Modern Warfare In Voltaire's Candide

In Voltaire’s Candide and various sources from the Sources of The Making of the West: People and Cultures text, the technology of modern warfare in the time of the accounts in the sources book is very much different and has improved but is still relatively just as dangerous as the weapons in candide’s time period. The old and new war technology also had a significant impact on people’s emotions and made them question humanity.

Some of the tactics used in the eighteenth century seem brutal to us now because of the much more personal feeling of beating someone compared to a quick shot. In Candide Voltaire satires the brutality of the war. The Bulgarians capture Candide and during training “he was beaten thirty times with a stick” (Voltaire 19). Each day after he was beaten too. He went out for a walk one day and was punished for it. They asked if he wanted “to be beaten thirty-six times by the whole regiment, or to receive twelve bullets in his brain.” He chose the beating and only completed it twice. He then asked to be executed and the execution

Every innocent civilian’s death was justified to the people who caused those murders. The Eyewitness Accounts of the Bombing of Guernica (1937) showed not only the ridiculous reasons that Fascist leaders had in the twentieth century behind mass murders but the new weapons of that time period. The reasoning behind the bombing of Guernica was essentially the Spanish Civil War. Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini sent military help to Francisco Franco to maintain popular support as a governing body.

On April 26, 1937, several squadrons of German and Italian aircraft swooped down over the town, dropping high-explosive and incendiary bombs. The eyewitness accounts that follow vividly describe an attack that lasted for hours; by the end, the town lay in ruins and hundreds of men, women, and children were dead (Lualdi