Christian Soldier at 60 on Veterans Day
Soldier at 18, baptized when I was 56 years old, and born the day after Veterans Day in 1951, I am on this November 11, 2011, mere hours away from being officially 60 years old. I was a soldier. I am a Christian. I am 60.
This day began as a celebration of peace (Armistice Day); and now it is a celebration of military nationalism.
This 60th birthday coinciding with Veterans Day wouldn’t normally occur to me as somehow significant. But it so happens that my country, to whom all honors are being given on Veterans Day, is sending soldiers — professional and mercenary — all over the world, and they are killing people. This is not news, but a lot of people naively believed that this war business was somehow the exclusive purview of the Republican Party, and that Barack Obama was a new messiah that was going to put things right again… whatever that meant. What we are seeing as clearly as possible yet again is that the Comander-in-Chief of the most powerful military force in history will always use that force, and that on this neither party stands out. Democrats are every bit as enthusiastic about war as Republicans; they just argue about which wars are the most important.
I’m 60 now, and I have come to believe that we cannot invest hope in politicians. Period. This is up to us, up to a lot of different us’s.
Some people say that 60 makes you an “elder” (or an old fart). I don’t know how I feel about that, but six decades, looking back on it, is a lot of time for a lot to happen, and sometimes learn from what happened. And Veterans Day makes me very sad, though not in the sentimentalized way people feign sadness for an idealized and mainly nameless dead-soldiery every year during this annual ritual of “remembrance.” It makes me sad that the shooting and bombing and beating and imprisoning that characterize war are just as horrific in Afghanistan or Pakistan or Iraq or Libya or Somalia or Yemen or Iran (all these places are now being actively targeted by the United States Armed Forces)… as they were when I got my first dose of it in Vietnam in 1970. Later I went to other places, where there was more war. Veterans Day makes me sad because it is a day designed to paper over that same horror that my country continues to use so people can make a lot of money. It makes me sad because my country cannot see itself honestly.
I’d like to do some remembering — for anyone who is interested — from the standpoint of a late Baby Boomer, North American white man, raised in public schools and suburban homes during the Cold War. There were two fetishes, consciousness-altering fetishes, that defined us as boys (boys like us being the norm, of course). One fetish was the gun. The other was the television.
The Gun
What can you say about guns, eh? Anyone who has handled a gun knows that the sight of it and the cool touch and the weight of it alters your consciousness with its terrible potential. No matter what juridical and cultural structures do or do not inhibit the use of firearms, the possession of a firearm confers power whether it is welcome or not. People who have a strong aversion to firearms are just as aware of that power as those who are obsessed with and attracted to firearms. Both groups know from firsthand experience that a gun is not representative of power, it is power. It is an instrument with which you can take life, in an instant, with the quarter-inch movement of a single finger.
Guns have come to mean something very special and sought after by boys: recognition, which they easily confuse with power. And not just because most of us in my demographic categories are descended from armed settlers, though that has a good deal to do with this boy-gun thing. I grew up with guns in the house. My father born in 1906, was a very competent hunter; and my mother even had her own bird gun — a 16-guage Browning automatic shotgun.
Guns are male icons, however, not merely tools; and we see guns as icons every day on TV.
The Television
Our first television was a circular looking black and white, where I never missed an episode of Gunsmoke, the Lone Ranger, Bonanza, or Wagon Train. Guns became instruments of justice and power in my mind, as I soaked up these powerful moving images of a mythical American frontier masculinity. The one that really got me, though, was a character who was a soldier, a rebel, and a trickster – Swamp Fox, a Disney production where Leslie Nielson played the Revolutionary War guerrilla leader, Francis Marion. That was the first impetus that led to my eventual entry into the non-televised world of Special Operations in the army; and it was seeded in my brain a decade before I even graduated from High School.
Television has been one of the most significant formative forces on the psyches of most Americans born in the last 60 years; and as society has evolved, television has co-evolved. Representations of gun-masculinity have become more sophisticated, more technologically sexed-up, more graphically violent, bigger, and more callous. Representations of men have become more smart-mouthed and cocky. Guns have become more eroticized, as has the kind of destructive power that gun-masculinity represents.
The average kid now watches television around 28 hours a week, though now that is also mixed up with video games where the boys can simulate killing hundreds of times a day in ever more “realistic” settings. Girls, unfortunately, also have plenty of girl-oriented programming that trains them into the superficial consumer-darwinism of patriarchally-defined femininity; but I am talking to and about boys now. Even old boys like me.
War
I started studying war when I was 18 years old; but when I left the military in 1996, I began to study war differently. After the attacks of September 2001 destroyed the World Trade Center, I was drafted into the service of an anti-war movement. This compelled me to talk about militarism — about ideologies that glorify, foster, support, and prolong wars. The more I talked about militarism, the more I was forced to answer questions about militarism; and so the more I was forced to think about militarism. Gender was in my face at every turn, so by 2005, I was writing a book that attempted to show how gender is related to war.
Every time I looked deeply into the subjects of war and militarism, I found all sorts of gendered language, and all sorts of gendered activity, and all sorts of gender segregation; yet most critics of war insisted that war was an outgrowth of perversions in the public economy (which it certainly is) and that the gendered aspects of war were secondary considerations that were being taken care of elsewhere — perhaps in the gender study ghettos of the universities, or in white middle-class women’s fight against corporate “glass ceilings.”
But what I found – once I started looking for it – was that war has always been formative of masculinity, and masculinity has always been reproductive of war. I also found that resistance to a criticism of something I call “conquest-masculinity” came from every direction, left and right and center; and that my thesis on the relationship between war and masculinity was most unwelcome. People’s very identities were involved, all the way down to some subconscious level where disruption of the gender order presages a fearsome cosmic chaos.
Still, the evidence piled up. Violence is eroticized. Violence is a male erotic ideal.
This is what I am thinking about this Veterans Day.
The Dangerous Erection
During the opening phases of the invasion of Iraq, we saw the introduction of a condom called “Shock and Awe.” Everyone gets the joke, but few will attest to how this conflates male sexual “prerogative” with domination and violence.
Television is being displaced in the overdeveloped world by its younger cousin, the personal computer. And what many, many, many boys and men do on those computers is twofold: they play war games and they masturbate while they watch pornography.
We are all familiar with the various references to the phallus as a weapon,with aggression-as-sex and sex-as-aggression. Here are samplings from the front pages of the first web sites that came up when I Googled “porn.” “Asian bitch. Black ass orgy. Black cocks ruin white wife. Watch her punishment. (Name) gets pounded and face-fucked. Little slit pussy fucked hard. From ass to mouth. Horny torturer at work. Showing whose boss. Gangbang brunette slut.”
A liberal acquaintance of mine once said he wanted to “hate-fuck Sarah Palin.”
Internet pornography is actually a venue where male ideas and attitudes about sex and power are distilled and concentrated. The ideas of domination, destruction, control, and humiliation reoccur again and again. The idea of the weaponized phallus is everywhere. The re-inscription of racial stereotypes is everywhere in porn; and I will suggest that racial stereotypes are also an essential adjunct to war.
It must be a terrifying world for women where so many men take these attitudes for granted and even celebrate conquest-masculinity, where a considerable number of men are obviously turned on by images of a male phallus that is plunged first into a woman’s anus then into her mouth. Men have been trained somehow in this culture to be aroused by the humiliation of women. Women are to be slammed, hit, banged, pounded, shown who is boss; and these ideas are sexually arousing to many men.
Women, Nature, Colonies
So how does this relate to war, you may be asking. And I’ll tell you. Conquest-masculinity defines a man as someone who conquers, dominates, and humiliates. When a man is trying to dominate another man verbally, he calls that other man a pussy, a bitch, a faggot (a male who acts like a female). The ultimate insult is to call a man a woman; because a woman is someone who exists to be conquered and dominated.
Real men control their women. Real men exercise control. Real men control their environment. Real men control lesser men. And here is the stick with that carrot. If you aren’t a real man, men, then you are fair game to be a lesser-man, now subject yourself to domination and humiliation. That’s the man-trap. I know. I was in it for a very long time. That is why I am writing this for Veterans Day.
The same idea of conquest and control that characterize this form of masculinity with regard to women, characterize a need for control over nature and colonies. I borrowed this association from a writer named Maria Mies, because I believe she is onto something. If you look at the propaganda for wars of conquest, and you look at the propaganda for the destruction of nature in the name of progress, and you look at the propaganda against women represented in some of those porn titles; these all relate themselves back to an idea of what it means to be a real man.
Here is a short video a friend and I made as a kind of crash course on this association.
The Dishonest Holiday
Veterans Day is a collective worship of soldiers; and the religion is American nationalism. It is a dishonest holiday (a term from the phrase Holy Day). Veterans Day tries to reduce war to platitudes – freedom and democracy and so forth. Veterans Day is a day of selective remembrance, where soldiers are honored for their sacrifices for the nation-state.
On the one hand, we will hear that the soldiers are to be honored because they sacrificed for these ideals, that they ensure our “freedom.” This presumes that the wars they participate in – in whatever roles – were actually conducted to protect freedom; yet few people can explain how the freedom of people in the United States was under threat in most of these wars.
When this objection is voiced, the premises are shifted. We are honoring their willingness to sacrifice, even though leaders may occasionally send them on unholy missions. Without them and their willingness to follow orders to kill and die, we would be under threat from various and changing dark forces from the outside. So the sacrifice is not for freedom now, it is for our “security.” Their virtue is in being there, willing to follow orders. Like good Germans. And so the obedient soldier is valorized, not the citizen-soldier fighting to protect “home and family and freedom.”
Women are now included in these shifting rationalizations, in a sense, because there are more women in the military now. But I contend that the idealized soldier is still a man.
This obedient man-soldier is not cherished then for his good motives; the reasons for killing and dying are immaterial. And so this idealized man is now valued simply for his necessity. He is to be honored because he makes himself available to fight, whether he knows why he is fighting or not, and whether he agrees with the reasons or not. And the overarching reason — the deity to which we can make some final reference to justify this soldier — is the nation-state.
Without belief in the civil religion – American nationalism – this soldier is merely a hired killer.
So let’s get this straight. Veterans Day is not a celebration of actual veterans — who are too diverse to characterize; Veterans Day is a High Holy Day of our nationalist religion. It is a proliferation of flags, a mass genuflection before the altar of the late modern Rome.
And our ideas about masculinity make us men particularly susceptible to this idolatry.
The soldier is the epitome of male — the guy who will visit death and destruction on the enemy, the guy who will take the risks, the guy who will put his hands in the gore (so we don’t have to). The solider will die “for his country,” but just as importantly, he will kill for his country. He will conquer the enemy, those dark, vaguely threatening outsiders whose names we need never know.
Veterans Day is a dishonest holiday, because in public we talk about sacrifice and dying for one’s country, but we go behind closed doors with the boys to celebrate the juicier stuff: the war stories with the body counts, the counting of kills, the trophies, the names we used to dehumanize them – Japs, krauts, gooks, slopes, hajjis. And this more visceral remembrance, this remembrance of eroticized violence, this celebration of conquest-masculinity, are the wet, dark, moving entrails of nationalism.
The less sophisticated among us will express it more directly on a bumper sticker: “God, Guns, and Guts Made America Free.” God is a subset of nation, a weaponized Jesus that has the same auxiliary religious status as guns and guts. But let’s be honest. The attraction of this message is not its content, but its domination machismo. That is the grail for the individual male psyche that can be so readily mapped onto the nationalist project.
It will be traumatic when the ideology finally collapses. For some, it already is.
The Toddler Age
The ideology that is dissolving into incoherence now, and the same ideology that brought us into the present age, is one that told us more and bigger is always better, that selfishness is some kind of civic virtue (which we ought to let run free in order to ensure the good order of society), and time is a commodity to be accumulated like other commodities – meaning we should go faster and faster, meaning the ideal is getting stuff done Now.
Now Marx described society as an overall form that develops not unlike a person, with developmental stages along the way: infancy, early childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, and maturity. I don’t agree with his formulation of these stages, or even with the presumption that there are some inevitable and predictable stages that society goes through that could be called “progress,” an idea that Marx shared with a lot of capitalist apologists. But I do believe that there is a childhood development metaphor that describes the actual, contingent and current form of social development, which should remind us of some of the obligations of actual maturity for actual human beings.
This ideology that is crumbling right now, even as it still holds sway over many imaginations, is what I call the ideology of the Toddler Age: we live in period where virtue has been replaced by value, and what we value are the same as toddlers, that is, we say “Mine,” “More,” and “Now.” This is the credo of consumer society, which also happens to be the society that fetishizes guns and television, and which also happens to revolve completely around the business of war. Like everything else in consumer society, war can be commodified, too.
Now I am going to reminisce again about my own childhood. When I was two, 58 years ago, my dad had been hunting birds in the desert Southwest (I was actually born in San Diego, a true native Californian) . My dad took a break and leaned his shotgun against the outside of a little Airstream camper trailer (hitched to a Nash Rambler). My mother was in the trailer, changing my baby sister’s diaper. I waddled over to the shotgun leaning on the outside of the Airstream, fiddled with the pieces around the trigger housing — like most curious 2-year-olds do — and I managed to blow a hole in the silvery skin of that Airstream, missing my mother’s head inside by so narrow a margin that she felt the shot go through her hair. She screamed. My baby sister screamed. I screamed and cried, backing away from the gun. My dad ran over, grabbed the gun to keep me away from it, and checked on my mom and sister. As I said earlier, I’ve been around guns all my life.
Accidents happen, and there are twenty ways in retrospect to keep what happened from happening; but the truth is, shit happens. And we learn from it. My dad learned a lesson that day,and it’s a lesson our whole society needs to learn. Toddler Age society, I mean. The Gun-Society. War Society. Here is the lesson for the Mine-More-Now society of the Toddler Age: Two-year-olds should not be allowed to handle guns.
I won’t participate in any war, and I will oppose the participation of others. But that doesn’t mean that what I am saying now is a principle of pacifism. What I am saying is that — regardless of how anyone feels about war — a society that has a lot of guns and thinks like a two-year-old is a very dangerous thing.
Media Infantilization
Before the advent of television and its electronic audio-visual grandchildren, people had a mix in their lives of the real and the simulated. You cook a meal; that is real. You watch someone cook a meal on television: you are watching simulacra — representations that are not the real thing.
