By Pieter Smit and Anne-Ruth Wertheim | –
Translated by Kevin Cook | –
( BNNVARA.NL ) – After Secretary-General Mark Rutte said in his concluding address at the NATO summit in The Hague on 24 and 25 June that NATO should become more lethal, there have been very few concerned responses in the Dutch press. We will show that there is every reason to be seriously concerned, because Rutte’s words are an ominous portent of growing neo-fascism.
In his concluding address Rutte stated ‘Together the Allies have laid the foundation for a stronger, fairer and more lethal NATO.’ In minutes 3.20 to 3.25 of the Nieuwsuur news bulletin on the final evening of the summit, Rutte’s words were translated into Dutch as ‘Samen hebben de bondgenoten het fundament gelegd voor een sterkere, eerlijkere en dodelijkere NAVO.’
Earlier, the same statement by Rutte was translated on the Dutch news site NU.nl with the closing words ‘… een sterkere, eerlijkere en krachtigere NAVO.’ That NU.nl translated ‘more lethal’ here as ‘krachtigere’ rather than ‘dodelijkere’ is, to say the least, surprising. The English word ‘lethal’ quite simply means ‘dodelijk’ (= deadly), and the translation ‘krachtigere’ (= more powerful) is a strange duplication of the first of the three adjectives, ‘sterkere’ (= stronger). The curious translation makes you wonder whether the people at NU.nl couldn’t believe that Rutte really did mean to say ‘more lethal’.
In any case, now that Rutte and his supporters have managed to persuade the NATO allies to devote 5% of their national incomes to armaments in the coming years, he is telling the world that this will make the alliance ‘more lethal’ – a term with ominous connotations for Dutch readers. It recalls J. B. Charles’s books, in which ‘thanatic sensuality’ is defined as enjoyment of killing or lust for killing, on a par with erotic lust.
Thanatic sensuality: lust for killing
- B. Charles is the pen name of the Dutch professor of law and criminology Willem Nagel (1910-1983), who was in the resistance during the Second World War and often narrowly escaped being killed. He later analysed the events he witnessed before, during and after the Second World War in important books that attempted to grasp the nature of fascism. He first did this in Volg het spoor terug (‘Follow the trail back’, 1953) and then in Van het kleine koude front (‘From the small cold front’, 1962), an entire chapter of which, starting on page 189, is devoted to thanatic sensuality. It compares the ways in which people are allowed to refer to Eros (love) and Thanatos (death) in published writings – for as a legal expert he had to determine the boundaries between what was moral, seemly and permissible, and what was not.
To make clear what he means by thanatic sensuality, he quotes from the description of killing in Salvo, a weekly newspaper for Dutch Catholic troops:
… The whole volley smashes into his face. Not one shot misses. The gun barrel mows like a scythe … Now more than twenty shots. He throws another grenade. As he falls to the ground he already has the fuse of the next one between his thumb and first finger. The soldiers emerging from the tent seem to form instantly into piles of wounded, dying and dead men …
On hearing the alarming message that NATO has become more lethal, one also cannot help thinking of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1976 film Novecento (‘Twentieth Century’), about the rise of fascism in Italy. This includes a scene in which the archetypal fascist Alfredo (played by Donald Sutherland) takes evident delight in killing a cat.
Willem Nagel examined closely how such enjoyment of killing is an inseparable part of fascism. On page 579 of the Dutch journal Maatstaf, Vol. 11, 1963-64, he wrote: What we see exposed here in passing are the roots of both militarism and fascism … I call it sadism. Sadism is lustfully committed cruelty, based on the notion that the opponent becomes the enemy once he is chosen as a victim, is humiliated because he is losing, and is guilty if he resists despite being the weaker party. This … is a constant feature of fascist fury, which selects a victim and turns him into an enemy as soon as he begins to resist. How fascist hatred is nourished by resistance from those selected for humiliation had already become clear once Hitler came to power in Germany.
In his books and articles, Willem Nagel also wrote conscientiously about the inhuman choices he himself had had to make during his time in the resistance – and how after the war he thought in both legal and human terms about the punishment of fascists and whether, and if so when, there could be any reconciliation. On page 799 of Maatstaf, Vol. 1, 1953-54, in Het laatste woord (‘The last word’) about his book Volg het spoor terug (‘Follow the trail back’, 1953), he wrote:
Fortunately, people are not predestined to be good, evil, dangerous or innocent. Thank God, we are capable of insight and revulsion. In a large number of cases reconciliation was achieved, among other things through purges and trials. However, there are also irreconcilables – those who want to remain enemies. I am reconcilable – but not towards enemy forces and their current representatives.
What he must have meant by this was that he did not want to be reconciled with what had remained of fascism, and was still a threat, after the Second World War. We interpret his words as a warning that now makes us wonder whether there is any implicit danger in the NATO Secretary-General’s pronouncement on 25 June at the end of the NATO summit in The Hague that the alliance is now more lethal. In this connection we will look at written and oral statements made within Rutte’s present circle of friends.
