A friend alerted me to this headline in the NYT:

“As Syria Talks Fizzle, ‘War Has No Meaning Anymore’”

And here are the last paragraphs of the article:

‘“The people who still live with it every day are not even allowed to cry, because they know there will be more tomorrow, and the day after and the day after,” Mr. Hadad said, talking in part about himself. “But you don’t want to develop that resistance — to not care about people dying.” He tried to stay focused on what passed for hope: Syrians were still united, if only by common suffering. On both sides of divided Aleppo, he said, gunmen ask for IDs at checkpoints, electricity fluctuates, shells fall, and people make plans for a dash to Europe.
On New Year’s Eve, he recalled, he was in a front-line building with insurgents who declared they had “a surprise” for government troops nearby. At midnight, they unleashed mortars — and shells came crashing back, nearly hitting the building where Mr. Hadad was.
Was there a military purpose? “Absolutely not,” he said. “The war has no meaning anymore.”’

Read the article here.

War without any military purposes. We need to ask ourselves: are there still meaningful wars? Mali? Afghanistan?

Or perhaps here we have another, contemporary definition of genocide: war without any military purposes.

Once upon a time of course, killing civilians and enslaving women was the normal practice of those who won the war.