Back in the day, say prior to World War II, people could occasionally go to a movie. That was a big deal, that kind of entertainment. As a percentage of your total time, this kind of simulacra was very small compared to how much time you spent paying attention to something real, something you were actually doing instead of passively observing.
Now, everyone seems hooked up to an electrical entertainment grid every waking moment. They carry their teeny televisions around in their hands. TVs are mounted in automobiles. We are attached to these electronic glow-boxes everywhere, as I am when I write this.
Going back to my observations about toddlers, one of the characteristics of a toddler is the inability to separate representation from reality. For actual toddlers, this is an essential developmental stage; but again, thinking like a toddler is not compatible with handling guns and such. I contend that the increased exposure to simulacra has retarded our capacity to separate representation from reality. So again, the metaphor is apt. The ideology of consumer society is irresponsible and dangerous because it is childlike in a period when human beings carry guns, some of them uber-guns (intercontinental ballistic missiles, for example), that could lead to big accidents. Really big ones.
Media has infantilized us. It has turned grown-ups into children mentally. Entertainment media have cocooned us in a techno-fantasy that tells us, Peter Pan like, that we never need to grow up. Even with all our guns. In fact, most of our boy techno-fantasies involve guns and the most dangerous techno-fantasy of them all – control.
When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. (1 Corinthians 13:11)
Would that it were so.
Revenge
If you want to trigger a celebration of conquest-masculinity, the best trigger is revenge. If you want to see guns as instruments of redemptive violence, and if you want to see audiovisual media celebrating revenge with plenty of guns, check out all the films that can be categorized quite simply as “male revenge fantasies.”
Commando, Gladiator, Man on Fire, Ben Hur, Straw Dogs, Death Wish, Rolling Thunder, Collateral Damage, Braveheart, you name it. The male revenge fantasy is always a hit. Revenge is the license to return evil for evil and call it good. The story line is, Man is affronted by other Man, who has done something terrible to a loved one. Protagonist Man then wreaks deliciously cruel punishment on the Offender Man, and that violence leads to happiness. Redemptive violence, this is called. But is it sexual?
You bet your ass it is. Think, for just one moment, about how often and easily people you have known have referred — with great schadenfreude — to a criminal getting what he deserves by being raped in prison. People make jokes about it, because everyone in this culture is already in on the joke. Rape is a crime when it is perpetrated on Us; but it is not a crime when it is perpetrated on Them. It is payback. Why? Because it humiliates, and that humiliation is eroticized. Rapists ejaculate into and on their victims. I’m no medical doctor, but it is my understanding that before men can come, they have to be adequately aroused.
That criminal has it coming. No pun intended. We all get it. We all understand that sex-is-aggression and aggression-is-sex. No cop-outs with that stuff about rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power. Rape is about power all right. Rape is also about sex. There is no real sex in the real world that is not inflected by power. We talk about a victory of one person over another as the winner sodomizing the loser. When we are cheated or betrayed, we say we have been “fucked.” The word itself is used more often to express aggression than sex, and the sex it often expresses has nothing whatsoever to do with that romantic, friends-first, mutuality thing we associate with contented couples of all kinds.
Conservatives are in denial about men needing to lose some power. Liberals are in denial that sex is about power at all.
I’m going to weigh in on this question, and weigh in as a Christian, but not in the way most might expect. I’m not going to worry in the least about how and when people rub what parts together. There’s not much about sexual couplings in the Gospels, taken as a whole. There is a lot about power, though. Everything in it is about a power struggle that involved this man (who we call the Christ), along with a lot of social rabble, challenging the power of both an empire and its native surrogate leaders. Again, taken as a whole, the Gospels are tracts against the exercise of force and fraud against others. They are consistent in the message that dying rich puts your soul at risk; and Jesus himself — who was sexually abstinent as far as we can tell (a very unmanly thing) — set out to undermine the very material foundation of domination, and the dominator masculinity that makes it possible.
News flash to Christians: Jesus forbade retaliation.
If someone slaps you on the right cheek, offer the other cheek also. (Matthew 5:39)
Christians
Many of the most childish and reactionary people in the United States will insist that the United States is a Christian nation. I beg to differ. Most of the Christians I have encountered know little about their own scriptures, and much of what they are familiar with in the Gospel stories of the founder of our church they have torn out of context to get a different meaning. They have learned to ignore the repeated warnings that being rich is an unfavorable state before God. They have learned to ignore what Dorothy Day pointed out: “The Gospel takes away our right, forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.” They have learned to ignore that given the choice between violence and non-violence, Jesus chose the latter even as it resulted in his torture and execution. They have forgotten that Jesus said, “Blessed are the meek.”
Masculinity is not meek.
Most of all, they have forgotten what Christians proclaim as a political reality — that the risen Christ is sovereign. Readers who are taken aback by that will understand now how serious I am when I say that the United States is not in fact a Christian nation. Readers who are taken aback by that may even agree with those who say we ought to be Americans first, and Christians second. As Stanley Hauerwas has pointed out: Even the churches in the United States are Americans first, and Christians second. Being Christian means something different to me. It means that I obey God before I obey the state; and if there is a conflict between obedience to God and obedience to the state, I will disobey the state. My confession of faith is political.
Christ is sovereign. War was abolished on the cross. All the rest is disobedience. Sovereign over each of us who make this proclamation. Sovereign over the church — the community of believers. Sovereign over nations, all nations, no exceptions. Sovereign over and above the United States of America.
So if Jesus says not to kill, and the United States says to kill, we are obliged by this proclamation of Christ’s sovereignty to disobey the United States, because this nation is in a state of disobedience to God. That is one Christian’s response to Veterans Day this year.
Are you listening, Christian brother Barack Obama?
- He hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart.
- He hath put down the mighty from their seat,
- and hath exalted the humble.
- He hath filled the hungry with good things;
- and the rich he hath sent empty away. (Luke 1:51-53)
Now this may not sit well with conservative believers and liberal non-believers, this idea that we might refuse the civil religion –patriotism — as an idol, that we might consider ourselves Christian before we are American, that we might choose to disobey laws written by both liberals and conservatives; but this is my conviction as a Christian. Romans 13 told us not to disobey the law for the hell of it; but Romans 12 (always left out when 13 is used to justify blind obedience to the state) calls Caesar to repentance, too. We are called to obey civil authority as long as civil authority is not being disobedient to God.
The Gospels are not equivocal. They say love your neighbor, even when the neighbor is an outsider (the Samaritan); and they say love your enemy. War is not an acceptable practice for a Christian; and in every instance when Christian churches have supported, participated in, or acquiesced to war, those institutions were themselves in a state of disobedience to God. Institutions are human, and like humans, they are broken and subject to corruption and rationalization.
I want to make an argument on Veterans Day this year, at 60 years old, as a Christian, about one major source of all this brokenness. Conquest-masculinity.
Anti-Masculinity Jesus
Within the ambit of Christian theology, there is a peculiar term: “the scandal of particularity.” If Jesus is the incarnation of God, then why does God choose a teenaged peasant woman in a backwater of a colony of the Roman Empire to raise this incarnation as a Palestinian Jewish boy in a town of around 200 people?
There is no final answer to that. It is something we accept and try to understand a little at a time. A good deal of how we understand it is that Jesus-the-person was an observant Jew, and his life and mission are seen as a fulfillment of Jewish prophetic hopes – a messiah.
In 1st Century Roman-occupied Palestine, there was already a long history, among Romans, Greeks, Babylonians, Jews, and all the other people in the region, of warfare. I have said that war shapes masculinity, because was has traditionally been an exclusively male practice.
What are the characteristics of effective war-fighters and war-mongers? A good warrior must – above all else – be able to harden his heart against the enemy in order to kill the enemy without hesitation. A good war-monger must be able to speak about then enemy in ways that harden the hearts of many to accept the killing.
Warrior masculinity demands men who are capable of cruelty, even when that capacity for cruelty extends from the battlefield to the polis to the home. War forges a conquest masculinity that Jesus, in his words and by his very example, rejects all the way to its root.
My own argument within the Christian community is about masculinity, at least by inference. What John Howard Yoder called the Constantinian temptation was really a temptation to power, and specifically it was a temptation of men to participate in power that was the exclusive province of men.
Nothing in this early Jewish cult could have been more scandalous than its deep gender subversion — man who would die before he would kill an enemy; and no temptation would have been more powerful that the temptation to re-seize male prerogative.
Jesus actions rebuked male power in the empire (Rome), male power in the satraps (the chief priests and Herod), male power in the cultural monopolies (scribes and Pharisees), and male power among the warlike resisters (the zealots). We read that he rebuked powers, but we ought to remember that in every single case, this was exclusively male power. It was naturalized male power, and so it became invisible in the sense that people didn’t feel the need to differentiate it as “male” power.
As far as we know, Jesus never demanded equal rights for women, but then we know that “rights” are an artifact of modernity, that “rights” are an invention of a later time, and we also need to know that discipleship for the Christian is not about rights at all, but that it is a discipl(ine) of the suffering servant. Our community is called to be a community of service to others, of selflessness, and of reconciliation… or that’s what the Gospels teach at any rate. This applies to men and women in the faith, which I suspect is exactly what pulled church “fathers” toward the Constantinian temptation, the misrepresentation of “the lordship of Christ by identifying God’s cause in some way with the powers of the political establishment.” Ivan Illich calls it the “criminalization of sin,” the perverse attempt to legislate the radical freedom Jesus taught that allowed love to transcend every previous social boundary.
There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28)
Just as many men today are engaged in a backlash against the political assertions of women, especially against the ways women’s declarations and demands have undermined their sense of themselves as men, this Jewish cult that not only had men and women working as co-apostles and eating together (taking communion) with the opposite sex who were not family (an immensely scandalous activity). More importantly perhaps, the behavioral expectations of the men who followed Christ were extremely woman-like according to the mores of the day. The men were expected to be humble, deferent, self-abnegating, and quick to serve. These were the qualities that were most prized… in women. We might imagine how much of a role-conflict this discipline created for its male adherents. And, of course, there was the most difficult aspect of discipleship of all, especially for men, and that was not fighting back when they were abused.
Imagine someone today telling their sons, no matter what anyone does to you, you are not to fight back.
Yet this was the very example of Christ. From the point of view of the gender order, how much more scandalous could you get. Not only were you not to fight back against your social superiors, you were not to fight back against anyone.
It is not so surprising then to learn that many of the converts in Rome were women at first, since this discipline was one to which they were already more well-socialized than their male counterparts.
Jesus himself ate with prostitutes, engaged women as equals in debate, and touched menstruating women in violation of the prevailing purity codes. He risked his own life to stop the execution of a woman for adultery, calling her male executioners to account for their deep hypocrisy. Women attended his execution and witnessed the resurrection.
In the eyes of many Roman authorities, early Christians came to be considered a “mischievous superstition,” in part because they preached the spiritual equality of men and women, a notion that was scandalous to Romans. Paul typically greeted the various churches in his epistles with the phrase, “Brothers and Sisters.”
Rumors about the new cult exaggerated the open commensality of the shared meal and easy contact between men and women into a popular rumor that the Christians were engaged in secret orgies. There was general alarm about the number of Roman women who joined the sect.
Little by little, masculinity was taken back into Christianity until men again subjugated women within the faith and men recovered their archetypical practice – war. Even later, during the Reformation at the height of its iconoclasm, Protestants attacked the Roman Catholic Church for its continued veneration of Mary, Jesus’ mother, often on explicitly masculine grounds. Even today, at one of the local Catholic churches, there stands a great, bold and colorful statue of Mary with her eyes full of determination and her foot pressed down firmly on a thick, writhing viper. I can see how this image might disconcert a man who believed that physical courage is a gendered virtue.
Perhaps the most gender subversive aspect of the Gospels is what they leave us as a hierarchy of virtues. The valorization of courage in combat – venerated by the Romans, but also by the Hebrews with regard to King David and Maccabeus – was generally considered the epitome of virtue, the most arduous of virtues, and it was closed — by default — to women.
In the Gospels, virtue is embodied in suffering service, in courageous and confrontational nonviolence, and epitomized in martyrdom. All these are as accessible to women as they are to men.
In this, the Gospels are a gender revolution, even if not self-consciously so. I believe that this revolution transcends the 1st through 3rd Centuries and that this – if the church is faithful – is still true today. I believe this, because I believe that the most oppressive constructions of masculinity that correspond to the worst offenses of men against women (and against other men in the quest for conquest) have their deepest origins in war.
Irish former priest John Dominic Crossan said, “The church’s mission is to take the world back from the normalcy of civilization.”
Let me say something provocative but true about civilization. Civilization has always been, always will be, and is now fundamentally predicated upon… war. We tend to associate civilization – city-fication – with forms of high culture and manners, but the material reality of all civilizations is and has been the exploitation of weak people and their lands in the service of a powerful people. True in Egypt. True in Babylon. True in Rome. True in the British Empire. True for America, now.
When Jesus began his mission, he first left civilization. He turned around (what “repent” actually means), and headed to the wilderness.
I believe it took a man to tell men, show men, a different way to be men; and men were the most — are the most — broken of all people, because we are ripped away from our capacity to love by the obligations of masculinity.
Call to Repentance
On this Veterans Day, 2011, this deeply dishonest holiday, this day of turning the flag into an idol and the nation-state into a religion, as I am turning 60, and as a Christian, I need to confess and repent. And I am making a call to repentance, not just to soldiers and former soldiers, but to many of my fellow men.
Do not thank me for my service. You do not know what I did when I “served.”
I beat people. I burned their houses. I terrified children and old people. I humiliated people. I used racial epithets to dehumanize those I dominated. I took human life. And that was just as a soldier. As a man, I have dominated, insulted, humiliated, and exploited women. As a man, I have mocked the suffering of others. I have policed masculinity in other men, including engaging in homophobia — perhaps the most powerful form of hatred as gender-policing.
This came at a cost, not to be measured against the costs of what I did to others, but at a cost.
In the accustomed comforts of consumer society, said Walter Brueggemann in The Prophetic Imagination, we have been numbed to the pain of others by a secular ideology that teaches us to harden our hearts.
