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I was in the infantry for over a decade. I joined before 9/11, but I did reenlist some years afterward, and I deployed a bunch, and fought many times. The thing about the article is that he says right there in the first couple paragraphs... Nobody that hasn't been there will understand the core message here. Worse, it's not socially palatable to embrace your innate human violence, despite it being such an intrinsic b…
I was in the infantry for over a decade. I joined before 9/11, but I did reenlist some years afterward, and I deployed a bunch, and fought many times. The thing about the article is that he says right there in the first couple paragraphs... Nobody that hasn't been there will understand the core message here. Worse, it's not socially palatable to embrace your innate human violence, despite it being such an intrinsic b…
Society tries to tame violence, all good, but by supressing it we're not really improving things, we need people to master it in a way.
ps: a few years back some guy wrote a piece about why he loved war; title being counter intuitive, you'd expect a violent idiot but it was not. His point is that war is mentally easier than society, where every body lies, and confusion is normal. In war he said things become binary, friend or ennemy, inaction = death, decision = life. I found it very interesting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
War is some special experience that Western Men have ... where they get to fulfil some kind of murderous power fantasy over people who don't matter? No. Nothing about that is western. That’s just history. War is the most human you’ll ever be. I don’t know how to explain it to someone who doesn’t want to believe their own potential for malevolence. It’s like eating from the forbidden tree in the garden. You’re eyes be…
> You’re eyes become open to the savage visceral reality that we’re nothing more than primates that talk. If you look at all the accomplishments of mankind in science and art, how can you say that?
I learned several lessons in the service, many of which people don't want to talk about.
It takes only a few armed and motivated men to dominate hundreds, perhaps thousands of people. So disarmament and pacifism is not a workable strategy until the day we start programming people as if they were machines. Somebody has to have the job of being the most violent person in the room.
Everybody is violent. We are violent as a species. I think this is the thing that bothers so many people. They'd rather just turn away, pretend it's only others, and so forth. There is a ton of disgust and denial about who we are. We confuse who we aspire to be with our actual state. There may be Ghandis and Jesuses in our midst, but they are an extremely small percentage of the population. We are monkeys that kill things.
War is bad because of what is does to all participants, not just because it involves hurting and killing others. War slowly erodes our civilization, making more and more extreme things "normal". It doesn't matter who wins, who loses, or what the cause is. War harms everybody -- perhaps especially the ones who win, who view war as a logical remedy for whatever the next problem that they have. Those who have served avoid war not out of kindness for others, but because of the terrible destruction it will bring on our own society every time it is used.
(This, by the way, is another argument for the citizen soldier. Making war a separate profession that most people never experience just makes the self destruction that war does to civilization even worse, by isolating it and keeping it hidden. It also causes all sorts of misunderstandings and prejudices. The volunteer armed forces was a hack in the middle of Vietnam. It worked for a while, but it is having horrible long-term effects. Very bad stuff.)
I think the analogy that stuck with me most about this was that war may be the male version of motherhood, that is, the closest we come to being true to our biological selves. Somehow this feels right, although that's just intuition on my part.
Note: I am as non-violent as a person can get. I'm not trying to say that any of this is okay, simply that it appears to exist, whether it's okay or not.
It provides a sense of purpose, it builds comraderie, and actual combat is more addictive than any drug. There ya go, the basics in easily digestible civilian form.
> But I believe that most men who have been to war would have to admit, if they are honest, that somewhere inside themselves they loved it too, loved it as much as anything that has happened to them before or since. This sounds conspicuously like the conservative version of the people who say "All men secretly desire to rape women."
War is to a degree more consensual. BDSM scores very highly in taboo surveys. I don't think the author would say all men love executing POWs or anything like that. Also, not to support that view, but the amount of sexual violence that has historically accompanied war is startling. There's obviously something to it.
Rape has been used as an instrument of war for all of recorded history - as a demonstration of domination; as a means of punishment and repression - and also - just because the men can.
Combating the use of rape and sexual violence in conflict is something that we are trying very hard to make progress on ... but it is a very difficult (maybe even impossible) task; human nature being what it is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That feels like a fairly unique experience. I was in the military and I don't recall ever meeting anyone with that sort of attitude towards killing or death. On the contrary, most everyone I knew was rather opposed to fighting and saw what we were signed up for as a necessity that we did out of duty to our country, not because we liked it.
Are you serious? The Marines literally make you say "kill" during combat training. The phrase for firing a machine gun is "die mother fucker die mother fucker die mother fucker release" (release the trigger to prevent over heating of the barrel) Every time we went on a platoon run the diddies are about murdering our enemies. I honestly don't believe you were in the military, or you seem to have forgotten what it was…
What's more interesting is that this is not always known to people inside the group; that they believe it to be the standard (people from other military occupations are likewise often surprised when they witness a group of people team-chanting about killing people, having believed their own approach to be standard, and in my experience some European military find it a little disturbing, as they tend to be even further removed from this approach). Everyone takes their own experience and generalises it across the board; the US marines are an extremum in the field of mentally preparing (or indoctrinating) people to kill.
Horses for courses; it only becomes a problem in the field when you put people heavily indoctrinated in killing into a deployment where not shooting people is really what's needed, and vice-versa. Unfortunately, that's where it has fallen down over the last decade or so.
It's interesting to read this first hand account after having read some more science focused stuff. >The power of war, like the power of love, springs from man's heart. Both actually almost certainly arise from evolution. Love helps reproduce the species, wiping out the adjacent tribe and grabbing their resources helps also and if you are too nice they may wipe you instead. See 'Demonic Males' and the like for how ch…
It provides a sense of purpose, it builds comraderie, and actual combat is more addictive than any drug. There ya go, the basics in easily digestible civilian form.
I often wonder if economic competition is not a re-emergence of that need into a non physical manner. Kinda like sport. You try to kill your opponent but symbolically (team or alone).