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There're some Mamoru Oshii book lists on the Internet, but they don't have detailed explanations about the contents. My Mamoru Oshii book collection is far from complete, but I'd like to write some short summaries for each of those books.
I apologize in advance for grammatical errors and misinformation.
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title: ワードマップ 戦争 思想・歴史・想像力
(Word Map: War/ Philosophy, History, and Imagination)
release: 07/25/1989
publisher: Shinyosha
[contents]
I: Principles of Wars
II: Wars in History, or History in Wars
III: Our Wars
[review]
This is an extra issue of a magazine called "GS Tanoshii Chishiki". GS Tanoshii Chishiki was edited by a group of people from New-Academism.
Maybe most people don't know about Japanese New-Academism. In the 80s, some interdisciplinary critics and modern-thought became so popular in Japan. That trend was called "New Academism". GS Tanoshii Chishiki was launched by some famous critics from that movement. "Word Map" is a sub-series of that magazine. They featured cognitive science, capitalism, Buddhism, sex, modern art, etc. This volume covers "war".
Why is this book important for Mamoru Oshii fans? Because the dialogues of P2 about peace and wars are based on this book. Oshii himself once said, "some dialogues of P2 are just a remixed version of a certain essay." He always starts script development from reading memos. He highlights good sentences with markers and edits them into a script. This book typically shows that method.
For example, the book's introduction says this:
"If you're secretly hoping for World War III, you're utterly wrong. It has already begun. The real problem is how to end it."
That is almost directly quoted by Arakawa. The book directly/indirectly influenced the movie. I picked related parts down below:
*Paradoxically, wars by nation-states are not real wars because their goal is the end of wars. They are supposed to achieve peace by exterminating enemies. They are planned to wipe out any kind of squander and anti-community freedom. The warless world paradoxically demands wars of extermination.
*Whether we want or not, we have been dragged into the modern nation-state system. Fears of death, poverty, and diseases have made us idealize the welfare-states. A delusion of nuclear wars manipulates our mindset into a totalitarian fear. In other words, we are living in a materialized fiction, a realistic fake. We need to bring a change in wars, or in peace. For now, our peace is locked into Hobbes's peace by extermination, apocalyptic peace, "potential wars" driven by poverty and fear, or "Stalin's peace" pretending to be fundamental humanism.
*Louvois brought the standing-army era. He re-organized old fortresses and added military warehouses into them. He turned those "King's fortresses" and other normal warehouses into a huge logistics network. That network supported Louis XIV's concentric attack. On Lous XIV's cannons, these two words were engraved: "ULTIMA RATIO".
There are various arguments about the modernity and feudality of absolute monarchy, but those absolute monarchy nations look the same as modern nation-states from a military point of view. Radio waves took the place of cannons' range. AWACS took the place of the line formation. The radar networks inherited the role of military warehouses. Moreover, the status quo of nuclear deterrent forces is directly referencing the old cannon-range network. The peacekeeper called ICBM is a literal "ultima ratio". It is the last resort to defend peace.
*Inside and outside of cities have different types of speed. When people started dividing their lands from others, they only knew the speed of human beings and horses. Physical divisions defined space differences. Topological borders were identical to empirical borders. Those differences caused strategic differences of offenders/defenders. In those days, unmoving sides were superior to moving sides.
*Before actions, terrorists are invisible. Minimum time after the actions, they retreat beyond the horizon. They do exist in people's memory. They monitor people's behaviors. Terrorism is a sort of fleet-in-being or panopticon. Terrorism looks far away from tangibility, but it is a type of total-war. Instead of constant escalation, terrorism strengthens the random tendency of time, space, and human life. It oppresses people, making 360-degree danger zone. Total wars shifted from the sea to land, and land to air. Right after dominating physical/extensional spaces, it shrank into each person's mind. However, to make terrorism a new icon of total war, they needed a certain system to tell everyone about it: It is the mass media.
*Since checkmates don't exist in position warfare, every single social state is identical to a warring state. To distinguish peace from war, we need to define the checkmates. In other words, we don't have any checkmates because we can't define peace.