Power depends on uncaring hearts to remain powerful. “Compassion,” says Brueggemann, “constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural…”
He was moved with compassion. (Matthew 9:36)
Hardening one’s heart is painful. It takes an effort of will at first. Learning it requires numbness. Mab Segrest, in her book, Born to Belonging, calls this numbness “the anesthesia of power.”
When you see those besotted barfly veterans, bitter without knowing why, baleful against humanity in general, know that they are using their anesthetic. There is pain under all that bitterness, the pain of loss, the loss of the capacity for love. The loss of love is the steep price of penultimate masculinity.
It was only grace that brought love back into my life.
Grace and forgiveness, two things you need every day.
On Veterans Day, 2011, this dishonest holiday when I am about to complete 60 years as a human, I have good news for men, for soldiers, for veterans. We do not have to pay that price. We can stop any time. We can turn around. We can repent. We can learn to love again. All we have to give up is power.
Some of that power is invisible, and we have to work on that, too. Finding all the ways we exercise power over others, and surrendering that power.
It will take discipline and practice, because giving up the trappings of conquest-masculinity will feel unnatural to us. We won’t get it right, right away. It will take humility and a daily re-dedication of willingness. It will mean we have to drop our defenses and accept vulnerability.
Something I can say today about my own freedom, since that word gets a lot of Veterans Day play: I know now that I never have to raise my voice or hand in anger again, no matter what. If there is any redemption for men, it is in becoming peacemakers.
For me, this includes active opposition to war in all its forms; but we also need to make this a reality in our personal lives. I want to suggest a simple starter program of peacemaking that you can use with everyone you meet. Elders are supposed to confer simple wisdom if they have it, and I think this qualifies.
Don’t dominate. Don’t retaliate. Don’t humiliate.
With those three simple don’t's, you can make your little corner of the world a better place for yourself and everyone around you. It isn’t everything we need to do, but it is a start on undoing what we never should have done.
To men who are Christians: I didn’t make up these rules.
Blessed are the peacemakers; for they shall be called the children of God. (Matthew 5:9)
C.C.:
While I sit in an abandoned building during a field exercise for the Army (we have internet access here), I too reflect on Veteran’s Day.
What I’m mostly reflecting and lamenting is the loss of innocence and what is stereotypically defined as “feminine actions” that was “disciplined” out of me as a young child by my masculine step-father.
I remember being told that children should be seen and not heard, as I tried to sing and voice my complaints over something trivial like a paper cut or having to make my bed. I remember being told repeatedly that boys don’t cry. I remember being told repeatedly that women are not smart, all the while my heroic mother tried to raise me to be a loving child.
To borrow a phrase, I mourn the lose of that child. And now, all that’s left is me wearing this monkey-suit that others call a uniform.
February 14th (my ETS date) can’t come fast enough.
11 November 2011, 2:59 amStan:
Come home, come home.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iMusPYq83g
11 November 2011, 7:08 amC.C.:
Much appreciated, Stan.
BTW, beautiful piece. However, I must add another “fetish” that forms boys’ childhoods: sport/competition.
Now, one can say that sport/competition is a derivative form of war. All true. However, I do think that this deserves a category and examination on it’s own virtue for the following reasons:
1) It is one of the earliest experiences of domination experienced by most, boys and girls.
2) It is sometimes the only form of domination experienced by us, even those of us who know nothing of the military. I have pacifist friends who still love sport.
3) We form our virtues around it. We teach our children to have “sportsmanship” (I don’t even have time to get into the gendered implications of that word), by being “good losers”. But what exactly is involved in being a “good loser” and having “sportsmanship”? It means that we “take it like a man” and be glad for our victors. It means that we let the sting of having lost a game seeth into our minds into a drive to never be conquered again (and this seething-to-motivation process is done “stoicly”, because no one thinks we’re masculine unless you internalize that drive).
4) Anyone not good or excited about sport is “gay” or a “faggot”. I’ve often heard that non-competitive pursuits like fine arts refered to as “fag arts”.
This is just a lose connection that I just noticed. Again, when lightning strikes, no time to proofread and verify, right? (Terrible, I know) But I hope that others weigh in.
BTW, my wife and I love board games. And though these games can get competitive at times, I still enjoy the quality time. However, has anyone ever heard of cooperative board games? There’s one called “Pandemic”. Each player has a specific role that can only do specific things (e.g. medic, doctor, researcher), and all the players work together to spot an epidemic from spreading against a turn-based time limit. Fun for the whole community.
11 November 2011, 8:55 amDon:
Stan,
You always give me excellent food for thought (and I am not always up to the task – more than I can digest in one sitting). As a broken part left over from the big machine (a well-progammed part), I often struggle with my participation in all of this. As you know, I wrestle daily with Post Trauma Stress – often the symptoms seem to crush me in a psychic vise – but I seek help and therapy and do obtain a measure of relief. A portion of the healing process for me has been acknowledging the nature of my service and connecting with other veterans in support and recovery groups. We support each other – help each other – cry with each other. It is not the real world – it is not filled with universal truths – it is certainly not deeply philosophical – but there is healing.
On this day, Veterans Day, a day filled with nationalistic symbolism and jingoism and chauvanistic macho bullshit in support of abhorant past and present expeditionary slaughter, I take a moment to tell you, Stan, that I recognize the many personal physical, psychological, spiritual and moral sacrifices you made over the course of many years while wearing the uniform of this country, and that in spite of the abusive manner in which that service was utilized, those sacrifices are noteworthy and they have meaning, and that it is that very service which lends credibility to your voice….it is certainly what inspired me to seek you out and now I call you friend and Brother.
So Happy Veterans Day Stan…I’ve never been especially correct in any forum. Fuck it.
I love you brother…and Karen says Hi.
Peace,
Don
11 November 2011, 11:58 amGuy Montag:
“Veterans Day is a collective worship of soldiers; and the religion is American nationalism. It is a dishonest holiday …Veterans Day tries to reduce war to platitudes – freedom and democracy … Veterans Day is a day of selective remembrance, where soldiers are honored for their sacrifices for the nation-state. … Veterans Day is not a celebration of actual veterans — who are too diverse to characterize; Veterans Day is a High Holy Day of our nationalist religion. It is a proliferation of flags, a mass genuflection before the altar of the late modern Rome.”
. . .
Our country has turned Pat Tillman into a lifeless patriotic icon, instead of celebrating his iconoclastic nature (e.g. the man who told a fellow Ranger in Iraq that “This war is so —-ing illegal!). Pat Tillman’s true legacy is not about “glory”. It’s about secrets, lies and death, too. Here’s an excerpt from Mick Brown’s October 2010 piece “The Betrayal of Pat Tillman”:
“For Mary Tillman [mother], what the army did to her son made a mockery of everything he went to war for – honesty, integrity, the defence of the truth. ‘If you ask me if I trust our system now, the answer is I’m pretty disgusted by it. Unfortunately in our culture people survive more effectively through lies and deception and dishonourable behaviour than they do the reverse. And that’s very sad.’ … ‘A lot of people don’t really understand the depth of what happened to Pat – “Oh, he’s not the only one to die of friendly fire.” But it has absolutely nothing to do with the friendly fire; it’s all the deceptions around it.‘
The top leadership of the Army, Congress, and the Presidency (both Bush and Obama administrations) betrayed the Tillman family by their cover-up of Pat Tillman’s 2004 friendly-fire death and their whitewash of those responsible for it (including Gen. Stanley McChrystal).
And the NFL now exploits the death of Pat Tillman, yet they refused to help the Tillman family in their search for the truth. I guess the NFL figures they’ve put up a statue, had a jersey dedication, paid for the Tillman USO … time to move on (during the 2009 Superbowl with the Arizona Cardinals (Pat Tillman’s team), playing the Steelers, he was barely a footnote).
Pat Tillman has been enshrined as an icon while the man fell by the wayside. “The truth may be painful, but it’s the truth,” his mother said. “If you feel you’re being lied to, you can never put it to rest.”
On this Veteran’s Day we should honor Pat Tillman’s memory by honoring the man, not the myth. The iconoclast, not the icon. As his mother said, “Pat would have wanted to be remembered as an individual, not as a stock figure or political prop. Pat was a real hero, not what they used him as.”
. . .
If you want to learn about the real Pat Tillman, see the documentary “The Tillman Story” [features Stan Goff who helped the Tillman family in their battle for the truth] or read Mary Tillman’s book “Boots on the Ground by Dusk” (at blurb.com with preview), Jon Krakauer’s (flawed) book “Where Men Win Glory,” or browse my Tillman posts including “The [Untold] Tillman Story” at http://www.feralfirefighter.blogspot.com
11 November 2011, 12:35 pmWm Terry Leichner:
Stan,
11 November 2011, 1:18 pmI write this as a 62 year old combat veteran of Vietnam. In my own way I’ve written many of the sentiments and thoughts you put in your piece above. Thank you for the thoughtful and honest writing. You always find a way of “expressing yourself”.
Happy Birthday, brother.
Stan:
Happy armistice day to y’all. We know why that was the real cause for celebration. Hugs.
11 November 2011, 1:57 pmTom:
I’ll add my imaginary tip of the hat to my favorite veteran of all time — Smedley Butler. And, to Stan for presenting a banquet-for-thought on this day.
11 November 2011, 3:15 pmKeith:
Similar sentiments from across the pond:
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-do-those-who-flaunt-the-poppy-on-their-lapels-know-that-they-mock-the-war-dead-6257416.html
11 November 2011, 3:22 pmBarbara Bursell:
Stan…
While I salute all veterans,,,you included, your missive is incorrect!
This was never a day of celebration, Armistice Day was a somber day of Rememberance when the VFW sold poppies on the street. I am older than you and I do remember. It is also not a day to celebrate anything much less American mititarism…rather it has become a day to honor veterans. And I salute them all!
Your new found ‘christianity’ may color your thoughts…as you sound like a TPub.
And to make things very clear…I was married to a Navy Submariner for 15 yrs..so I am familiar with military life. Good luck with ‘religion’…from a recovering Catholic..I used to say former, til someone told me I would never totally recover!
11 November 2011, 6:08 pmStan:
TPub?
12 November 2011, 7:33 amMichael Anderson:
TPub=Tea Party Republican
12 November 2011, 11:58 amMichael Anderson:
Thanks for the link, Stan…I have sent this to those I care about.
I am not a vet—-I fought the draft in ’72 (my number in the ’68 lottery was 24). I received a 4-F, following proscribed procedure. After the events of my teen years, especially 1967-68 (Tet, RFK, MLK, DNC), I had no intention of serving the interests of what I now know to be the corporate state—didn’t know it by name then, drowsing in small-town America, just knew something was wrong, and I wanted no part of it. I make no apologies for it.
I think we need more days to memorialize and celebrate peace. Perhaps every day…
12 November 2011, 12:12 pmMichael Anderson:
PS—-happy 61! How’s the fishing in Michigan?
12 November 2011, 4:07 pmMichael Anderson:
er—60…
12 November 2011, 4:08 pmWinston Warfield:
Thank you, Stan. That was, well, profound. You are contributing a great deal in the struggle for peace, and I want to let you know it is appreciated. I am distributing this link around to my fellow vets and others in the resistance in Boston.
12 November 2011, 7:33 pmBob Cable:
Happy 60th Birthday, Stan. And happy new life! Thank you for sharing the pearl of great price that you have earned (or have been gifted). Would you be willing to post it on the VFP website?
Your essay is a powerful antidote to the idolatrous ritual that “Veterans Day” has become–a worthy contemporary scripture.
Peace(that passeth all understanding)to all of suffering humanity.
12 November 2011, 10:40 pmJan:
Stan –
Having read some of your work, the picture I conjure up from your material is someone who has arrived at the complete opposite of where he started. In effect, rejecting everything you were as a soldier; which in a sense is another form of extremism. I also wonder if you might have sexually repressed feelings about other men. Some of your writing leads me to believe that, however, I could wrong.
Take care.
13 November 2011, 12:09 amStan:
Just accepting some things I used to reject. I think we are supposed to change as we go along.
13 November 2011, 8:13 pmLeah W:
Hi, Stan -
14 November 2011, 7:06 amI just wanted to say thank you for this article. While I don’t want to disrespect the sacrificial and honest intentions of those who have gone before, and family & friends that are currently serving in the military, thoughts like those in your article have often swirled around. I appreciate your writing and especially the clear conclusions that you have formed. My son is almost 6 years old and I cannot imagine the world he will be growing up in and have a part in – in the years to come. My desire for him is that he would become a man like Jesus – a true man – not seeking glory and power for himself – but seeking peace for all and justice for the oppressed.
Even though articles like this are difficult to read, it is helpful for me in identifying the societal and cultural issues that I need to be aware of and eye-opening in the sort of pressures that men are up against.
Thanks.
Leah
Richard:
“which in a sense is another form of extremism”
I don’t buy this. Is any wholesale rejection of a former way of life/belief necessarily “extremist”?
“I also wonder if you might have sexually repressed feelings about other men.”
why?
14 November 2011, 4:04 pmDeAnander:
@richard
I was also puzzled by that. it sounds prima facie almost like the “self-hating Jew” label tossed by Likudniks at Jews who question Likudism… that is, a dominant/aggressive ideology serving a defined in-group tends to be deeply threatened by “traitors” — members of the in-group who don’t agree that either their self-interest or their moral compass is in accord with the programme. such dissidents or traitors are not only threatening but incomprehensible. therefore there must be something “wrong with them” — they must have false consciousness or psychological hangups or some kind of issue that prevents them from seeing the obvious truth and rightness of the programme
so if a credentialled macho man turns about and becomes a gender traitor, questioning the very foundations of male privilege and gender hierarchy, there must be some reason *other* than that he’s independently figured out that male privilege and gender hierarchy are genuinely bad ideas. he must have some inner psychological problem that explains why he can feel passionately on the “wrong” side of his self-interest, or repudiate his membership in the Boys’ Club, or whatever.
anyway, that’s just a WAG. OTOH it could be just plain ol’ homophobic baiting.
meanwhile I refer interested readers to the cult of Muscular Christianity w/which the British Empire attempted to resolve this nagging problem of the sissiness of Christ — a desperate attempt to Make Christ a Man Again and by bizarre rhetorical contortion reconcile the radical rabbi from Galilee with the Constantinian religion of empire and conquest. it would be pretty funny if it weren’t happening all over again in the Left Behind fiction and related contemporary heresies…
14 November 2011, 10:04 pmDeAnander:
oh and BTW Stan, an admirable piece — deep and true, and accessible as well. though I am unlikely to join your (or any) church, I am right beside you in your reading of the gospels
14 November 2011, 10:07 pmStan:
Means a lot for you to say it, De. Thank you.