Mark Rutte first phoned the new US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, in late January 2025. According to the Americans, the main takeaway from the phone call was that Rutte had committed to making NATO stronger and ‘more lethal’. NATO itself was evidently still reluctant to use the term, and avoided it as much as possible – whereas Trump’s defence secretary continued to tweet it left, right and centre. In private, of course, Rutte and Hegseth must have had numerous conversations in which the term was used. However, as all we heard it, it was Rutte who first publicly announced it as part of NATO policy at the Hague summit, after testing it on a British thinktank.
And so the term ‘more lethal’ seems above all to have come from Hegseth – but does this mean it was just an innocent quirk on the part of one of the present US leaders?
In late 2024, soon after taking office, Hegseth was asked by journalists about his cooperation with Congress and the Pentagon. He replied that Trump had told him to make soldiers ‘No. 1’ once more, and restore the Pentagon’s warrior ethos. ‘All that matters now is to be lethal, lethal, lethal. Anything that detracts from this has to stop,’ he said.
The book ‘American Crusade’ that Hegseth wrote just before he was appointed defence secretary gives us an insight into his morbid views. It calls in warlike terms for a crusade against the left wing and Islam, in order to preserve freedom in the United States. He is not so concerned about democracy. Hegseth served in the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then became a commentator for the far-right TV channel Fox. He considers himself a Christian nationalist, a fast-growing far-right political movement (see also here). Together with the aggressive body tattoos he shows off to the world, this paints a gruesome picture. And it also seems to provide an insight into what must have attracted Trump and his supporters to Hegseth’s personality. His book also describes what he means by restoring the warrior ethos among American soldiers. Diversity and human rights, he writes, have weakened the army and caused the unnecessary deaths of many soldiers. He therefore proposes ignoring the international law of war, and henceforth adopting the following approach: ‘Hey Al-Qaeda, if you surrender, we might spare your life – otherwise we will tear your arms off and feed them to pigs.’ In his opinion the army must become ruthless and shatteringly lethal. He has also successfully called for several soldiers convicted of war crimes to be amnestied.
Less restriction on the number of civilian casualties of warfare?
When Rutte was asked by a German journalist why NATO should become more lethal, he said this was needed as a deterrent. He said nothing about what would specifically change. But we doubt that the appointment of Secretary Hegseth has only led to a change in the way of talking about warfare. We believe there is every reason to fear that Rutte was also referring to the international law of war, which is the basis for the rules of engagement on restricting the number of civilian casualties. In his first policy directive to his generals, ‘All About Army’s New Comprehensive Transformation Strategy’, Hegseth said just three words about the abolition of these rules of engagement: ‘overcome parochial interests’, which had not been enforced in the American army since March. The whole section has been dismissed, including all the advisors on human rights.
This has created a huge problem for other NATO countries: in Article 1 of its founding treaty, NATO promises to uphold human rights. How this is to be done in cooperation with other countries is set out in its own Rules of Engagement. The Americans have far better satellite pictures, so in a joint NATO attack the procedure is often as follows. The Americans designate a target to be bombed by a Dutch pilot, and must then also state how great the risk of civilian casualties is. However, Hegseth’s new policy makes this very hard for them to do. In recent years the rules of engagement had been tightened up after numerous incidents involving large numbers of civilian casualties, such as the 85 victims of ‘Hawija’, in which a bombing raid was carried out without obtaining sufficient information about local conditions.
Has America now really changed course? Two weeks ago the US army bombed a speedboat they believed to be carrying drugs and probably also a few migrants, and proudly posted the pictures on the Internet. This is a flagrant violation of the law of war. We had already had a terrifying pointer in that direction when America agreed to the Israelis causing an extremely large number of civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip ‘to eliminate Hamas’. So it is clear that Hegseth is not only using more shameless language. We now want to know whether Hegseth and Co. have got Mark Rutte on their side – and whether this means that NATO will now abandon its goal of restricting civilian casualties. Could it mean that the Americans plan to commit atrocities as suggested by Hegseth (‘Hey Al-Qaeda, if you surrender, we might spare your life – otherwise we will tear your arms off and feed them to pigs’) even in NATO operations, and that NATO as a whole will then look the other way – or even join in?
For a better understanding of the kind of dilemmas now facing NATO, we must also ask ourselves whether there is any connection with the latest developments in Remote Warfare.
The first people who used weapons to kill other people could see exactly what they were doing, for they were never so far away from their victims that they could fail to see their suffering and death agonies. That remained so for millennia, but changed fundamentally with the design and construction of remote weapons, such as planes that could transport bombs over long distances and drop them on people who were far away. This had the grim advantage that the soldiers who were pressing the buttons were no longer upset by the sight of what they were doing. It was already the case with ‘ordinary’ bombs that were dropped on people from planes, starting in 1911 when the Italians dropped bombs on rebels in Libya. Other striking examples of such bombings are of course the German attack on Rotterdam on 10 May 1940, and later the British attacks on German cities (particularly Dresden) in the final days of the Second World War – not forgetting the atomic bombs that the US dropped on the inhabitants of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on 6 and 9 August 1945 respectively, and a similar number of civilian deaths in the bombing of Vietnam. In all these cases the perpetrators could no longer clearly distinguish the people they were hitting. But they could still see something from a distance or at least have some idea of it – and so one of the pilots involved in ‘Hiroshima’ later suffered mental problems from remorse.
