No I don't buy this line of reasoning. I have no experience of war, nor do I wish to. It is tragic when we loose our humanity. I can't see the great horror of war being a good way to remember our humanity. It is nessecary to remind ourselves that we are human and to cease the killing, else we would extinguish ourselves. So the processes of rediscovery must happen. War is so deeply affecting that it's memory can last in a population for generations, the resentment can remain. Wars end not because people have rediscovered their humanity but because people are too tired, too hungry to kill, are tired of being killed. There might be moments for individuals in the carnage, they realise the sanctity of life, such realisations can be found by looking at the world from outer space, by delivering a child, by seeing someone you love pass away. In all the latter examples the chance for inducing madness, shell shock, the fear of destroying the core of a person through what they have witnessed is far less than on the battle field. That such moments of clarity can be seen by people is a testament to the human will rather than to the glories of camaraderie or the epic of battle.
The First world war had a victor, but the vanquished did not forget their defeat, and the lessons were not learnt. In the north of Ireland the ramifications of pitched street battles still run through the provence 25 years later.
The Balkins have been stewing for almost a thousand years.
War is blood and death and hate and dimemberment, and rape, genocide, the stealing of futures, the disasembling of the past, it is all that is not that which we would have be human, it is a call to terrirory and to thoughtlesness. It is yet inevitable and if there is anything that can redeem it it is the simple fact that we have yet to find a way to end it.
That's not to say war can't be perfected. I find the oxymoronic concept of a "humane war" where the only ones killed are the soldiers who signed up to be one worth going towards. Or even a "virtual war" where two parties engage in a fair competition and abide by the results in lieu of actual combat. But, alas, until you can get everyone to agree on this (and we've already noted the futility of THAT) the old standby of mass slaughter is going to be with us in some capacity.
1. Population Control 2. An opportunity to express agressive / violent emotions.
As near as I can tell, most wars result from overpopulation which leads to a depletion of resources. The limited resources force people to compete - and the more necessary the resource, the more violent the competition. In WWII, one of the bases of the Third Reich was the belief that the Jews were hording all of the money and controlling markets. People in Germany were starving, struggling for survival. The approach of Thanksgiving has me thinking about the US genocides. We wiped out entire native races so that we could build our subdivisions. Limited resource: livable land and freedom. Solution: Kill everyone that's in our way. (Personally, I'm still having trouble celebrating the holidays that honor the US genocides.)
Humans also seem to have a natural amount of violence within them. I heard on a TV show about rage that one in five Americans has trouble controlling his or her anger. This isn't someone's personal problem with their frustrations. It's a human problem with the fact that we do have some aggressive tendencies, and a need to express them. According to a psychologist friend of mine, people who exercise regularly are less likely to have these anger problems. People who go to war and kill will of course work it out of their systems - at least for a while.
But our society has blocked most every route, except exercise and sport, for the expression of aggression. So, we saturate ourselves with violent TV and movies.
By the way - think you're not at war? There are more people killed in the US by gunshot than in most any other country in the world - including those countries that are at war. When we drive to work in the morning, we're competing for the limited resource of road space. Thus, road rage - the attempt to kill other motorists in order to have better access to the resource. As population increases, if infrastructure does not exist to provide resources, the level of violence will also increase. We have the movies and TV now to express our violence, but how long will that work?
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