Did this for VDay, and FBd it. But the thesis there is a kind of book idea, maybe with a few ifs, and any source material bibliographies — from anyone — will be met with gratitude. Re-reading Maria Mies (never can get enough from that book… great book!) Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale. This time, on what she says about the Man-the-hunter myth that permeated 19/20 C speculations about gender. Mapped straight onto the Progress trope and imperial practice (as social darwinism). But what is interesting this time is how she breaks down the object-relation of weapons. What’s written above about guns is impressionistic; but Mies really nails down a theory on this. (We’ll get back to her history of witch-burning and the emergence in history of an opportunistic legal profession that promoted that practice in order to make a lot of money. That was, in some ways, during the dawn of Progress, dawn of modern Enclosure,etc — thinking too about risk management – a lawyerly preoccupation – and how that has become the new panopticon [Illich, Duden].)
Researching S&W was like a treasure hunt. This might be, too. In fact, I feel sure it will be.
Mies on object-relations of weapons in pre-history:
1 Hunter’s tools are exclusively to destroy (unlike an ax or knife, that has constructive uses).
2 Gives hunter power over living beings (animal and human).
3 The object-relation is inherently predatory, exploitative (a tool for appropriation)
4 Appropriation of nature, and humans, becomes one-sided: a property relation.
5 Predatory advantages create systematic appropriation: organized theft, stealing of women and slaves, revenge, skirmishes, territorial ambitions, organized warfare.
So what kind of man does this require then valorize? This is conquest-masculinity in its infancy. There is a constant – an unbroken thread – from then through now, no? Power for the purpose of force and appropriation. And if this is a constant, from then through now, (a) is it gendered, and (2) are its origins in gender? This is an activity predominantly of men, jealously monopolized by men… as men.
What does this say about guns? Real power. Exclusively to destroy. Exploitative. Objectifies others and makes them property or refuse. Essential material basis for violent human conflict. Strongly identified with men; and are the object of a kind of idol worship by certain fractions of Man-kind. (That term means kin of men… the evidence mounts)
Mies, btw, is quick to disclaim the idea that hunting technology automatically triggers aggression in men. There are many examples of hunters who are very respectful and even worshipful of animals taken for food. She points out that this kind of aggression was a possibility created by the existence of the weapons.
15 November 2011, 8:26 amRichard:
Stan -
If you haven’t read the Silvia Federici book that was mentioned in an earlier thread (Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation), you’re going to want to. She follows Mies in some ways, of course, and she spends a lot of time on the witch hunt, including its modern re-emergence in Africa. I’ve also previously mentioned (more than once, I apologize) Chris Knight’s work, but in reference to your comment, his book Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture is relevant, as it suggests ways in which origin myths, and hunting/eating/sex taboos got transmuted from woman-centred to man-centred, with the traces of awareness on the part of men of having taken power from women in the dim past.
De -
First, thanks for your remarks. Glad I wasn’t the only one puzzled by that. Also, do you recommend any books about the Muscular Christianity idea you mentioned?
15 November 2011, 11:12 amDeAnander:
I think, but am no longer sure, that I ran across it in The Games Ethic and Imperialism which discussed the importance of the “old school” cult of games and gamesmanship as a training ground for imperial administrators and warriors. The Duke of Wellington, so Google tells me, was the one who said that the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton… and since schooling was inseparable from USUK religious instruction through C18-C19 (and on into first half of C20), somehow Christianity had to be folded into a boys’-school culture that was also about training warriors — the very antithesis of the ideals of the Gospels. Surprisingly, no one’s head exploded. Instead, a bizarre cult of the Manly Christ emerged, in which selected episodes from the NT (such as Jesus’ alleged tantrum in the Temple, overturning tables and intimidating the financiers) were emphasised to indicate Jesus’ potential for he-man anger and action. IIRC. It’s been a while since I read it. The topic returned to me when I read reviews of the Left Behind series, books in which (post-Rapture) the risen Christ stalks the land causing sinners to writhe in screaming agony with his laser-like gaze. Hard to fathom how the reader reconciles this with the text of the Gospels. The author seems to lean heavily on Revelations — which I’ve always found rather unreadable — but even so I don’t recollect any textual detail that would support this image.
My podner and I were just talking the other day about guns and male fascination with guns. The obviously phallic metaphor has to figure in it as well, no? We were talking about the difference between old-school hunters who think of their (few, often old) guns as *tools* for acquiring subsistence (meat) from the land — like a plough or a hoe — and those for whom the gun is an end and a fetish in itself, collectors, men who value their guns for lethality, enormous stopping power, automatic firing… (and beat goes on). Size queens of the gun world. But I just said “plough,” and of course in olden times, male farmers managed to find phallic symbolism in the passage of the plough through the earth. They also mis-understood and mis-named semen (“seed”), not realising that seed are the eggs of plants, female eggs are the seed of humans, and the male mammals’ emission is our pollen. In this primal misconception (forgive the pun) lies a great deal of the devaluation of women; many agrarian cultures imagine women — and the soil — to be an inert, sterile medium into which men introduce life by means of penetration. If we had thoroughly understood biology Way Back When, we might have realised that the soil is full of life already, that women’s eggs provide the preponderance of the mass of a potential human at the moment of fertilisation, and that men are pollinators rather than (lit) inseminators. [We might also have reconsidered ploughing if we had understood some of the long-term implications of tillage.]
The belief in women’s inertness was so complete that many farmers used to believe that if a woman (or a dog or cow or whatever) had been “bred” by an undesirable sire, she would never breed true again; she was somehow “contaminated” by that unwanted “seed”. Contributing nothing of her own, you see, she was seen as a sterile medium which could be contaminated permanently by any unauthorised genetic material.
Another facet of “men’s hunting tools” is that in many cultures, women were not allowed to touch them, or in some cases even look at them. Menstruating women in particular were often forbidden to walk abroad lest their gaze somehow contaminate the essential male tools like fishing gear, bows and arrows, etc. Anyway, these memes or tropes or whatever are immensely persistent… in our culture we have an unspoken but persistent belief that when women touch or use men’s tools, the women are somehow contaminated with masculinity and “lose their femininity”.
Podner and I noticed t’other day that in our local sportin’ goods consumer heaven, they sell rifles for girls — but they are decorated with pink camo. So it’s OK, they are girly little rifles and it’s safe for girls to touch them!
15 November 2011, 1:26 pmDeAnander:
BTW Stan, when I gits settled, I wants to work with you on that definitive (sorta) refutation to the Green Revolution trope. I run across it over and over again in Peak OIl discussions: Everyone Will Starve if we don’t continue Agribusiness As Usual! I get tired of refuting it on a case-by-case basis and would like to work on a solid FAQ documenting the numbers for productivity per hectare using perennial and organic polyculture on small plots. I’m about to unpack books again over the next month or so and will have my ref library once more to hand… maybe by December. I’ll also be planning permaculture activities on my own (!!!) land, so the topic will be up front and centre in my poor shallow brain pan. Wanna collab on that?
15 November 2011, 1:31 pmStan:
Yup.
15 November 2011, 1:48 pmShaukat:
I would like to second Richard’s recommendation of Federichi’s study, “Caliban and the Witch.” It focuses on many of the same themes as the Mies book (the witch burnings, industrialization, the emergence of capitalism, male conquest) though in my opinion it surpasses Mies study on the subject of the transition to capitalism in Europe due to Federichi’s heavy emphasis on internal class conflict and struggle as the driving force behind the transformation of feudal relations of production in medieval rural England, and later in the rest of Europe, as opposed to a focus on mercantile plunder, slavery and colonial conquest. Mies’ emphasis on the latter acts as sufficient conditions for the emergence of capitalism, as well as her heavy reliance on Wallerstein and world systems theory, tend to obscure an extremely significant aspect of the transition away from feudalism, highlighted by scholars like Robert Brenner, Ellen Wood, Perry Anderson and Charles Post; namely, that the essential dynamic of feudalism is to be found in the surplus extraction relations between the landlord and the peasant, and the class conflicts this engendered, and not in the relations between merchants and landlords or between the core and the colonies.
Thus, contrary to the assertion made by Wallerstein and repeated by Mies, the extraction of bullion from the Americas did not, and could not, contribute to the rationalization of agriculture in England or Europe, since such an argument assumes the existence of capitalist rationality that did not exist under feudal property relations. As Brenner and Wood have pointed out, the feudal lords would not have, and in fact were contrained from, voluntarily and consciously setting free the peasantry and using resources secured through colonial extraction for the purpose of investing in agricultural and technological improvements in order to create economies of scale and bank in on relative surplus value. Rather, it made more sense for the lords to simply intensify their strategy of absolute surplus extraction, which is what they in fact tried to do through refeudalization in England and France, and only in England were the lords forced to abandon this tactic and eventually turn to relative surplus value extraction through technological improvements as a result of peasant resistance. In France, the class conflict resulted in small peasant propiertorship and the parcellization of landholdings. I believe Federichi understands this dynamic behind the transition, though I also disagree with her argument that “capitalism was the deliberate response to peasant rebellion by the landowners and merchants in England.” Rather, I believe Brenner is correct in characterizing the emergence of capitalism as the unintended consequence of the lord’s response to the basic dilemma of feudal reproduction in the face of gowing class conflict.
Sorry for the digression, but I thought such differences might be relevant in the context of the above discussion. At any rate, I think Mies is on firm ground regarding the male conquest theme and her comparison of the colonial conquest of nature and the destruction of the female body during the witch purges. Also, in the very next passage to the one discussed by Stan, Mies locates the the rise of male domination in the emergence of the pastoral mode of production, which entailed the domestication of animals and their forced breeding. I would be interested in hearing people’s views on this point.
15 November 2011, 3:26 pmRichard:
Shaukat – as it happens, I’m reading the first volume of Wallerstein’s The Modern World-System right now. My previous experience with world-system analysis is Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century. Frankly, I find it very persuasive. I have no trouble reconciling Federici’s analysis with the world-system analysis. In my view, it’s kind of a bottom-up view of the same emerging systemic process (I’d include such books as Linebaugh & Rediker’s The Many-Headed Hydra in this category). The Brenner hypothesis, which I know primarily through Ellen Wood, is in reference to the specific capitalist mode of production, which is a little different, I now think, or more narrow, than the capitalist system as a whole. Wallerstein, Arrighi, et al, define capitalism as a “system of endless capital accumulation”. I think this is helpful, since it allows us to understand how slavery and other non-free (in the legal sense) labor can exist in different parts of the capitalist system, and in fact are crucial to it (and I’d like to factor in the Italian Wages for Housework movement here too, of which Federici was a big part, which emphasizes the role of unpaid labor–reproductive or otherwise–in the maintenance of the waged system). Brenner/Wood are very helpful in understanding the mechanics of the capitalist mode of production itself (that is, so-called free labor in the core countries of the system), but I think they are overly beholden to a classical Marxist view of things.
15 November 2011, 4:04 pmJAN:
Richard:
If someone spends 25-30 years doing something that at some point was considered important to them, then adopts the complete polar opposite position, it could be construed as an equally extreme position. There is also finding a balance between two opposed positions.
My view is that behind much of the hyper-masculinity in the military is that there also is a great deal of repressed homosexuality. In Stan’s initial post, he seems to be revolted by the male erection and what it represents. It triggered a memory of one of Stan’s earlier articles, where he wrote something about prison homosexuality, which is why I was wondering if he is exploring that potential side of himself. I know a lot about this subject since I am a preoperative MTF transsexual. That’s why I asked.
There are also more than a few former combat arms veterans who have traded in their military hyper-masculinity for femininity, which often has to do with their rejection of male anatomical parts and discovery that they no longer desire to play the masculine male role. Just so you know, many military guys are fascinated with preoperative transsexuals, which noone ever dares to talk about, since it is taboo.
It would be an interesting topic if ever written.
15 November 2011, 4:18 pmJAN:
Wherever you find hyper-masculinity like the military, you will find men who deep down are attracted to other men, but are afraid of expressing or acting on those feelings. Thus, it takes the form of outward violence and sexual control. The senior officer role in the military represents the father figure, and most enlisted personnel simply don’t get along with officers, just like they don’t get along with their fathers, which is why they long for acceptance and love from other men.
As a transsexual woman, I have talked to many other trans-people who have dated members in the military, and what I have discovered is that we (preoperative transsexuals), represent the sexual attraction men feel towards other men, but which remains repressed within the military setting. By our feminine looks, mannerisms and comportment, men are able to act out their gay fantasies, without ever having to acknowledge they are actually gayness, since we personify women, especially those of us on hormones, yet we have also have penises which is where the real attraction lies.
This gay porn Stan makes mention of and the anal sex directed towards women is not rooted in heterosexuality. It has mostly emerged from the gay and transgender lifestyle. Women didn’t all of a sudden develop an interest in anal sex and porn; it was brought in by men who spend time fantasizing about other men, or having sexual encounters with gays and trans-people on the down low.
I would say that 80% of the men I have dated, along with the other TGs I’ve talked to, will tell you that those men are either married or have a girlfriend. Many of them are in the military or veterans.
What it boils down to is that deep down most men in the military want to experiment sexually with another man, provided it is packaged in a feminized version, which is where I come in. I’m convinced that if those men admitted and acted on their sexual desire to be with another man, we would have a lot less violence in the world. Thus, at the root of all this sexual repression is the stigma of being depicted as a homosexual who deep down desires other men, or worse, shows up at the t-girl’s house down the street.
When we stop raising children with the fear of being sexually who they are, only then will the violence stop. It goes far beyound the military.
16 November 2011, 2:49 amStan:
Not sure I buy most of your theory about sexuality, Jan. All this repressed this and repressed that fit into the Fruedian cosmos of human being as sexual steam boiler.
Forgive me for being short, but I believe this is pop psychology. Plenty of ancient Spartans would agree with me.
