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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SHARK" data-source="post: 438230" data-attributes="member: 1131">Greetings!Indeed, Chrisling, the Geneva Convention is important, but they also represent *ideals*--which, in many cases, when the rubber meets the road, and people really start to get dirty, bloody, and the fighting gets really down to the wire, societies are fighting for their survival and ultimate victory. When such Total War is engaged, many such niceties of the Geneva Convention go out the window, by everybody.For example:At the beginning of World War II, in both Europe and in the Pacific, the Axis powers were fully disregarding the Geneva Convention, while the Allied Powers were fully committed to embracing the Geneva Convention.However, though the allies never threw the conventions out the window to the extent that the axis powers did, by 1943, 1944, and 1945, after all of the U-boat attacks to thousands of ships, after the waters of Tarawa and Kwanjalein and Normandy turning red with American blood, and with the British literally being slaughtered like wheat at Caen by the 12th SS "Hitler Jugend" Panzer Division, the allies, were contnually being bled and savaged by the Germans and the Japanese. Of course, the Russians, too, were locked into a life and death struggle of their own on the Eastern Front. In light of such blood and savagery, the Allies began to bomb literally everything that lived or was even of remote value to the enemy. Allied ships shelled anything that moved. Land armies continued to engage in increasingly bloody and ferocious fighting. In the Pacific, American submarines adopted the very same U-boat tactics that the Germans were using in the Atlantic, in order to bring maximum death, suffering, and pain to the Japanese, which they did. The American submarine campaign in the Pacific was entirely successful. American submarines sank any ship from or going to Japan. By war's end, American submarines were responsible for sinking 60% of all Japanese shipping lost in the entire war.Of course, the Strategic Bombing of both Germany and Japan, turning both nations into broken wastelands of ash and fire, day and night, night and day, with no respite, with no escape, also ratchetted up the ferocity scale of the war.Point Being: When a nation, just like an individual, is literally struggling for their life, and at the same time they are being hammered with blood, pain, and terror, both the individual and the nation in question will use virtually any and all methods and resources available to survive and win.That is the trend in Total War, but the concepts and the realities of such can be seen all throughout the Ancient World as well, it is just a difference of scale.Humanitarian luxuries are concepts that one can adopt when one is sure of victory, or not in too much blood and pain. As those things increase, however, even moral nations and individuals, normally committed to such concepts, begin to discard them as they become increasingly desperate for victory in the face of suffering more blood and pain.Likewise, in a fantasy situation, such realities could easily be extrapolated. Fantasy societies seem indeed to be well-equipped for total war, and for wars of absolute genocide and conquest. The blood, terror, and madness that flows from demonic legions pouring across the battlefield, or marching into a city packed with civilians as they lead beastmen or hordes of orcs in their wake, raping and slaughtering as they go, will bring the desperation of paladins, or any other lawful good or even other moral characters, to the brink of savage determination in the struggle for survival and victory over such forces.Of course, such is the savagery and terror of war. Such is reality of war unfortunately.<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Semper Fidelis,SHARK</blockquote>

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