War Should Be Hell

Human beings are the oddest creatures.

We have been gifted with the power of reason, and yet we abuse it, misuse it, or turn our backs to it completely.  Consider the ways in which the purportedly "evolved" nations view warfare.  The mere fact that they sign agreements that limit the ways in which war may be waged seems to me prima facie proof that they are gone mad.

In the most general terms, what is the objective of war?  It is to defeat one's enemy.  Why would one fight without the intention of prevailing, regardless of cost?  Yet we are constrained by agreements such as the Geneva Conventions wherein we agree to never do X and to always do Y.  For example, we cannot target civilians and must always house and feed prisoners of war, treat them humanely, and so forth.  This, I declare, is pure rubbish.

So why, then, do we do it?  It is the pure hedging of our bets, that's why.

The thinking goes basically this way: "well, if we kill all the prisoners we take, they will do the same with our people whom the enemy takes prisoner."  We want to fight wars but do not want to pay the price of warring.  This, of course, is absurd.

If you do not want to pay the price of warring, then do not wage war.  The one exception to this lies in defensive fighting and in that case if you are facing an existential threat, which I will here suggest is the case any time a nation attacks you, then you should be fighting like mad bastards with the intention of committing utter and complete genocide against everyone bearing arms against you.  This is especially the case when you know you have committed no violation against your antagonist.

War should become so ghastly a prospect that nobody on the planet would wish to partake, precisely because the potential and sufficiently likely outcome would be the extinction of your bloodline and those of everyone you know, and for whom you care.  Were this the central concern, how many rulers and their vile, butt-smooching, hand-wringing sycophants would be eager to enter into mortal combat?  Knowing that their children would be hunted and slaughtered, as well as those of every member of their families out to, say, third or fourth cousins, how many of these great heroes of the people would be so eager to press Fearless Leader to send troops into neighboring lands?

How many troops would be eager to obey such orders, knowing their families would be hunted to extinction in the event they did not prevail?  How much of an incentive would it be for them to see the virtues of defensive-only action?  How clearly might they see war, not as a chance for glory, but for the thing that it truly is: utter barbarity?

Human history is littered with examples of young men champing at the bit to go to war for the sake of "glory".  The Great War was example enough, the result being an endless sea of regret from troop, sailor, submariner, and pilot alike after realizing the impossible waste that war represents in every imaginable term.  And yet, by the time the next generation comes of age, the lessons of that previous herd are lost or, sadder still, disregarded because the young always know better.  They know what dolts and nitwits were their parents or grandparents and that they will be able to do it right this time.  That is, of course, pure nonsense, and when the waves of mangled bodies and corpses return home, the cycle of bitter regret at lives wasted repeats itself.  It is almost as if we cannot help ourselves.  Almost.

War should be hell.  It should be waged as bloody annihilation of every human being, including civilians - perhaps especially them - on the losing side.  Make it the rule to commit pure genocide against anyone raising arms against you, knowing that they will do the same in return.

If the spectre of everyone we know and love being brutally murdered in a systematic genocide does not abate our willingness to war, much less our thirst for it, then we as a species are unworthy of our existences in the first place and humanity should then extinguish itself as an obvious matter of basic propriety.  At the very least, we should all shut our yaps and stop complaining about it because we get what we tolerate, so onus rests squarely with every last one of us.

War should be hell.  The very thought of it should fill the minds of men with revulsion and wild fear that everything for which they care will be written from the face of the earth in scorch and death and disease and misery and ultimate disappearance into the mists of eternity.

The very suggestion of going to war for non-defensive purposes should cause a people to immediately rise against those in power who would dare suggest it and kill them and their entire families without hesitation or mercy.

War should be hell.  But once engaged in, defensively speaking, the very roots of the attackers genetic lines should be killed off in totality such that never again will they pose a threat to one's own blood.

It is a horrible way to consider it, but I submit that the current way is far more so, for so long as war entails "reasonable" risks (to whom, exactly?), and those risks amount to near-zero for those driving others into it, we will continue to bloody the innocent for reasons that are never valid.

War should be hell.  Any people worth their moral salt would rise against leaders who aggress against other nations, killing them with prejudice, resolve, and no mercy.  Any people failing to do so are perforce complicit, thereby equally guilty, and therefore worthy of total annihilation.   Make this the rule of humankind, the violation of which brings upon the felons the fruits of their choices, and humankind would change as a pure matter of practical survival not only of the individual's thoughts for himself, but for those around him for whom his affections live.

War should be hell.  Make it so and the human race would undergo a quantum alteration in its views on many matters, the dictates of survival becoming the first-order canon of practical living.

War should be hell.  Not for a few, but for all.  Were it so, one can only speculate as to how eager would the people of Germany been to back the war-mongering Hitler.  As for the Soviets and Communist Chinese, those were internal affairs, horrible as they were, to be left to the people of their respective nation-states, though it is my considered opinion that had they treated Lenin and Mao in the same ways, things would have turned out notably better for both peoples.

War should be hell.  The incentives should lead people to avoid war at nearly any cost with a ready will to slaughter their "leaders" any time it is suggested they enter into a war of aggression.

Have I mentioned that war should be hell?