If you re-read what I wrote about “erections,” I used in in a sub-title to emphasize the identification of dominator masculinity with the penis as an instrument of aggression or revenge. This speaks to the mind of a rapist or misogynist, not to any particular preoccupation of the author.
No doubt, there are some men who may experience homosexual feelings, then overcompensate with expressions of homophobia; but I doubt you can generalize that to most of the male population, or even most of those who have copped to one degree or another to the whole dominator thing.
The point about prison is not only that men can separate fuck-er and fuck-ee in prison to act as “males” and “females” (male dominant, of course), though that inference can be unpacked around domination a lot easier than it can be unpacked by Freudianism imho. The point about prison in this case is that the entire culture has accepted rape as punishment fitting for some crimes. So even in the minds of Joe and Jane Everybody, sex and aggression have been conflated.
Porn that shows “ass-to-mouth” penetration is heterosexual exactly in those ways that “heterosexuality” (speaking here of far more than attraction) involves the hatred of women and the eroticization of of the humiliation of women. I doubt it has anything at all to do with “repressed homosexual desire.”
While I have some really sharp critiques of what sometimes goes by the name anti-essentialism, I do find the term apropos when we begin to talk about masculinity and femininity as if they are essences (our masculine sides and feminine sides, et al). These are behavioral expectations carried by culture and internalized through long practice and rehearsal. The dramatic differences between cultural ideas of masculinity and femininity are strong evidence for my own position, I believe. The aspect of masculinity that tends to be more generalized, and btw more associated with the exercise of male power in public and private, is a willingness to use force, a willingness to kill; and my supposition on this account is that war early on became a male practice that crossed cultural boundaries and homogenized aspects of masculinity. Mies hypothesis on the prehistory of weapons (and object-relations) is convincing to me as a precursor to the development of war.
@Shaukat, see the above. Patriarchy – in various and highly adaptable forms – preceded and facilitated/formed class struggle, imo. I won’t get too tangled up in various marxist controversies and doctrines here. Been there, done that (bangs head against wall). Mies book is entitled “Patriarchy…” so it is no surprise that the relations between men and women preoccupy her in the book. Her analogy between women-nature-colonies is convincing to me; partly in conjunction with two other books I’ll recommend: The Sexual Contract, by Carole Pateman; and The Death of Nature, by Carolyn Merchant. Partly from long experience with macho boys, listening to their bullshit (and my own at one point).
Mies actually locates the rise of male dominance in the discovery of male generative power, which coincides with the rise of pastoralism. It’s possible, and I love these speculations, but the fact is whatever happened was far more complex than we can imagine it; and we can never really know. There is no doubt that women were at some point stripped of status (and treated as chattel). History is showing us that uprooting male power is very difficult once it is in place. And my own anti-modernism leads me to the hypothesis that women’s self-conscious struggle against this loss of status emerged in the context of liberalism/modernism, which was still (and still is) awash in the unidentified bases (material and ideological) of male power. This has been a huge stumbling block for women, but that’s a longer story.
16 November 2011, 9:15 amDeAnander:
Interesting in that modernists always claim the liberation of women as their own achievement…
I’m also thinking about invasive species as I read your riff on the rise of pastoralism and warrior/dominator masculinity. It sets off a riff of my own, a botany-based metaphor for considering human cultures and their rise and fall. Suppose that a male-dominant culture emerges (with all its baggage of violence, fetishisation of hunting and killing, etc) and in the context of its time it is more “successful” than neighbouring cultures — which it invades and smothers, like kudzu or bamboo introduced into a temperate climate, or scotch broom… Over time, the patriarchal “virus” will extirpate all other social models because of its success in displacing and destroying them.
If this is a convincing argument, then the triumph of patriarchy was inevitable; by a kind of Gresham’s Law (or invasive species model) it would crowd or smother out alternative social organisations by faster reproduction (forced breeding, enslavement of females) and aggressive incursion (invasion, warfare, expropriation) and usurpation of resources (theft, brigandage, rapacious stripping of biotic wealth). It would monopolise all the nutrients and cover all the available ground.
A thoughtful poster on TOD has suggested that human societies may be successional, i.e. that fast moving aggressive cultures colonise “open space” but then must be superseded by less aggressive, longer-lived, more stable cultures as the open space is filled in (or “shaded”). However, invasives like broom, kudzu and boo can disrupt this process, preventing a mature forest ecosystem from ever re-forming on sites they have occupied. Whether there is long-term hope for the human species might depend on whether aggressive patriarchal cultures are successional or invasive… and the future of humanity is some kind of “scotch broom desert,” a scrubland of global patriarchy stabilising in an impoverished environment… not a cheerful prospect. I’d prefer to think it’s a successional process and the fireweed of patriarchal aggression gives way eventually to some kind of climax ecosystem, stable and biotically wealthy.
16 November 2011, 2:02 pmStan:
Damn, the stuff you say sometimes is scary.
Let’s hear it for climax ecosystems. (-:
(DeLanda says something similar, seeing what he calls an “arms race” dynamic in the “machinic phylum.”
16 November 2011, 4:18 pmJAN:
Stan – I’m not selling a theory on repressed homosexuality, since it’s pretty much common knowledge among gay men and trans-people, who more often than not sexualy accomodate hyper-masculine types who serve in the military. I also base it on my observation about what goes in the military, since I also served in an Infantry slot.
The repression comes in because soldiers are controlled at every level and are not allowed to act on or display their intimate feelings for other men, since to do so would essentially destroy their careers, even more so within the combat arms, where any sign of gayness would be perceived as weakness, or worse, being a a sub; which interestingly is what most “heterosexual men” on the down low desire from transsexuals like myself and gay men, that is, to be a sub and topped.
After many years of playing the hyper-masculine role, I was able to finally embrace who I was and freefall into not knowing where I was going to land, so to speak. My only regret is that I didn’t do it sooner, but I simply didn’t have the courage at that time.
As explained, I responded because I sensed that you might be exploring your feminine side. That does not mean you are gay – it was only an observation, which again was triggered by comments I read of yours on prison sex, this post, along with some of your other writings.
On another note, do you find that in rejecting what the military represents that you have arrived at the complete opposite side of the Full Spectrum Disorder? Or is there a middle ground?
Peace
16 November 2011, 11:40 pmStan:
Hey Jan,
Never got the impression anyone thought I am gay, or anything other sexual status. (I tend to keep the details of my personal life where it involves intimate others off the internet.) I said there seems to be a lot of popularized Freudianism underwriting the argument.
I don’t outright reject anything associated with Freud, but the steam boiler notion of the psyche I reject outright. On the other hand, my remarks on the “object-relation” of guns is a post-Freudian hermeneutic. Best book I’ve read on that imo is Jessica Benjamin’s “Bonds of Love” (where she talks about “erotic surrender”, btw). Benjamin is a post-Freudian. What I enjoyed most in that book is her description of “inter-subjectivity.” The trick with those herman-things is not to rely only on one, because they are after all interpretive tools that are finite in their application.
As De likes to say, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. (No offense to hammers, which can be very useful.) De’s biotic analogy above is like that, very useful in describing a particular process from a particular standpoint; and we go beyond it when we ask the question, do human beings have moral agency? Now, we might have to exchange the hammer for the screwdriver or the pliers. Your psychological take on these matters is another tool, finite in application. My post-military, post-marxian, Christian interpretive tools are finite, with limits to their application.
The interpretive standpoint I have on prison sex, related to the whole dominator-masculinity thesis, revolves around the question of power and aggression: I wasn’t talking about prison “sex,” but about prison rape — seen as a legitimate form of punishment by many people… proving my point that people understand that sex-means-aggression/aggression-means-sex. They see forced “top” sex as an instrument of revenge. A prison jocker is not the boyfriend anyone would seek out beyond prison walls, and the “top” definitely means the dominant partner.
I see three ways people can be together. In sympathy, in apathy, and in antipathy.
Graphic representation:
SYM-pathy >< figuratively facing each other with good will
ANTI-pathy <> figuratively facing against each other with ill will
A-pathy ll figuratively passing each other without recognition
Antipathy is the problem. Where possible, it needs to be turned into either sympathy or apathy. This reconciliation cannot happen when one mode of that antipathy is so deeply inscribed in the culture, yet unrecognized. Way more complex than that, but that is my motive when I write about gender. I write, when I feel like I’ve thought enough about it, about gender and power as I experienced it, believing that discussion of the issue is an essential step for a lot of desirable changes in the way gender and power are fused.
There are 7 billion souls on this rock right now, and every one of them came out of the flesh of a woman. Being against women is wrong.
I definitely have some pre-existing ideas about sex that relate to the public discussion of gender and power. One of those ideas is that masculinity-femininity are not biologically-determined or god-given essences, but part of a powerful cultural formation process. These are expectations and obligations, that are absorbed from one’s community, about how to behave. My suggestion – which I have no way of proving – is that masculinity and femininity, while set up by biologically-determined divisions of labor in the past, are unintelligible except as cultural productions. So I begin with the premise that sex is not “natural,” in the way we think of laws of nature being natural. Naturalization nearly always becomes part of any rationalization for power.
My point on femininity is that the term “your feminine side” smuggles in the premise that people inhere with “masculine” and “feminine” sides, which I reject. My rejection is a rejection of sex as “natural,” somehow fully encoded in the genes. Masculinity/femininity are cultural constructs that change from period to period, place to place, and can mean dramatically different things. (You listed “pre-op” as part of your own sexual status… this term only came into existence very recently with the advent of certain kinds of surgery, and is not universally available, eg.)
What I am studying and trying to practice – re your question on Full Spectrum Disorder – is how to live ethically and faithfully.
I have come to believe, from an ethical as well as a faith perspective, that force, fraud and coercion of others to get my way is wrong; and I have come to oppose war, all of them. In that sense, I have rejected what the military stands for; and on the same grounds, I reject the dominator masculinity that I believe makes the reproduction of war possible, even as war itself reproduces this particular role (and I believe war – organized violent antipathy – was the genesis of the role).
Peace-n-love!
17 November 2011, 7:46 amRichard:
I think, Jan, that there’s a distinction between the facts you are reporting, which I have zero trouble believing, and the psychological interpretations you provide as to what those facts mean.
Regarding Freud. I read a book earlier this year by Alice Miller (Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society’s Betrayal of the Child), who had been a Freudian, but then moved away from that as she delved further into things. She argues, convincingly in my mind, that Freud was very close to something very important, about how children are raised, how that shapes them, etc, but it was poorly received (she cites a particular essay of his, the title of which escapes me), after which he concocted the frankly ridiculous edifice of infant sexuality (Oedipus complexes, etc).
17 November 2011, 10:05 amaskod:
This list is very interesting. Living as I do in outside the imperial core, in Sweden, I have of course grown up saturated with the american culture in addition to local culture. Some things are the same, but not all. The main difference is guns.
Now, guns are common in Sweden, or at least hunting rifles are. Hunting is a big deal, in particular in the countryside, and moose hunting is biggest deal of the lot. Sweden also until recently had general male conscription, and if you are in the home guard, it was (is?) preferred that you keep your automatic rifle at home as the home guard was supposed to be quickly mobilised in case of war. But looking at movies and redemptive violence, guns does not hold the same symbolic meaning. A gun is a dangerous, phallic tool (and even more so is dynamite), and if you grab it for redemptive violence you have lost all senses and will be the bad guy in the movie (at best a tragic character, at worst a raging psycho). Redemptive violence (character is abused, character builds himself up and returns to face his abuser) is instead either delivered through verbal means, often playing on a greater understanding of the legal standing of the various parties, or by means of a fist-fight.
Another difference is the scale of weaponisation of the penis. There is no prison-rape culture here, nor is “fucked” used in the same way. But it is a matter of degree.
17 November 2011, 6:33 pmStan:
Culture matters. In Costa Rica, where there is no army, even the cops are kind of no-drama types. There is no national incubator for the homicide-boy. Very, very laid-back there.
18 November 2011, 7:16 amJAN:
Stan:
Thanks for explaining and touching on some of the points I asked about. It puts some of the material you have written into perspective.
I also agree that “masculinity-femininity are not biologically-determined” and evolves out of a cultural process. Thus, our culture, background and who we hang out with has enormous impact on us from a developmental and responsive standpoint.
Myself, I think that most people develop inflexible gender schemas throughout their lives and often react angrily or uncomfortably with men or women who break out of their assigned sexual roles. Thus, I see it more as cultural conditioning, which interestingly is now changing as gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender folk are integrating into mainstream society.
When you say that there are three ways people can be together: “in sympathy, in apathy, and in antipathy.” Am I correct in saying that in sympathy represents the synthesis of in apathy and in antipathy, since it is a dialectic method you are using to describe those three ways?
The term “Pre-Op” is more of a label that has evolved within the trans-community where some ts women who have opted for SRS distinguish themselves from those who have choen not to, which has created a differentiation of post-op transsexuals from those who are pre-op transsexuals, crossdressers and transvestites. It has created a division among us, since the term “transgender” was a convenient way of consolidating us into part of the gay cause; yet many gay men have an abhorance towards transexuals, since we represent the antithesis of male hyper-masculinity, who they are sexually attracted to. What most straight people don’t realize is that gay men are actually hyper-masculine men themselves, which is why they are completely devoted and attracted to men!
I would venture to say that a large number of MTF transsexuals choose to remain pre-op and have no desire to proceed with SRS, since many of us actually prefer our male anatomical parts, but relate to all the other feminine aspects of being a women. Interestingly, while transexuals have moved towards the perceived idea of femininity or womanhood, so to speak; genetic girls (women) have moved away from it, and many have adopted characteristics of male masculinity. This extends to the military where more and more women would like to serve in combat infantry roles.
So, yes, I would have to agree that in many respects masculinity and femininity is a cultural process.
You’re an interesting man.
19 November 2011, 11:44 pmStan:
Nothing that fancy in this case. Good will, ill will, or don’t really care. The vast majority of us are in the latter category with each other. Dunbar says we can only maintain about 150 actual relationships after all. Ill will, or hostility, makes me and the other one I meet enemies. Enemy-making is trouble-making, mischief that threatens not only the enemies, but the community.
