“This ceasefire thing doesn’t have anything to do with peace,” a retired senior government official told me last month. “It is only a lunch break. To the Burmese military, there is only total war.”
I later found what “total war” was when I re-read War and Anti-War: Making sense of today’s global chaos written by Alvin and Heidi Toffler 20 years ago.

Total war, according to German general Erich Ludendorff (1865-1937), differs from the “absolute war” of Karl von Clauswitz (1780-1831) in that while the latter saw war as “an extension of politics, and the military as an instrument of political policy”, the former believed that the whole “political order had to be subordinated to the military” in order to wage a total war. (P.45)

They also wrote:

• In its larger sense, total war was to be waged politically, economically, culturally and propagandistically, and the entire society converted into a single “war machine” (P.45)
• In practice, total war blurred or completely eliminated the distinction between military and civilian targets. Since everything supposedly contributed to a total war effort, everything… was a legitimate target (P.46)
• Nazi theorists later extended even Ludendorff’s notions of total war by denying the reality of peace itself and insisting that peace was merely a period of war preparation —“the war between wars” (P.45)

Reading them, comparisons may immediately come into mind:

• The Thein Sein government that was created by Senior General Than Shwe who has supposedly gone into retirement afterward. One begins to ask oneself, “Is this for real?”
• The people’s militia strategy drawn by the military “to administer the participation of the entire people in the Security and Defence of the Union”
• The wholesale forced relocation of people in Shan State’s 11 townships in the late 1990s and the “License to Rape” which, according to the Shan Women’s Action Network (SWAN), was used as a “weapon of war” against the civilian population (which means that if a terrorist, according to Gerald Segal, is “somewhere between a common criminal and a guerrilla who fights by the rules of war,” a Tamadaw man may be a cross between a common criminal and a terrorist.)
• The invitation of peace talks by Naypyitaw that has steadfastly refused to declare a nationwide ceasefire and the deployment of troops facing the Karen resistance (that had signed a ceasefire) to the Kachin front

Of course, “nothing ventured, nothing gained.” And, according to Sun Tzu, one cannot hope to achieve one’s aim without feigning acceptance of the other side’s ruse sometimes.

But in the meantime one should never forget that he had also insisted on a “careful accommodation” that never stops to seize any opportunity that opens up.