“I love the smell of napalm in the morning

[coberst]

“I love the smell of napalm in the morning

America has 1.4 million in the military with 900,000 Reserves. All of these are hired-hands; all are volunteers seeking a job. Of these, 42 % are racial or ethnic minorities. Of these, 6.5% have had “some kind of exposure to college education.

The economy today fights the war in Afghanistan and Iraq at a cost 0.1% of what the economy had to pay to win WWII; this figure is based upon Defense Department budget being 4% of GDP.

Thus says David M. Kennedy “In the Fourth of July debate about the state of American democracy, Kennedy, a historian at Stanford, suggested that war making was becoming too easy for American policy makers. This article appeared in “The Atlantic magazine.

Kennedy didn’t mention the wealth this war effort has brought to these self-same industrial leaders who influence public policy. Also he did not mention that most, if not all, of funds on Iraq and Afghanistan war is borrowed money.

War: A piece of cake—for America!

It is human nature to constantly seek “fuel for one’s own aggrandizement and immunity. Otto Rank says “The death fear of the ego is lessoned by the killing of the other; one buys one’s self free from the penalty of dying, of being killed. Is there any surprise then to discover that human kind is constantly engaged in war?

The ego can consign others to death without a ‘second thought’, when such will provide a sense of personal security. This is why war comes so naturally for sapiens. Considering the fact that we now have the WMDs to destroy all citizens in one single cataclysm, is there any doubt regarding the necessity that humans begin quickly a process of self-learning in order to comprehend our nature so as to possibly prevent this logical fate?

The price of our natural animal narcissism is that we will, when pressured, willingly sacrifice another in our place; with one very remarkable exception; the exception to this rule is, of course, the hero. Heroism is an amazing reversal of the rule of routine values. Heroism is another thing that makes war so wonderful and uplifting. War has become for DickandJane a ritual for the emergence of heroes. We launch our self into uncritical hero worship as a catharsis of own fears.

“The logic of Scapegoating, then, is based on animal narcissism and hidden fear. If luck, as Aristotle said, is when the arrow hits the fellow next to you, then Scapegoating is pushing the fellow into its path—with special alacrity if he is a stranger to you.

The logic contained in killing others in order to protect our own life makes clear anything that may puzzle us regarding the frequency of war in human history. When I kill an enemy and thereby affirm the power of my life, then, certainly the staging of massive life-and-death struggles affirms our whole society. The outsider ponders known incidents when the mob delighted in watching the prolonged death of someone; we need not ponder if we comprehend sapiens’ drive to survive. “They are weak and die; we are strong and live. “My God is stronger than your God.

The Nazis provide an example of this phenomenon. The dedicated themselves to the ‘final solution’, to large scale sacrifices of human life after 1941 when it was becoming evident that they were losing. The Jews were singled out as the scapegoat for the economic and political woes of Germany in the mid twentieth century.

Considering our propensity for war do you think that we will ever control this urge to settle differences by killing our opponent?

Many of the quotes are from “Escape from Evil—Ernest Becker