Where this is complicated by late modernity is our habituation to simulacra. In making moral decisions, we are often acting a part because we want to look good. It is motivated by self-regard. It is when aesthetics are a simulacrum of morality (as John Henry Newman put it). We learn to show approval, excitement, disapproval,even disgust for all the correct objects of approval, excitement, disapproval and disgust. We can no longer tell the difference. We belong to communities who define themselves aesthetically.
20 November 2011, 3:14 pmMichael Anderson:
“What most straight people don’t realize is that gay men are actually hyper-masculine men themselves, which is why they are completely devoted and attracted to men!”
This would seem to be in accordance with Nancy Hartsock’s description of later period Greek culture, especially relating to their army.
20 November 2011, 4:07 pmJames L:
Re: Weeds and succession, generally weeds dominate because they are better adapted to an environment that has been modified by humans, not because they are more “aggressive” (IMHO there is little that plants do that can be construed as aggression). Succession is inevitable, even introduced species will eventually either become part of an ecosystem (no longer dominating it), or go extinct. Plants change slowly, so this could take a long time, but humans change much more quickly.
Here’s another idea for you. In areas of high resource availability, biodiversity is low, and the dominant species tend to be the ones that can acquire resources the quickest. As resources decline, niches appear that didn’t exist before, and biodiversity increases. So I think we can anticipate increases in cultural diversity as human resource use (specifically fossil fuel) declines.
21 November 2011, 1:37 amcabdriver:
It may well be impossible to formulate binding “laws” about “sexual behavior”. There’s so much personal bias involved in the formulation of a framework for elucidating insights on that subject. And I think that even the status of being a biological eunuch is not remedy for that subjectivity. The idiosyncratic level is not to be dispensed with.
“Power”, by contrast- that can be spoken of in translatable terms. Including the tropisms associated with masculinity and femininity in the human species.
It’s plain that overall, in humans, there’s an attributed status bias in favor of males when it comes to some issues of power, like weight, muscle mass, and strength. Physical coercion is a powerful trump card- in a world without reflective consciousness, at any rate.
Acceptance of the sociobiological paradigm of man-as-animal leaves us simply with drives and desires, and ourselves as animals run by them. And some would say that what’s commonly referred to as “human consciousness” is simply the veneer on that primate animal.
And then there are others of us, who say that the fact of human consciousness and it’s potential comprise what human existence is really all about. Not veneer at all. That consciousness entails more than being a chimp with some extra RAM.
It’s getting tough to English this…
22 November 2011, 3:07 amStan:
I agree, CD. Interesting how we use the language of computers to describe ourselves now the same way many theorists adopted the metaphor of the steam boiler in the past. There is a lot biology has to tell us about ourselves, but the attempt to reduce us to biology is part of the same failed Enlightenment attempt to reduce the entire universe to mechanical physics.
It also lets a lot of people off the hook, because it implies we are incapable of moral action. We have no moral agency whatsoever, yet when we decry this situation we are saying, in effect, that we can see the possibility of good in action. If we complain that people are inherently selfish, eg, we are making a moral claim about the value of selflessness. If we state this without the implied value of selflessness, we are abandoning any claim of right and wrong (which is precisely what Ayn Rand and her ilk did, proclaiming the “virtue of selfishness”).
Not only is the human animal different than the chimp on biological grounds, the chimp has no history, no genealogy of ideas and morals, that forms her.
I’m not convinced that male strength is that distinctive from female strength, or that strength alone had something to do with this power gradient. Culture intervenes to make the distinction between male and female strength more pronounced, more an artifact than a cause. I’ve seen a barefoot 50-year-old peasant woman pass a Special Forces A-Detachment going up a hill with 80 pounds of water over her shoulders.
22 November 2011, 9:18 amm.c.:
I worked in a movie theatre in h.s. The projectionist was a guy who when he was younger worked as a golf instructor. He said that it’s easier to teach women/girls to hit a golf ball because they don’t try to use their upper body too much. Their natural swing is closer to optimum. Swimming is another sport where women perform very close to what men do. Men usually have slightly more upper body muscle mass.
22 November 2011, 1:30 pmcabdriver:
I am referring to a specific sort of strength- not endurance or stamina, but brawn. What one might term “dominating” strength. Brute force strength.
There are, indeed, all sorts of self-contradictions that arise once one accepts the biological-humanist paradigm and the implications of its postulates. I often read the commentaries of self-identifed liberal people, decrying some injustice or stupidity or another, while seeming to be implicitly expressing that there’s no moral center- or even that the human species is inherently a plague on the earth!
I call it Materialist Predestinarianism.
22 November 2011, 3:00 pmStan:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/11/23-2
23 November 2011, 4:42 pmJAN:
From the link to article
“When sex is hidden in the shadows — when it’s something you can’t talk about (but you can brag about) — it easily becomes one more tool of domination, wrapped in an unspeakable shame that preserves its secrecy. The crime of rape is the crime of predation, the crime of “I own you.” And it is an institutional failure first — on college campuses, in the U.S. military — as evinced by breaking news stories reporting not merely allegations of sexual molestation over a long period of time, but of their quiet cover-up by those in charge, granting de facto impunity to the victimizers. The pattern is always the same.”
Some of the common theories on why men rape are based on several different motivations:
1. Peer approval – college men who have coerced their dates into having sex have often been pressured by male friends to prove their masculity (Kannin, Eugene. (1985). “Date rapists: Differential sexual socialization and relative deprivation,” Archives of Sexual Behavior, 14, 219-231).
2. Anger, revenge or a desire to dominate and humiliate the victim – this motive is apparant among members of the military (especially the combat arms) who have raped captive women during war and then usually snuff them out (Olujic, M.B. (1998). “Embodiment of terror: Gendered violence in peacetime and wartime in Crotia and Bosnia-Heregovina,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 12, 31-50).
3. Narcissism and hostility toward women – sexually aggressive males tend to be narcissistic and unable to empathize with women, believing they are entitled to have sex with any woman they choose (Bushman, et al., (2003) “Narcissim, sexual refusal, and aggression: Testing a narcissistic reactance model of sexual coercion,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 1027-1040).
It’s even more dangerous for those of us who are transgender, since at any time we could be snuffed out, especially if someone has made us, or worse, if a guy believes they were talking with a biological woman, then discovers that we came with the wrong parts and it’s non-returnable.
Also, If we look at the TV shows from the 1950s and compare them to the savagery that gets passed off for entertainment today, I’m convinced that television, movies and computer games all contribute to the violence and rape that is rampant today.
24 November 2011, 1:50 amSam:
Any Talk of Values is a Joke
By George Galloway
January 30, 2012 “Information Clearing House” — HILLARY Clinton said – that the slaying of apparently unarmed, barefoot, skinny Afghan youths by armed US Marines who could hardly wait to urinate on the deceased was “inconsistent with American values”.
Inconsistent? What, with the values of Wounded Knee? With the values of distributing smallpox-infected blankets to the native Americans to ethnically cleanse them from their lands so the settlers could steal it?
Inconsistent with the wholesale slaughter of the USA’s aboriginal people, the enslavement of millions of others until the 1860s on account of their faces being the colour black?
Inconsistent with the fact that Barack Obama’s house was built by black slaves and his own father couldn’t have urinated in the same public lavatory as a white man until the 60s?
Inconsistent with the American values of the Vietnam War? You know… the smell of Napalm in the morning? The Agent Orange chemical weapons, the massacre of millions of Vietnamese peasants?
Truth is, what your Marines did is absolutely consistent with the values you have projected ever since the last honourable shot you fired back in 1945.
30 January 2012, 9:39 pmCurt:
Who has ever claimed that the dead Afghans in the video had been unarmed before they were killed? I could not find any such reference after a google search.
31 January 2012, 6:07 amFor Gallowwy to make the claim that they were unarmed with no evidence to support that claim is very irresponsible.
Henry:
Obama’s SOTU, authoritarian followership, and civil society: Part I
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/01/obamas-sotu-and-authoritarian-followership.html
Part 2
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/02/obama’s-sotu-authoritarian-followership-and-civil-society-part-ii.html
Last week in Part I of this piece, I argued that Obama’s recent State of The Union speech endorsed a particular model of military organization named the “warrior ethos” by its DOD developers, and that this ethos and American soldier’s oath of enlistment (10 U.S.C. § 502) were in contradiction. That is, one can treat the “mission” and the “team” as primary, or the Constitution and the UCMJ as primary, but not both. Ethos is one thing; the rule of law another, and in the SOTU Obama, by focusing exclusively on the first, rejected the second — and not merely for the military, but for civil society also, since the SOTU posits that the warrior ethos should apply to all citizens, not only soldiers.
Obama’s rejection of the rule of law should surprise nobody who has been following his administration’s failure to prosecute bank executives for accounting control fraud, his abolition of due process when assassinating U.S. citizens, or his vote, while still a candidate, to grant retroactive immunity to the telcos for felonies committed during the program of warrantless surveillance initiated by the Bush administration.
6 February 2012, 6:12 pmHenry:
The Afghanistan Report the Pentagon Doesn’t Want You to Read
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/the-afghanistan-report-the-pentagon-doesnt-want-you-to-read-20120210
Truth, lies and Afghanistan
How military leaders have let us down
http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2012/02/8904030
A failure in generalship
http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2007/05/2635198
In Afghan War, Officer Becomes a Whistle-Blower
17 February 2012, 4:44 pmhttp://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/world/asia/army-colonel-challenges-pentagons-afghanistan-claims.html?_r=1
Henry:
A War of Lies and Deception
Dying for Disaster
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/17/dying-for-disaster/
17 February 2012, 4:47 pmMatt:
Any Talk of Values is a Joke
By George Galloway
January 30, 2012
Hillary Clinton said that the slaying of apparently unarmed, barefoot, skinny Afghan youths by armed US Marines who could hardly wait to urinate on the deceased was “inconsistent with American values”.
Inconsistent? What, with the values of Wounded Knee? With the values of distributing smallpox-infected blankets to the native Americans to ethnically cleanse them from their lands so the settlers could steal it?
Inconsistent with the wholesale slaughter of the USA’s aboriginal people, the enslavement of millions of others until the 1860s on account of their faces being the colour black?
Inconsistent with the fact that Barack Obama’s house was built by black slaves and his own father couldn’t have urinated in the same public lavatory as a white man until the 60s?
Inconsistent with the American values of the Vietnam War? You know… the smell of Napalm in the morning? The Agent Orange chemical weapons, the massacre of millions of Vietnamese peasants?
Truth is, what your Marines did is absolutely consistent with the values you have projected ever since the last honourable shot you fired back in 1945.
18 February 2012, 2:17 pmCurt:
Calling on any Christian,
23 February 2012, 11:49 amFor some unknown reason I recalled today a statement I heard many years ago by I believe Ted Turner if I am not mistaken. He said that Christianity is a religion for losers.
It was kind of contraversial statement at the time. What did Ted Turner mean by the term loser? Did he mean someone who does not seek financial success? Considering his background that is what I think that he meant. Thinking about it today I started to wonder not only if Christianity is a religion for financial losers but if someone wants to try to follow the path of Jesus if one must not only be a financial loser but take pride in being financial loser.
Any comments?
Michael Anderson:
Ted Turner is a Capitalist. Jesus was not. Capitalism has only one guiding principle, which is the bottom line, which is antithetical to most, if not all, of the teachings and faith of Jesus.
It’s not a matter of taking pride in being a “loser”, which I could safely say is NOT participating in that system. It’s a matter of seeing what is real, and right in front of your face, and acting on that. Seeing Power. And, accepting death….
The Laws of Thermodynamics rephrased—You can’t win, you can’t break even, and you can’t get out of the game. Accept it. In a real-world setting, it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a manifestation of God. We’re all in this together, and any BS to the contrary from the “breakaway civilization” as was put by Catherine Austin Fitts and Ted Turner is a card-carrying member of, is just that—-BS.
23 February 2012, 3:52 pmStan:
Jesus was a loser. I wish I could make that into a bumper sticker.
He challenged the family structure, the purity codes, the rich, the gender hierarchy, the legal establishments, performed wonders, and drew an increasingly large following that expected him to overthrow the powers. Then he gave himself up to the authorities, who tortured him to death, leaving his disciples to skulk away (down the road to Emmaus, and other places) in fear.
His three original temptations were to means of domination, and during his mission, all three were presented to him again… the new David, the new King. In the end, he got only the crown of thorns, a mocking lampoon.
Of losers, by losers, for losers. The kin-dom of God.
We live in a culture of winning.
24 February 2012, 8:44 amMichael Anderson:
“We live in a culture of winning.”
If you can’t win, break even, or get out of the game; you can’t magically turn it into a zero-sum game.
24 February 2012, 1:48 pmm.c.:
I do like Ted Turner putting up a Billion for the UN Foundation, Capitalist or not…
Jesus during his lifetime wasn’t the Head of A Large International Organizational Structure with Institutional Hierarchy & Control(The Vatican has a Bank, Post Office, Radio & Tv stations, Universities, Medical Schools, etc.
He was probably of of several radicals(can I say that?) along with others like John the Baptist arguing against Occupation & Taxation by the Roman Empire; and possibly against their local governments who were complicit with the Romans. Here, I’m thinking of the Tetrarchs/Tetrarchy of Judea mentioned in the Book of Luke(of the four Gospels, Luke a physician is the most detailed IMO.)
One thing I’ve caught from Michael Herr’s Dispatches and also in Chalmers Johnson’s Sorrows of Empire books is that Large Empires tend to develop huge blind-spots because they have so much military & economic might, they are not accustomed to asking permission or advice from their colonists…. Belgium for example is probably constantly asking Holland & France and vice versa for political/social/cultural/economic input.
24 February 2012, 2:07 pmCurt:
An open letter to the Police Academy of class of 84 in Lake Wobegone.
The comparative religous scholar Sabo Lance, who runs the blog triangulations.com, along with many other skeptics claaim that God is whatever the “beleiver” wants God to be.
We or at least I am allowed to tie this same concept to Jesus by way of the trinity. Just in case you forgot that is the idea proffesed by the vast majority of the US Christians that Jesus is not only the son of God he also is God.
