The Boarding of Metabolic Vehicles1
Yours is not to reason why!
\- Frederick the Second to his soldiers
THE EXTENSIVE PHASE of Assault reqmres quick deaths; the intensive preparatory phase inflicts slow ones. As Lieutenant-General von Metsch writes in Wie wurde ein neuer krieg aussehen? in the 1 930s, "In total war, everything is a front! But along with the new total front, we would be wise to include the nation's spiritual front . . . In both the practical matter of preparation for rearmament and theo retical military discussions, the mo ral question is of primary importance. "
Born o f the sea, total war, according to Admiral Friedrich Ruge, aims "at destroying the honor, the identity, the very soul of the enemy." By striking populations with slow death through the destruction of their environment, the ultimate forms of modern ecological war curiously restore the "soul" in its primitive, "ethnological" definitions: "mana," potential substance indistinguishable from its environment, not individual but plural, multiform, fluidiform, coagulated here and there in social, animal or territorial bodies.
Dromological progress, by imposing the idea of two types of body, dependent on their situation in space, also imposes the idea
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