| Thursday, July 28, 2005 |
11:38 - BREAKING: Purpose of military is to kill people
http://ravishinglight.blogspot.com/2005/07/you-got-your-tricks-good-for-you-but.html
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Please tell me Western society is not this far gone—where politicians can profess horror at the very thought that the job of a nation's military might include "killing people".
The "End of History", as I understand it, was about the idea that all those icky, ugly "wars" we used to fight back in the benighted ages (heretofore defined as "before 1992") were something we would never again have to revisit as a species—interstate warfare was this thing that some shambling precursor race did, but not us. We've become beings of pure energy now, you see. We've shed our meat bodies and the brutish baggage they bore. No more wars ever. No more killing. Militaries might exist, but only for "peacekeeping", which—you see—doesn't involve killing, because they're, y'know, keeping peace. Not because they have to eliminate threats to peace or anything; no, it's more like how the UN can scowl and write letters and draft resolutions and reality will rearrange itself accordingly. Peacekeepers, in the same vein, can merely strut around in helmets and camouflage, and everyone around them will magically become peaceful. That's just the way it's gone down in Bosnia and Rwanda and such places, you know.
The tests being applied to the military these days—whether it's about the treatment of illegal enemy combatants in Guantánamo, or the occupation of unsecure cities, or the treatment of mosques being used as arms caches, or the role of coalition forces in Afghanistan, seems increasingly to be every bit as stringent as the ones the same people are trying to apply to domestic civilians. The military must be civil, non-aggressive, non-intrusive, culturally sensitive, infinitely patient, willing to absorb infinite insult without retaliation, and—of course—unarmed. Because weapons kill people... and we wouldn't want anyone thinking our military kills people.
Yeah, there is a gulf between us and our forebears, so wide it often does seem like we're a different species. I don't, however, think this is an upward movement on the evolutionary ladder.
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Brian Tiemann
