BRIEF THOUGHTS ON CRUCIAL MATTERS (one moment of your reflection, please)
A NEW GENERATION OF WAR NUMINA
To be one with the Universe and to exist in harmony with other creatures fall within human capacity though, humanity still seeks and walks throughout the perverse path of war and destruction.
Surely, in every conflict there is the stronger side, who happens to be the blinder one as well. Should they pursue the total annihilation of their weaker enemy, they imagine they will thereby prevail. But the truth is that one people cannot destroy another without destroying itself as well.
War was a deity in ancient mythology and so the acts of plunder and mass killing constituted forms of worship and devotion to the numina. And, for many centuries more after the advent monotheism, some wars have been deemed a holy and so the very acting of fighting and killing other humans have been considered instances of submission and obedience to the divine will.
In this aspect, Capitalism and the ascension of the bourgeois have rendered a great service to human culture, for they have completely de-sacralise and de-sanctified war in all aspects. Soldiers would no longer believe that they would die or kill to serve the cause of God, that they would be heroes, champions or martyrs in a ‘crusade’ or ‘jihad’. As time passed, the political conscience of the dominated classes grew and those in and out of the militias were aware that their fight was either a matter of collective survival (namely the survival of their nation) or simply the will of their politicians and generals.
The youth in the 1950’s and 1960’s have gradually and persistently worked in favour of the idea that war was something unholy and immoral. Young men and women in France and in the United States went even further on, denouncing the atrocities of the wars in Algeria and in Vietnam as continuations of a resilient colonialist mentality.
Nowadays nobody is naïve anymore. War is a business and it is impossible to ignore this basic truth. Industrial countries engage in invasive huge scale military operations either to conquer and annexe or to intervene in other countries for no primary reason other than the necessity of dynamising their economies. The process is basically twofold:
[1] On one hand the very warfare enterprise is a billionaire business that creates demands and it is up to the private sector to provide, i.e., to sell the materials and the services the armed forces will need.
[2] On the other hand, the country, which will be invaded, conquered or remain under intervention, will probably be deprived of its wealth (including its natural resources, lands, manpower, capitals, pieces of art and other assets) to the benefit of the private corporations behind the invasion forces.
Thus, the vastest majority of the citizens of the countries concerned, i.e., the taxpayers on both sides loose their money, paying for maintenance of their military personnel, the arsenals and the operations to attack and/or defend, and public treasury consequently incurs into deficit, so that some gigantic companies may have profit. The middle and lower classes send their children to die and pay all the war bills, so that the top wealthiest and safest classes increase their fortunes.
In the 21st century the war numina became faulty and imperfect humans who, nevertheless, still require all sorts of bloody sacrifices.
posted by Tony Marmo @ 12:43:00 PM
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