Thursday, November 01, 2007
wakey wakey lemon shakey
I don’t know why, but this is a sentence I say every morning. Maybe it’s because the world is messed up and sour like an over-ripe lemon. How sour and sick depends on which part of the world we’re talking about, but we can pretty much find unsettling things everywhere we look. So, in a sour world we need to wake up from our slumber- hence wakey wakey etc.
I just finished reading a very disturbing book called Conversations with Americans. This book is almost 40 years old and is on a war that ended before I was even born. Why would this book make me so uneasy?
That’s simple, it’s because it’s about how war turns ordinary people into monsters and the horror of war is something that millions of people like you and me have to face every day. It’s a recurring theme that soldiers have gone crazy on the battlefield since the dawn of time but in modern warfare the battlefields are cities where innocent civilians are tortured and killed.
In the past soldiers were trained to dehumanize the “enemy”, it’s easier to commit murder if you think the victim’s not even the same species as you. In boot camps rookies didn’t get dinner unless they screamed “Kill, Kill, Kill” first. The psychology of warfare and war training is beyond my comprehension- I just see it as pure evil and I fear that not much has changed since Mark Lane interviewed US servicemen back in the sixties. We get news regularly about airplanes that supposedly had prisoners on board stopping in Iceland before they went on to a country where torture’s allowed.
I suppose many historians want to write their books on the past in order for people to actually learn from their ancestors’ mistakes. How naïve! Greed and stupid world views prevent us from ever evolving into better animals- we continue to be the greedy ape- sadly.
I grew up fearing the mushroom cloud and The Bomb. Back then, the Soviets were the enemies, now there are new enemies and new hardships.
Bottom line- before jumping on the war train, read about what war does to people that are just like you.
Peace!
I just finished reading a very disturbing book called Conversations with Americans. This book is almost 40 years old and is on a war that ended before I was even born. Why would this book make me so uneasy?
That’s simple, it’s because it’s about how war turns ordinary people into monsters and the horror of war is something that millions of people like you and me have to face every day. It’s a recurring theme that soldiers have gone crazy on the battlefield since the dawn of time but in modern warfare the battlefields are cities where innocent civilians are tortured and killed.
In the past soldiers were trained to dehumanize the “enemy”, it’s easier to commit murder if you think the victim’s not even the same species as you. In boot camps rookies didn’t get dinner unless they screamed “Kill, Kill, Kill” first. The psychology of warfare and war training is beyond my comprehension- I just see it as pure evil and I fear that not much has changed since Mark Lane interviewed US servicemen back in the sixties. We get news regularly about airplanes that supposedly had prisoners on board stopping in Iceland before they went on to a country where torture’s allowed.
I suppose many historians want to write their books on the past in order for people to actually learn from their ancestors’ mistakes. How naïve! Greed and stupid world views prevent us from ever evolving into better animals- we continue to be the greedy ape- sadly.
I grew up fearing the mushroom cloud and The Bomb. Back then, the Soviets were the enemies, now there are new enemies and new hardships.
Bottom line- before jumping on the war train, read about what war does to people that are just like you.
Peace!
# posted by Björkin : 2:26 PM