*The "philosophy of tank" became questionable in Vietnam War. Since it was invented in European flat land, it was powerless in the tropical forests. Even jets and helicopters couldn't dominate those lands. When bodies of crawling infantry took over the role, "tanks/ nation-states" started collapsing. Defenseless flesh came to be exposed to wars again.
*When we consider the aesthetics of wars, we realize that the extermination of others is derivative. We commit ourselves to the procedure and the sublime experience of wars. Conflicts accompanying sublime experiences, an expectation of encounters with absolute others, and an expectation of higher experiences beyond battles. Those things make wars exciting and attractive.
*Wars are opportunities for developing a national identity. Some novelist once said, "We become nationalists only during the Olympics." The abstract concept of the nation-state, the difference between self and others, or own country/enemy countries. Those borders were established because they're necessary war units. (That is similar to how class-struggles turn the class concepts into reality.) Wars give identities to the non-existing entities called nation-states.
*Sublimity of wars is represented by battlefields. The attractiveness and fears of wars appear on battlefields because the latest technologies, the maximum speed, and the biggest destructions appear in those places. However, the "self"/ human bodies faded away from there when the core technology shifted to electricity. At that point, the speed of weapons went beyond the human control level. The destruction of nuclear weapons became way too big. Now, the sublimity of wars appears only in images. We used to bet our lives on wars, but their values were already lost. The sublimity of current wars is too big or too complicated for human beings.
Nation-states' identities also vanished because nuclear wars can destruct the basis of war itself. Under the fears of the final war, nation-states focus on inhuman deterrence by the electric control technology. Differences between self and others became just electric data on displays. Our identities became video game parameters.
*Pure wars eliminate differences between ordinary and extraordinary in a similar way as religions merge this world and another world. In fact, nuclear deterrence is just a sort of religious belief. Like computers became the "Gods" of the network society, the nuclear deterrence era prepared another God with another appearance. (It also prepared the death of the new God.) As Virilio said, artificial satellites became omniscient and omnipotent Gods. Since we bet everything on the deterrence game, nuclear weapons became a sort of Pascal's God. (We should remember that the telepaths from Beneath the Planet Apes worshipped the divine bomb.)
*Paul Virilio said that film is another way of war. To us, that sentence has a double meaning. First, modern pilots are surrounded by various sensors and simulators in cockpits. Radio traffics, holographic collimators, radars, and computers constitute pilots' extensions. Visible world and simulated graphics penetrate each other to the max. (Even "combat flight" simulator experience is added to total flight time.)
Second, the origin of film camera technology is war. Cameras’ gun-like appearance arguably stems from Etienne-Jule Marey's chronophotographic gun or Gatling gun. Films are wars, and wars are films. We can't make, nor even watch films without that fact.
*Simulated wars are remaining as simulation data for now. They need to be assured by "real wars" in the end. The total nuclear war will exterminate the irreplaceable basis of both the real world and simulations.
*As Virilio said, every single war is hyper-realistic. There has never been a real war. Some people preach like "Know the reality of war", but it's just a bad school teaching method. It just decreases intelligence.
*Since a long time ago, we have probably experienced two types of wars: defense wars and wars against any kind of enclosure. Those two different wars merged into the wars of enclosure and parsimony. They are inseparable today. Rejection against enclosures falls into defense wars in the end. Defense wars start from rejections against enemies' enclosures.
*We finally, and vaguely, started to learn that there is another type of war: A gratuitous war against any kind of enclosure and defense. It is a war of extravagance and gratuitousness. Now, some may argue that we should say "learn the value of peace through war experiences". However, we all know that "peace" doesn't mean a warless state. We can easily realize that fact by looking at local conflicts. That's not our goal. Our current peace is based on fears. We're just afraid of property losses. Our peace comes from fears of the total destruction of our basis. It is just a defensive peace or fearsome peace.
*As Pierre Klossowski pointed out, extreme parsimony will turn into absolute gratuitousness. Unused gold gradually loses its value and disrupts the value system. In the same way, unused troops and weapons will fall into a perversion. This might sound a bit tricky. When weapons and troops are not used, nation-states become a sort of phantasm. The whole defense-war system will fall into a gratuitous perversion.
