Spoils of War?

Hindu (ॐ) depiction of the
Battle of Kurukshetra (कुरुक्षेत्र), between
the Kauravas (कौरव) and the Pandavas (पाण्डव),
recorded in the Mahabharata (महाभारतम्)

Spoils of War?
Friday – October 9, 2026

Deuteronomy 13:12 – 18 states many things and the purpose of this post is not to recount that entire passage of the Torah (תּוֹרָה), but among one of the things that this passage mentions is the spoils of war that the Israeli nation must take from the town that they have just defeated in a holy war fought in the defence of the name of Yahweh (יהוה). Now, the question then becomes what should be done with the spoils of war? Yes, because today there are plenty of wars being fought all across the earth, read "My Views on Warfare in Modern Times", and I have been forced to wonder whether or not there are any spoils of war left these days, or if perhaps the power of destruction leaves nothing left to the imagination? See, what Deuteronomy 13:12 – 17 eventually makes clear is that the spoils of war and all the treasures of a defeated enemy in a holy war to uphold the sacred law and prevent the activity of blaspheme should be burnt and destroyed; burnt and destroyed because such trassure, such loot, contains the energy and the essence of the enemy, men who were confused and turned to evil. Yes, evil. Now, in the face of evil it would makes all the sense in the world that any artefact, and detail, and any particle associated with evil must be destroyed, destroyed and burnt not as some kind of sacrifice, but rather in a consecration, read "Destruction!", a cleansing of the land, and these traditions do not only belong to the Jewish people and to the Bible, for they truly exist across the planet and across history. Now, there a situation where it is not necessary to destroy the spoils of war may of course occur, and this is much more common in modern wars, at least this would seem to be the case, because modern warfare happens not because men are motivated to balance the scales of the celestial order; modern wars happen because of material considerations and because of ideological considerations, and many of these ideological considerations are profoundly entrenched in materialism at the end of the day anyhow.

    And so we are all left having to ask the question: what about the spoils of war? Look, for the most part the answer is quite obvious: there are no spoils of war, because it has all been destroyed, because modern warfare seeks the complete and utter destruction of one or both sides involved, as recent conflicts have shown, and this is really nothing new; warfare is not holy and has no basis in true justice. This means that whatever we can consider the "spoils of war" to be, it has to be projection, material projection into the future: whenever some war eventually reach an end, the only thing left is the future, or the fact of the future, and of course during the war most people eventually become accustomed to a kind of war fever and eventually war fatigue. Yes, are we not asking quite a lot of modern people: that they should be able to somehow survive an existential war fought over the future? Who in the past would have been forced to walk the earth with an expectation of this kind? Not even the most noble of warriors would have had to deal with this kind of meaningless nihilism, and yet these people are supposed to somehow survive and keep up their grit. I am of course referring here to the civilians and the many men forced to fight and somehow survive these wars. Of course, it has to be mentioned again: whenever a war was fought in the distant past, this war concluded when the last battle was fought, but these wars seldom affected people who were not destined for warfare, and so what historians refer to as "religious wars" in the period between 15th century and the 17th century is nothing but an enormous fraud, because these were the precursors to modern warfare, read as well "The Problem of Borders". Of course, it should come as no surprise really that the future and time is what modern warfare is all about, because one view of what modern warfare actually constitutes in a world without true knowledge would be the accurate description of the necessary convulsions felt when humanity should become completely disconnected from nature, read "Genesis, Chapter 4".

    Now, these points are all fine and I have made them multiple times elsewhere, but again to return to the question of the spoils of war, we may ask ourselves some questions. If you have defeated an enemy: you may ask yourself why you fought a war against him in the first place? Of course, because modern warfare tends to extend across oceans of time so vast that they completely drown us and we lose our sense of history, we have no concept of this to begin with, and as I mentioned above modern warfare erases any treasures that be left on the side of the now defeated, or supposedly defeated enemy. From a material point of view: if we have no spoils of war, then why did we fight the war? Yes, yes, there will be all sorts of talk about human rights and supposedly "just war theory", but most of this highfalutin babble is just a justification rather than a reason for, raison d'etre for war. Of course, this last point can be made in particular when we are able to connect it with the Western view of the world, or should I say the liberal and universalist view of the world: all of a sudden the spoils of war is the new paradigm of happy and "civilized" children learning about the world, becoming "enlightened", and always in a distant and still strange land, read "My Views on Multiculturalism". Yes, for some this messianic vision of pluralism is the real treasure of war, at least for the stupid and naïve this is the belief.

    Of course, there are actually spoils of war to mention in modern warfare, and most of these "spoils" are increasingly positive cash flows, that is to say: the true victors of modern wars are not the soldiers who fought them, or the civilians on the winning side; the true victors of modern warfare are the bankers and the weapons manufacturers, the agitators and the propagandists, which is why it is good for the Pope to have mentioned this fact recently, and this is why I hold that the Pope must issue a Papal Bull calling on all nations to disarm and actually once and for all to ban warfare, and if it must be so in the name of humanity, even though he should be more forthright and pressing about the spiritual side of this, read "On Disarmament". It is all good and well to dwell on the sentimental and humanist value in keeping the international peace, but above any psychotic and messianic idealisms of some kind of borderless and all loving brotherhood in harambe, the Pope should consider the fact that his civilization is facing an existential crisis never seen before, and this precisely because of the real cost of war. I gather that another intra or even intercontinental war would not favour the Pope's position in the world. Yes, these are the true spoils of war...

Reginald Drax (AKA, M. C. Dutt) – October 9, 2026.