As I can see from observing US political discourse it is an idea that makes a lot of sense. Some Americans see Jesus as the forrunner of Ghandi and Martin Luther King. A non violent protestor concerned about the plight of the poor and the powerless. To this type of believer Jesus works by a two step process of transformeing peoples desires. Those who follow him transform their own desires for wealth and power and life filled with sexual encounters to a life of simple managomy. They lead by an example that is supposed to inspire everyone to follow them. Sure enough this Jesus is a completer loser. If it had not been for Saul or Paul or whoever the dude was who had an ephifany on his way to Damascus Jesus’s name and his teaching would be even less well knkown than those of Mani.
The followers of this Jesus are forced to sit around while a jack ass like some one identified as the former head of the Navy Criminal Investigative Service can go on network TV and claim that Americans should not be surprised if Iranian Agents launch terrorist attacks on the US mainland. These followers of Jesus have to sit there as as the so called network reporter lets him get away with such outrageous accuastaions. These followers of Jesus have to sit there as the network executives decide that such demonic drival counts as national network news.
On the other hand there are those who claim that Jesus was not really a loser after all. It only looked that way to those who were not blessed by the Grace of God.
Those who were blessed understood that Jesus’s death on the cross was planned from the moment of creation. God of course knew in advance that Adam and Eve would sin in the Garden. He knew that he would have to punish ALL human being for their transgressions. God knew that the only way that this punishment could be lifted was not by an all powerful and all knowing and merciful being lifting this curse against humanity. No, the only way that it could be lifted is if he sent is only son who was actually himself in disguise to suffer the punishment for all human beings instead. But there would be a catch to this solution. In order for this gift to be effective it wouild have to be explicity accepted by the reciepients. Those who read about the life of Jesus from the bible and think of him like some sort of socialist do gooder have fallen in to a trap that was set by God himself. If one would had faith and were granted Gods grace one would understand that the life of Jesus has to be interpretd in such a way that is does not contradict any portion of the bible the comes before Jesus. Failure to followe the instructions would result in failure and eternal damnation. Today these followers of Jesus percieve themselves as winners and they percieve of Jesus as a winner. They have figured out the complex instrustions and fortunately there is no room in heaven for thsoe degenerates who could not figure them out.
But what does the former head of the NCIS really think? What do the network executives really think? What does Admiral Mullen really think? Do they really think that Israel might attack Iran with out the approval of Admrial Mullen? Are these people followers of Jesus the winner or are they a different breed all together?
Experience shows the losers that Jesus is a loser. With just a few well aimed lighting bolts he could alter the course of history. Yet those lightening bolts never come.
Experience shows the winners that Jesus in a winner. With just a few well aimed lighting bolts he could turn those who are winning in to French Toast. Yet those lightening bolts never come. It is a pattern so strong that it turns implyed consent in to explicit consent. What does experience show those who do not place much stock in whatever God or Jesus or Mohammad thinks?
What experience shows me is that there ought to be a law against taking advantage of the mentally retarded.
25 February 2012, 6:01 amWhat experience shows me is that those who most abuse the mentally retarded are those who make and enforce the laws.
Who are the people who make and enforce the law?
Stan:
@mc, on blind spots. I suspect the blind spots are of two varieties: the kind that result from self-delusion (believing one’s own bullshit), and the kind that result from plain scale (to much going on to keep track of everything).
Even accidents can be the initial conditions that veer off into chaos.
25 February 2012, 7:33 amHenry:
@ m.c.
Re: “He was probably of of several radicals(can I say that?) along with others like John the Baptist arguing against Occupation & Taxation by the Roman Empire.”
This is what you get from the New Testament? Not exactly consonant with the plain and immediate message of the Gospel, not to speak of the millenial Christian tradition, which is unanimous in declaring that the aim of the religion is saving the immortal soul of the human being. We may not believe in this, but there is no good served by distorting the plain truth of the matter to suit our personal world view.
25 February 2012, 12:36 pmCurt:
Jesus says that I am supposed to love the former head of the NCIS. He says that the former head of the NCIS is supposed to love me too. Some people say that Buddha said that we should not even say things that the other would take as an insult. I do not thing that the Buddha really said that though. It is said by televangalists that we should hate the sin but love the sinner. Is that a reasonable request? It has been said that we should not judge so that we ourselves are not judged? Is that reasonable?
25 February 2012, 1:47 pmMohammad makes it easy. Of course you can kill serious sinners. You are doing them a favor. If they die before they have a chance to break more of God’s laws you may actually be helping them in to heaven by ending their life at a point when their good deeds still out weigh their bad deeds. Ok my source on that may not be a world respected Muslim scholar but my observations of the behavior of many Muslims makes it seem like this understanding of things is widespread in the Muslim world.
It seems to me that compassion for the wicked might not be misplaced when the wicked come from a disadvantaged background. I would be willing to bet that not many field or general grade officers have such a background. But insiders no doubt think that compassion is something that they will never need becasue their position will protect them.
Experience cetianly shows that they are right. They can continue to abuse the mentally retarded until a cow jumps over the moon and never have to answer for it.
Whats love got to do with it?
Whats Louisville got to do with it?:)
Michael Anderson:
After the Amish school massacre a few years ago, when 10 Amish girls were shot and killed at the West Nickel Mines School in Pennsylvania….they forgave the killer. The reasoning being this—it does not excuse the seriousness of the offense, but it gives a way to go forward and leave vengeance behind. The Amish even established a charity fund for the shooter’s family, who were devastated.
Big stuff. Stop the cycle. James Taylor wrote some meaningful lyrics on this subject in “God’s Rifle”:
There are rifles buried in the countryside for the rising of the moon
May they lie there long forgotten till they rust away into the ground
Who will bend this ancient hatred, will the killing to an end
Who will swallow long injustice, take the devil for a country man
Who will say “this far no further, oh lord, if I die today”
Send no weapons no more money. Send no vengeance across the seas
Just the blessing of forgiveness for my new countryman and me
Missing brothers, martyred fellows, silent children in the ground
25 February 2012, 3:34 pmCould we but hear them could they not tell us
“Time to lay God’s rifle down”
Curt:
If that is what floats the Amish boats good for them. As for myself vengence could be a way forward too. It does have a couple of hurdles though. People like Mr. Mullen are so far in debt to the planet that there is no punishiment that he could recieve that would even come close to giving him what he deserves. The death penalty is a gift and life in prisonment is a puny punishment compared to what he deserves. The other hurdle is that when those who recongnize his crimes are but a small minority there is no way to administer any vengence anyways. But theoretically I have no interest in forgiving people who have no mitigating circumstances to point to and many aggrevating circumstances to hide. Mr Mullen appears so grandfatherly in public. If you have ever seen Goebels in action he could appear very rational to his audiance as well.
25 February 2012, 4:16 pmAmericans now seem to think that you judge what a person says by the way that he says it not what he is actually saying. It is pathetic.
Curt:
When I lived in the Metro DC area a lifetime ago I often read the newspaper that was sold on the street by followers of Louis Farrikhan and now and then had disscussions with them. One claim that was often made in these papsers that I thought and think went to far is that whtle americans wouild not be where they are today were it not for the labor of African Americans. This was brought up as a justification for repatriations for slavery. Now a discussion about repatriations would be in an of itself a very interesting disscusion. My post is intended thought as a prequel to that subject. It is more limited in scope.
26 February 2012, 5:49 amTo make a long story short the point that I tried to make with the members of the Nation of Islam is that it was slaveholders and their decendents who primarily benifited from
from the labor of African Americans. I could of course exand on why this is so but I think that the readers can figure this out for themselves. THerefore I thoguth that decendents of slaves should file lawsuits against those families that held their ancentors in bondage. It would not only be to seek vengance wish would be justified but to level the economic playing field.
Vengance against slaveholders was certianly justified. Slavery had been an issue in the country since the time of the revolution. Slaveholders deliberately chose to ignore the arguements that their opponents were making. After slavery ended thier families had the benifit of not only being allowed to keep the capital that made their wealth possible but also recieved the benifits of higher education placing their decendents in a different economic league than the decendents of the slaves.
I see a clear parrallel between that situation and the situation of this country’s military industrial complex. The members of armorments industry and the military itself misappropraite (steal) huge amounts of the nations labor through taxation and counterfiting of currency they misapporpriate hundreds of billions of dollars of resources each year to maintain their industry they murder people all around the planet they mock those who call them the criminals that they are and then to top it off they have the gall to expect a welcome home party. When they are often only in their 40s they get nice pensions that would have made Roman Legionaires proud. Then they get at a minimum nice jobs with the post office or someother government agency. That is if they do not get much nicer corprate jobs. Their children end up in a completely different economic league than those not part of the military club. Then they wine that there is such a gulf between the military and the citizens that they “S E R V E”.
So obviously I am not trying to make a case here that US military is a force for e´vil in the world. That would be to easy here. This is not Black Five or the 5th Corp.
reading room. No my purpose is to persuade followers of Jesus that vengance is justified. Justified not only against members of the military themselves but even to some extent against their families. These families, especially of the field grade and general officers have been recieving stolen money for decades. Perhaps it is reasonable for the children to say that they did not know that the money was stolen. But if the police raided the home of a thief and they found a stolen TV in the childrens bedroom they would surely take that TV away from them.
To allow the members of the military to escape without punishment for their misbehavior would surely be a form of appeasement. Yes I know that the US military and the goverment that supports it have been misapplying this term of appeasement to everyone but themselves for the past 50 years but it is still a valid concept dispite that misuse. An arguement that those in favor of forgiveness often bring out is that one must forgive transressions to break the cycle of violence. Well that could be a vaild arguement when those who are being punished still have the will and the means to resist. If you break their spirit or deny them the means to resist then that will also break the cycle of violence.
I myself will not even consider forgiveness until I hear what I think is a sincere appology. As I have said before I am not a person who jumps to conclusions about a persons charachter. I would have to observe people for a very long time before I come to the conclusion that they are sincere.
Henry:
To keep it short, Curt, vengeance is ugly. A person who needs vengeance to “satisfy” a wrong done to him needs what the Chinese used to call “inward hygiene.”
“Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay’ says the Lord.”
This corresponds to a norm that is understood and accepted by healthy minds. It is understood that paying evil with evil simply contributes more evil to the world and that it is profoundly selfish.
To ask Christians to think that vengeance is justified is to ask them to jettison their religion. Not too likely.
At the same time, you are quite right in saying that people who don’t want forgiveness–or have little or no remorse for evil they have done–don’t really deserve forgiveness. The point, however, is to cleanse oneself from the desire for vengeance, which is quite different! In religious terms, it is to leave the outcome in God’s hands. Or in Buddhist terms, it is to let “immanent justice” or the law of karma operate–with the understanding that for religious people this world is not everything, and that the law of karma above all concerns eschatological realities, something that many modern people disbelieve in, of course.
26 February 2012, 2:31 pmCurt:
Vengance is ugly? I have no problem with ugly. If you are ugly I am ugly too. Does Bon Jovi’s song work in reverse?
26 February 2012, 4:42 pmI am not a Christian. I do have a story that I would like to repeat now. It is a story that may actually undercut my own position. Never believe what you hear unless it corrsponds to your own experience. I am going to start the story with the next post though.
Henry:
Morally ugly, Curt. If you have “no problem with that,” suit yourself and experience the consequences. I have no quarrel with you. At any rate, be less subjective in your replies, please. I said vengeance was ugly, I didn’t say you were ugly–whatever that would mean in your mind.
You were trying to convince Christians. You are not a Christian. Fine. I don’t think you will be too successful in convincing Christians–which, by the way, range from Copts, to Orthodox Christians, to Catholics, to the whole range of Protestants.
Also, I have never experienced the South Pole, yet I do believe it is cold there. I rather doubt a human being has ever existed who confined what he believed to his experience.
26 February 2012, 5:14 pmCurt:
In the summer of 1912 an archeologist arrived in a small village near Magdeburg and knocked on the door of a farmer. The archeologist asked to see the rock that the farmer had hauled out of his field while plowing 30 years before. Since then the farmer had only shown the rock to a few people but someone the archeologist came to be aware of its exsistance.
When the archeolosist saw the rock he saw that one side of it was engraved with the picture of a man on a horse with a shield and a lance. On the other side a story was engraved in a acript that the archeologist could not read. He made a copy of the script and brought it back to Humbolt University in Berlin to be translated.
This is the story. The story takes place in the 5th century AD.
I am the monk Siegreich of the Franks. I was born the son of a great warrior. This accident of my birth led to a martial upbringing. I became a trusted aid to our King Ludwig. Under his leadership we won many battles. Then a day came in which I feared our downfall. We were engaged in a battle against our arch enemy the Allemanen. Our situation looked hopeless. I prayed to our Germanic Gods of war to rescue us. I did not know it at the time but as he stood beside me King Ludwig prayed to the Christian God for victory promising to convert to Christianity if we could defeat our enemies one more time. He had heard that in a similar situation the Roman Emporer Constantine had prayed to the Christian God and he was rescued from defeat.
A short time later our prayers were answered. The enemy king was killed by a hand ax that was thrown at him from a distance of over 25 meters. The enemy then lost its zeal and fled the field of battle. King Ludwig converted to Christianity. His example was followed by many others among our people. Not by me. Which God had helped us?
A few weeks later I was seated at a table next to the king at a banquet when a Bishop arrived. The Bishop was a Roman and told me to give him my seat next to the king.
I was about to put this Roman in his place when the King suddenly took his side and asked me to find another place to sit. This really made me smolder.
Then a few weeks later one of our great warriors insulted the Bishop. King Ludwig killed him on the spot with an ax blow to the back. I had had enough. King Ludwig was not upholding Frankish customs. In our customs the King had been a first among equals but not a tyrannt. I took my leave of the court and began my journey home.
As I was only one days ride away from my own family I fell in to an ambush. I was captured and sold in to slavery among our arch enemies the Allemanen. The work was hard and the food was scarce. Then one day while we were being given water by a servent girl she placed a small silver cross in to my hand. I was surpsrised by this act of kindness. I spoke of this to another Frank who had been in captivity far longer than I had. He said that among these people Christianity was spreading among the women but that the men refused to give up thier old Gods.
Some days later the girl came to our cell at night and convinced the guards to allow her to give a loaf of bread to a Christian among us. I grabed at the bread as I was very hungry. The man pulled the bread quickly away and said that we would all share the bread. He said that Christians have a duty to feed to poor, to visit the sick and to spread the brotherhood of mankind. I sat in humiliated silence.
