study on modernist responses to the particularly 20th century versions of human tragedy and came across one of the most difficult questions of historical comparison I can imagine: is the experience of human tragedy really that different from the pre-modern period to the modern?

We know that technology plays a new role in warfare in the modern world, and that people theoretically think and behave differently, but I challenged, in that paper (the full version of which is attached here, should you care to enjoy - and my apologies for the html formatting on Google docs), the notion that the experiences of those wars were any different. I.e., bows and arrows killing from hundreds of yards might provide the same removed killing experience as dropping bombs from airplanes, though to a different degree. Similarly, though technology created a more efficient approach to annihilation, it is difficult to imagine that the practice of killing/enslaving entire cities (or nations) felt essentially different to the pre-modern humans who were experiencing it.

I put these thoughts out there as a way of pushing back to the now almost cliched notion that there is a war happening a short way from me and I am able to act (at least until Hamas brings the war back to us) as if nothing is going on. This notion got a lot of press during the 2nd Lebanon War (of '06) and in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts of the last 5 and 7 years, respectively. My question is if this is really any different than how things have always worked, with two notable exceptions: the first is the all-encompassing war, the great economic effort exerted by the likes of World War II and, I imagine, some pre-modern conflicts. The second actually favors our modern existence - the relative lack of fluidity in the boundaries of war in the contemporary period, as opposed to attacking/marauding and then counterattacking armies in the past. For example, it seems to push the bounds of the possible to imagine, in the current setting, the Gaza situation to migrate anywhere from where it is, with the exception of isolated terrorist attacks in Israel.

Which is all to say, basically, that I'm pretty sure most people living in France and England did not feel a constant sense of warfare during the 100 Years' War, and that, with the exception of economic and social consequences of drawn out, hugely manpower-intensive conflicts, many people throughout history have been as close or closer to war zones as I am to Gaza and gone about their lives in an essentially unaffected way.

One other scary-as-hell note:

The reactions of the organized Arab world have been relatively neutral or anti-Hamas. Many of these nations seem to understand the degree to which, to paraphrase a World War II image, the rocket attacks on the Negev were like mosquito bites that have awoken a slumbering giant.

Scarily - and, paging Marx - the citizens of the Arab world seem to have a different approach to the situation, one that might have long-term very bad consequences for elected leadership and political stability in the Arab world, and one that does not bode well for the West's political war of attrition with violent extremism in all its forms.