I have no illusions about people coming to sense on this matter.  Warring will continues as always, and people will meekly and corruptly accept it as matters of their cowardice, ignorance, desire, and convenience.  But they can no longer claim that they were not given the better idea on how to proceed with respect to aggression waged on a national basis.  It could be stopped today, if we cared enough.  That we do not is prima facie proof of the need for war being made hell for one and all.

Give it some thought before rejecting the notion out of hand.  Look deeply into the issue and I believe you will see the virtue in what it is that I suggest.

Until next time, please accept my best wishes.

Language, Conceptual Stores, And Mental Health

I have noticed through the decades how many people fail to understand the expressive styles of people from ages long past.

The average man seems to regard such styles as those even as recent as Victorian english as "quaint", at best; often "corny", and even "stupid". That of Shakespeare is indecipherable to most and even modernized interpretations of ancient passages such as Song to Inanna, what is generally considered the world's first poem, in the same ill-considered and ignorant ways.

So I will mention this: men of yore departed from us in two essential ways where language is concerned.

Firstly, they respected language, whereas most of us regard it casually, with disregard, and even dismissal. They understood the power of words; their central importance in the lives of humanity, whereas the contemporary meaner has little to no clue whatsoever. Sadly, it appears he has no desire to learn this most centrally important aspect of human life.

Secondly, men of yore were less beset by conceptual noise - the myriad of ideas swimming about in their heads that lead them astray from a more essential mental bearing. The people of ancient Sumer knew nothing of cell phones and the political idiocies of our contemporary times, such as communism for example. The swamping of men's minds with noise that separates them from essential thought cannot be helped, so far as I can tell. It is an unavoidable consequence of the gaining of new knowledge, for better or worse. As that body of concepts grows, the new knowledge and its attendant thought-volume revolves around the more highly-abstracted, newer ideas perforce because they seem more practically relevant to everyday living. This places distance between the mind of the individual and more basic considerations - ideas that were central to the mental lives of the people of ages past.

The farther back in time one goes, the less "polluted" were the minds of people, simply because the store of human knowledge was smaller.

While in some ways we find advantage in this augmented body of conceptual stores, there is a price to pay, which is precisely the fact that the most basic sense becomes foreign to us. My suspicion is that this presents a deep and abiding problem for humanity and my proof of this lies in the fact that the world of humanity is a hot mess and getting messier, rather than less so.

And that is why I have been writing about the basics, in the effort to at least make available little reminders of the most fundamental notions that SHOULD be serving as anchors for our mental and spiritual health.

We do still find such reminders in places such as in religious texts, but those suffer from serious drawbacks, mostly related to language, it's style and how that style deviates from our contemporary usage. Christian writings, the Bible in particular, is a good example of this. The catastrophic example is well represented in Al Qur'an, which has sown more destruction and misery than any other tome, save perhaps the body that represents communist/socialist/progressive philosophy and attendant thought.

The Christian church attempted, however ham-fistedly, to keep people well anchored through the imposition of their political might upon the mass of humanity under their aegis. This, of course, failed miserably in the end precisely because it was forcefully imposed and not made attractive such that people wanted to maintain virtuous relations with the sacred, rather than toeing a line due to fear of dire punishments, whether in this life or that hereafter.

The Muslims took the Christian model and stepped it up several orders of magnitude in error via sheer viciousness, the results being plain to see in places such as the middle-east, which is a study in human disaster.

An interesting aspect of this mental noise is that it is very effectively employed, consciously or otherwise, as a fog into which politico-social chicanery is injected into the minds of men, leaving them less able to understand the truer nature of what is being presented. This is how the scourges of all modern authoritarian thought and action have been so successfully foisted upon the people of the world since the twentieth century, at the very least. When people are separated from basic sense, they are less able to discern nonsense when presented to them, further leaving them unarmed and consequently unable to repel the assaults of the Tyrant upon their innate rights and liberties. When people do not know better, how can they even be inclined to fight the violation of their individual sovereignty?

Retaining the basics is essential to the health and prosperity of the human race. The depressingly absent health and happiness of men is the direct indicator of just how little we as a race of beings have retained of that basic knowledge. That we are so widely separated from the basics bodes deep ill for humanity's future, which is why my suspicion hovers about the thought that nothing short of reset will save the race of men.

Individuals can think their ways out of this sort of trouble, for illumination is the necessary condition for setting then right once more. But such enlightenment means nothing to men as a body gestalt if sufficient numbers fail to come to sense. By that failure are the good dragged into the pit with the rest, and so it appears to me at this time that reset is the only hope remaining to us; an even so deeply and unforgivingly disruptive of daily life that the choice becomes immediately clear to all but perhaps the most stubbornly dull among us: come to sense now, or have your name stricken from the Book of Life.

That, I fear, is the fate that awaits us because I see just this side of zero possibility of a critical mass of humanity so much as wanting to come to sense, much less making the actual effort to do so.

Perhaps none of it matters, but I cannot help but feel deep sorrow for the innocents, the children mainly, who will pay for the sins of the rest.

Ask yourself where you stand on this issue: do you want to know what is right for all men?; how to live properly amid the throng without destroying them and yourself, or being destroyed by the others... or does it just not matter? To that last question, I have no answers for you, but will suggest you turn your thoughts to those whom you love and regard with fondness and care and then consider the question once more.

Be well, and as always please accept my best wishes.