However, the subsequent development of sat-nav missiles and drones in a sense detached the perpetrators from the people they were killing. If there had ever been human compassion in warfare, precious little of it now remained – for the people operating the devices hardly needed to worry what they were doing. An added boon for the arms industry was that the further away the users of the weapons – the consumers, if you will – were from their targets, the less they themselves were at risk.
But as if this were not enough, in recent years there has been yet another development. We saw this when the US and Israel began wiping out their enemies in other countries without advance warning, let alone any official declaration of war. This innovation only became possible after diligent efforts by the arms industry to equip its remote weapons, missiles and drones with cameras. What has not changed is that the people operating the computers are themselves not at risk. However, an ironic result of this technological breakthrough has been to nullify the great advantage of the existing remote weapons – namely that the perpetrators no longer had to see what they were doing to people. They can now watch in detail what they are attacking, and how their victims are killed – for example, by missiles that can take out people in distant countries without causing an explosion. Just before the head of the projectile reaches the live target’s neck, it fires off six rapidly spinning blades which do the real work.
And this brings us back to J. B. Charles’s thanatic sensuality – for what now really matters is to find a ‘solution’ to the problem that the soldiers who press the buttons are once more directly confronted with their victims’ suffering and death agonies, and that some of them are refusing to go along with this. We are now again seeing conscientious drone pilots who are suffering from depression or turning to drugs, or becoming very angry with their superiors.
One solution to this problem that has been dropped back into the military commanders’ laps is to transfer this final part of the killing to Artificial Intelligence. This appears to be one of the reasons why the question of where the bombs are to be dropped in Gaza, and how this is to be done, is being left almost entirely to AI computers by the IDF. The remote pilots can then still watch, but do not have to witness anyone’s death agonies at first hand, even though they can surely imagine them. However, because AI has the drawback that the weapons are sometimes less accurate, it is regularly decided to destroy entire buildings that contain supposed enemies. The exact coordinates are known from telephone data, and so no-one has to steer the missile or drone for the last hundred metres and see just what it has done. A further ‘benefit’ is that you kill the whole family in one go, so there are no younger brothers left to take the dead man’s place. And, with luck, more and more families who have witnessed all this will stop their rebellious sons from becoming rebels in turn.
A quite different way to protect NATO pilots from feelings of guilt is connected with the rules of engagement in their present form. It is not only the soldier who fires the projectile that bears responsibility for the decision, but also the whole chain of officers above him. And so, it is generally assumed, the soldier who fires will feel less guilty. But what about the officers above him?
Is Europe now also about to turn its back on the international law of war?
The documents we have found provide the following picture of how the higher echelons in NATO think about respect for the law of war, with restriction of the number of civilian casualties of course much the most important factor. A large number of European generals, as well as the American generals appointed by Biden or even Obama, appear to embrace respect for the law of war and human rights, or at least to regard it as a necessary evil – if only to save ammunition, maintain public support for fighting, and so prevent too many soldiers from having mental problems.
Other generals, now under the inspiring leadership of the new American defence secretary Hegseth, simply seem to want – just like the Israelis – to transfer some of the responsibility to AI computers. They also want far more flexible rules of engagement, in which soldiers make far more of the decisions themselves. However, and this is the whole point, they also benefit from transferring responsibility for the killing to individual soldiers, as the best way to dodge their own heavy responsibilities for this.
The whole of the armed forces must again come to see killing in a positive light
This means that waging war in what they see as the masculine style, especially killing as many – preferably dehumanised – opponents as possible, should once more be seen in a positive light. And this will not happen as long as the soldiers continue to feel guilty about what they are doing. So it is essential that they be trained step by step to think of killing as something praiseworthy. Subtle new psychological methods will surely have to be devised to achieve this. Glorification of killing and promotion of thanatic sensuality must then, in a new form, become a fixed part of military training, so that the notion gradually becomes established in soldiers’ minds that they are doing something extremely valuable and heroic.
If this is really what is going on, we fear that Hegseth’s call for ‘more lethality’ – and its repetition by Rutte, without the slightest protest from the NATO partners – must be interpreted as a fundamental change of course for NATO’s armies, turning their backs on the international law of war. And we can only hope that things are not even worse, and that we should not – like Willem Nagel – see this as a portent of growing neo-fascism.
Pieter Smit studied political science and journalism, and has investigated human rights violations in armed conflicts mostly in Africa, and international (including Dutch) cooperation with violators of human rights in Africa. His work has taken him to such countries as Mauritania, Mali, Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia, as well as into the dark corners of the European and Dutch asylum systems.
Reprinted with the authors’ permission from BNNVARA.NL
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