I thought about my time with the Romans. I thought about things that I had seen while being held as a slave of the Allemanen. Romans-Franks-Allemanen there is not much of a difference. Why had no one thought of this before? But I wondered, What is Christianity? Is it the religion of Ludwig that leads warriors to victory or is it the religion of my neighbor, to be considerate not only of the poor but even to slaves?
A day came in which our guards were distracted by stormy weather. I resolved to try to escape. While the other guards took shelter the youngest guard was left to watch over us. Eventually I found myself behind him. I grabed the knife from its sheath and had was about to slit his throat when my arm was grabed from behind. At the same time a blow was delivered to the guards head knocking him out. The three of standing there ran for our lives. After one hour we stoped. We were exausted. The Christian
said to me, it was not neccessary to kill the guard to escape. I knew that he was right. We decided to split up to increase the chances that at least one of us would escape. The Christian gave a ring that he had managed to keep hidden. It was engraved with a cross. He told me that whenever I met a Christian I could ask for help and I would get some help.
We departed and I ran. It did not take long before I made a life althering decsion. I will not return home to my life as a Graf*. I will trade the armor of a warrior for the staff of a shepard. I will learn to read and write. I will learn about this religion called Christianity. Then I will travel to the east. I will travel to the Huns.
I will travel with nothing to protect me except a feather. I will bring the idea of the brotherhood of mankind to the Huns.
30 minutes later I crossed a stream. I had gone fifty meters further when I heard a lot of splashing in the water behind me. I looked behind me and saw three wolves 50 meters away and closing fast.
26 February 2012, 5:42 pmm.c.:
@ Henry,
26 February 2012, 5:51 pmI’m currently reading the Book of Luke, and Acts(which was almost certainly written by Luke. Historians agree the style is the same.) Early in Acts, the Tax Collectors come to Jesus at least once and ask him what to to. He replies only do you job within reason and don’t rob anyone. Then soldiers(it doesn’t specify if they are Romans or Herod’s troops) ask him if they should do their job. He replies something along the lines of don’t persecute anyone unjustly and don’t put innocent people in jail. I wish I knew the verse numbers of the top of my head.
Henry:
Yes, m.c., but it seems to me that these encounters are not an epitome of the religion; they express an aspect of it, to be sure. If one wanted an sentence that summarized the essence of it, Christ furnishes it: Matthew 37-40.
26 February 2012, 10:34 pmCurt:
Fast forward 10 years, Siegreich has changed his name to Ansgar or Anthony the historical record is unclear. We will call him Ansgar. He has spent the decade in a Benadictine Monistary along the Rhein.
In the spring of the tenth year of his new life he was walking east. One problem was at the forfront of his mind. He had learned to speak Latin but what if the first Hun that he met did not speak Latin. How would he communicate. Would he be able to teach Latin as second language to an unruley audiance? He prayed for guidance each day as he got closer to his goal. Near the city of Regensburg he had some very good luck. Sometime before, in a battle along the Danube, a Hun raider was left behind for dead. He was not dead and later regained consciencness. He was then captured and made a slave. Ansgar decided that he would stay with the slave and work along side of him and eat and drink the same food that he ate and drank to be able to learn the Hun language.
So we fast forward again. This time for two years. Ansgar believed that he had mastered Hunish. He decided to give his first sermon to an audiance of one, the slave that he had worked beside for the past two years. When Ansgar was done explaining the brother of mankind to the slave the slave smiled. Ansgar was pleased with hiself. Yet the slave was not smiling becasue he was impressed. NO it had been so long since he had actually laughed that he had forgotten how. He said, Ansgar my friend, you are a fool. A sweet fool but a fool none the less. You saw that the Franken and the Romans and the Allemanen shared much in common. I have never lived among those people yet I would be willng to bet that they all share something in common with these Saxons. That is when they are not trying to kill or cheat or do whatever it is that they can to take advantage of other tribes they are doing those exactly that to each other but only in a more polite stylized form. From the moment they are born they are in compition with family members they are learing to argue and cut deals and cheat and threaten and sometimes even beat their own family members to achieve their goals with in the family.
As a family the cooperate to to compete with other families opressing them when they can dealing with them when they can not. There is no need to travel to the Huns to bring a message of the brotherhood of mankind. The Huns the Saxons the Allemanen the Franks and the Romans already live your Gods kingdom. Everywhere I look I already see the brotherhood of mankind.
Ansgar stood there facing the Hun. He smiled. He thought to himself. I am not ready. I had prepared myself to be burned at the stake to bear witness but I had not prepared to understand the viewpoint of a man with a different outlook. Ansgar unpacked his bag and prepared to go back to work. The family who he was working for was glad to hear of his change of heart.
27 February 2012, 1:28 pmm.c.:
RE: John the Baptist
Luke 3:10 So the people asked him, saying ” What shall we do then?”
Luke 3:11 He answered and said to them, “He who has two tunics, let him give to him who has none; and he who has food, let him do likewise.”
Luke 3:12 Then tax collectors also came to be baptized, and said to him, “Teacher, what shall we do?”
Luke 3:13 And he said to them, “Collect no more than what is appointed to you.”
Luke 3:14 Likewise the soldiers asked him saying, “And what shall we do?” So he said to them, “Do not intimidate anyone or accuse falsely, and be content with your wages.”
….
Luke 3:19 But Herod the tetrarch , being rebuked by him concerning Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, and for all the evils which Herod had done.
Luke 3:20 Also added this, above all, that he shut John up in prison.
27 February 2012, 4:33 pmm.c.:
27 February 2012, 4:33 pmCurt:
Ansgar “I understand that you have decided to stay. I can imagine that it is because you do not yet think that you are ready. For the past two years I have found you amusing but I must admit I was looking forward to your departure. You must think of me as really a substandard Hun. I do not mean here I am a prisoner, a slave, and I can not even fee myself from captivity let alone pillage and rape my way across Europe.”
1 March 2012, 7:04 pmI think that it is time that I share a sccret with you. I stay here our of choice. For me life is good, not only good it is great. You are a man of talents and there is plenty here to go areound for the both of us. You could join me and we could look out for one another.
Hogan, “what do you mean?”
Well for starters you know the young lady that came by the other day while we were toiling away. The one who beat me for my laziness. It was all an act. In seven months she will have a child, my child. I was just pretending that we had never met.
In your dreams Hogan! A woman like that would no more have anything to do with you than she would with salamander. Or do you mean something else entirely?
Ansgar, go to the corner and push against the wall near the bottom on the side away from the window.
David Tucker:
Stan,
Thank you so much for your honest, precise and brave writing. Much of what you said helped me to continue to separate myself from the false masculinity that was pounded into me as I grew up. I was not in the military, but I was surrounded by it. Was a jock. Was a hunter. I loved guns. All the stuff. Thank you.
I am a writer. I am just finishing a novel in which my protagonist, a war correspondent, spends time in Northern Iraq. He is witness to a Special Forces operation. I can read books about the Special Forces, but what the fuck do I know about the culture and how it’s expressed on a daily basis. Would you consider reading the novel and critiquing the military parts–or any other part you might wish.
I ask you, because of your clear thinking and because of your Spiritual experience. The journey of my guy takes him from a self-centered, abusive way of life to a real Spiritual awaking. His encounter with the Spirit of Jesus is a big part of it. I’ve worked hard to make it real. Not a Hallmark card.
Thank you again for your bravery in facing up to your demons and your willingness to experience the vulnerability of sharing your story. That’s a real hero.
David
13 March 2012, 1:07 pmMark:
Stan,
I wrote this some months ago and never posted it. It’s been in my “drafts” folder for awhile now. I haven’t posted it because of fear of offending you and other believers who visit your site. I post it now I guess because after re-reading it I’ve decided there ultimately is some value in it’s larger point and I hope you’ll agree.
I have no direct military experience. Part of the reason I have found your writings interesting and why I continue to occasion your site is because of the fact that so few career military people offer contemporary political insights that are critical of militarism. Indeed few bother to even make the distinction between “the military” and “militarism.” I suppose it’s obvious that you provide a kind of insider view to such things that is not what we hear on the evening news or in the “media” in general.
Although completely lacking in direct military experience I have spent over 10 years as a devout fundamentalist Christian. I was a bible study leader, youth counselor, and para-church professional. I took the words of Paul in 2Tim 2:15 – that part about studying to make oneself approved – quite seriously. Although I never studied theology formally It’s the reason I chose to study the bible and Christianity to the length that I have. I say this to try to bring home the point that I’m not an Atheist because of ignorance, or snobbery or even because I think God has somehow let me down by turning out to be man-made. It’s because I really cared enough about what I professed to believe to find out if it was actually true.
The inter-relationship between of sex, war, and masculinity especially as it relates to US society, has to my knowledge never been seriously studied. The use of the bible as a moral or ethical yardstick, however, is problematic to say the least. The God of the bible promotes and condones genocide (Deut 7), human sacrifice (Gen 22, Jug 11:29-40), and He provides detailed rules about the owning of slaves-down to the selling of children (Ex 21:16). As Thomas Jefferson said: “The Christian God is being of terrific character – cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust.”
It is after years of study and reflection that I can confidently say that the bible is but a collection of Bronze-Age mythologies with some occassional decent advice on human affairs. It is mostly filled with supersticious and awful edicts, incomprehensible and meaningless geneologies, and barbaric lessons in scape-goating and bloodletting. And the Jesus of the New Testament is no nicer than his Old Testament Father. As far as Jesus is concerned all the dis-memberments and tortures and genocides and selling of daughters like so much cattle were all part of the plan. Jesus after all said that he was “one” with the Father (John 10:30), and that not “one jot or tittle of the Law shall pass away till all is fulfilled,” (Matt 5:18) The ramifications of Jesus statements as they relate to the horrors of the Old Testament are rarely, if ever, discussed with any amount of intellectual honesty-they are generally dismissed with a wave of a dispensational wand. But even in the “New Dispensation” we have Jesus talking about “turning the other cheek” in personal relations, while reserving the right to condemn people to eternal torture by everlasting fire for the thought crime of “unbelief.” (Mark 16:16)
You say that “Little by little, masculinity was taken back into Christianity,” that apparently Jesus started out as a gender-nuetral or even feminist moralist and then his teachings were corrupted by the “Constantine temptation.” I would say that this relies on a very selective view of the New Testament generally and the Gospels in particular. To say nothing of the sweeping generalization it makes of the first three centuries of what we now call the CE (Christian Era). I would say it is simply another version of the old fundamentalist belief of the purity of the new faith being corrupted by the worldliness of the Roman Empire.
As I said earlier, I think this connection between masculinity and sex and war is indeed worthy of further study and research. The appeal to religion, especially the Christian religion, however, is not only morally and ethically problematic, it is culturally myopic. One might consider that there are on the order of 1 Billion Chinese people today on the planet who are by a vast majority, completely uninterested in the Judeo-Xtian sky God. There are untold other millions who are culturally and religiously completely ignorant of this Jesus and his Jealous and Vengeful Father. How does masculinity as it relates to sex and war manifest itself in non-Xtian societies? Is it a similar phenomena? If not, what are the differences?
By focusing on a Western religious tradition your analysis (at least that offered in this essay) is incomplete and needs much more cross-cultural and inter/exo-religious research. It may not be because of your Christian bias that you have neglected to consider the social and political ramifications of sex and war and masculinity in the non Judeo-Xtian-Muslim world. Perhaps it is simply because you are not an anthropologist or because in the field of cultural anthropology this subject may very well be in its infancy. But ultimately, the appeal to religion, especially either of the Three Great Faiths, creates more problems than it solves. As Christopher Hitchens said: “Religion ruins eveything.”
11 April 2012, 3:30 pmMichael Anderson:
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=8183
Sometimes Civil Disobedience is the Only Way to be Heard
Leah Bolger, a retired navy officer, talks about her arrest at Congress and plans for NATO protest
29 April 2012, 2:27 pmSojourner:
No time to offer a useful comment, just wanted to say I thank God I found your site! (Via Disinformation). I’m a bit younger than you, but served as a Marine during the Cold War, including the (now ‘first’) Persian Gulf War. I now routinely face the most nerve-wracking combat of my life trying to disuade my 18 year-old son from joining the Marines! You neatly and cogently summarize many of the facts and concepts I try to convey (usually rather obscurely) and you’re NOT DAD, so I’ll be trying to send him your site’s way!
Thanks again for taking the time, and making the effort.
6 June 2012, 1:41 pmMichael Anderson:
http://truth-out.org/news/item/9808-veteran-suicide-a-predictable-epidemic
I’ve never been a soldier, but it gets me how the captains of industry and ideology use humans up and toss them away like spent shell casings (metaphor intentional).
“Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) started “Operation Recovery,” a campaign to fight for the rights of service members and veterans to heal, and not be redeployed if experiencing PTSD. Too often, service members with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), military sexual assault, or combat stress, are forced to redeploy rather than receiving the support they so desperately need.”
19 June 2012, 9:51 pmm.c.:
One of the worst thing about starting a War(i.e. Vietnam or Iraq/Afghanistan) is that is is so difficult politically to end it without a Strong Reactionary Political Backlash from the Reactionarys, the Republican Pols & their Backers. Bush almost certainly didn’t know or care. I bet Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz were a little smarter.
22 June 2012, 12:01 pmMichael Anderson:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuaTqhYP-Tc&feature=player_embedded#
Al Jazeera World – Songs of War
absolute filth…
6 September 2012, 11:46 pmMichael Anderson:
This makes a mockery of what we as musicians do as a form of service. The interview with the band Drowning Pool is particularly revealing. Their ABSOLUTE separation & quite intentional ignorance from what their “music” (quotes intentional) actually sounds like, how it is used by TPTB, and the effects that it creates. It is diabolical…
Back in the 80′s, I worked at a company that made acoustical devices to use in recording studios and listening rooms. I was in production. For a week I was put in the basement doing a particular procedure with a couple of kids who listened to NOTHING but the heavy death metal of the period. I came out of that basement with an abiding hatred of this form of sound.
7 September 2012, 8:06 amMichael Anderson:
…and, interestingly enough, no copyright owners of the music were consulted. Download it on your computer, you’re a criminal. Use it to destroy people’s minds for the (corporate) state, you get a free pass.
7 September 2012, 8:11 am