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Is anyone ever truly prepared to kill? From Christian Science Monitor
Much is rightly made of the dedication and sacrifice of those willing to lay down their lives for their country. But what is rarely spoken of, within the military or American society at large, is what it means to kill - to overcome the ingrained resistance most human beings feel to slaying one of their own kind, and the haunting sense of guilt that may accompany such an action. There is a terrible price to be paid by those who go to war, their families, and their communities, say some experts, by ignoring such realities.
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2 comments:
I think a couple years ago I re-read Vonnegut's thoughts on the necessity to dehumanize the enemy in order to have a war.
Extrapolate: no one is ready to kill another human... you just gotta dehumanize the other human first.
Well, that will get people to sign on to the cause, but I don't think we're (or at least speaking for me) programmed to kill someone whose eyes we have looked into or hands we have held.
I wish I could remember the anthropologist or even the theory name- but there IS a theory that there is a sort of sociopathic minority, and one of them will arise to power in every village to rally the troops to the killing fields.
My $0.02.
Yeah, I totally agree, Crockett. It takes a lot of outside conditions to overcome that natural aversion to kill. And like you said, the typical pattern is to demonization of the Other. I remember hearing the author of the Nanking Massacre (Iris Chang), that her conclusion for any prerequisite of a massacre is a total dehumanization of the subjects. That way, you're not really killing another human.
Unfortunately, I think the minority theory lets the majority off the hook too much. In the Postmodern Age, I think a prevalent mode of being is a state of paranoia in that the Other (whatever bogeyman you define them to be, see Republican for Democratics and vice versa) has the surplus enjoyment and/or is out to take your enjoyment. It takes a sociopathic minority to harness that low, underlying fear....
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