From: PsycheCulture-AT-cs.com
Date: Sun, 3 Nov 2002 19:09:40 EST
Subject: PLC: Re: Warfare as Submission



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      J. Piven writes of the soldier's violence in terms of the "pleasure in 
domination (often couched in explicitly sexual terms) as documented by Joanna 
Bourke (1999)."

      The idea that the soldier acts from a position of "domination" is one 
of the fundamental delusions surrounding the institution of warfare.

      Bourke's research focuses upon the First World War. It is unlikely that 
one out of a thousand soldiers in that war ever encountered a soldier of the 
opposing side. Most of the fighting was done out of trenches. The majority of 
deaths occurred as a result of artillery shells projected from afar that 
dropped on or near the soldier and tore him apart. Other deaths occurred when 
soldiers got out of trenches and ran into machine gun fire.

      The basic posture of the soldier in the First World War was sitting in 
a trench-- cold, starving, and frequently accosted by vermin. In her earlier 
book, DISMEMBERING THE MALE (1996), Bourke observes that the most important 
point to be made about the male body during the Great War is that it was 
"intended to be mutilated." 

      The statistics of World War I read like a science fiction fantasy. The 
"final tally" counts 65 million forces mobilized, of which more than 8 
million were killed and died, over 21 million wounded and 3 million taken 
prisoners and missing--for total casualties of 37 million, 58% of the forces 
mobilized.

      Bourke gives a flavor of what occurred to millions of men--year after 
year--for four years:

"This war promised men the kind of death that removed their stomachs and left 
them a mangled heap of human flesh. Scottish Highland kilts were blown up and 
putrefying buttocks exposed. Men were roasted alive. Death descended from the 
skies and disappeared without being sighted by those who survived. It was 
like black magic: bodies continued walking after decapitation; shells burst 
and bodies simply vanished. Men's bodies 'shattered': their jaws dropped and 
out poured 'so much blood.' Airplane propellers sliced men into pieces. 
Bodies lay forever unburied, eaten by the dogs, birds and rats."

      So much for the idea that the posture of the soldier is one of 
domination. The essence of soldiering revolves around the realization that 
one's body might be mutilated and/or destroyed by an artillery shell and/or 
bullet. The soldier exists in a state of paranoid anxiety. Occasionally, he 
is required to "advance" (not because he feels "aggressive," but because he 
is ordered to do so). However, the basic posture of the fighting man (in 
World War I and many other Twentieth Century wars) consists of LYING IN A 
TRENCH OR FOXHOLE, trying to avoid getting blown apart.

      The Germans attacked Verdun in 1917 hoping France would be "bled dry" 
of its fighting men. The French action to recapture Fort Douaumont employed 
711 guns on a front of just over 3 miles. A notice in the fort today informs 
us that 1,000 shells were used for every square meter of the battlefield. 

      Imagine the pathetic plight of those who were on the battlefield, 
confined within a narrow space which glowed like an oven for miles because of 
the constant artillery bombing. During the battles, most soldiers barely knew 
what was going on, spending most of their time hiding from the incessant 
shelling and bombardment of rifles and machine-gun fire rather than actually 
fighting.

      A French Lieutenant notes that before attacking his men were either 
"drunk, howling out patriotic airs, or weeping with emotion or despair." One 
had the temerity to remark within earshot of the company commander: "Baa, 
baa, I am the sheep on the way to the slaughterhouse."
      
      The stance of the soldier in World War I may best be characterized as 
one of abject passivity. Soldiers were expected to obey their officers and do 
their duty without shirking--to offer no resistance when they were ordered to 
put their bodies onto the battlefield to face mutilation and death. What the 
"masculinity" of these soldiers amounted to was a willingness to offer 
oneself to one's nation as a sacrificial victim.
      
      Robert Kee called the trenches the "concentration camps of the First 
World War." Our foremost historian of war, John Keegan, observes that indeed 
there "IS something Treblinka-like about all accounts of the battle of the 
Somme (July 1, 1916)." Twenty-five thousand British soldiers were killed on 
the first day of the Battle of the Somme (about the same number as a good day 
at Auschwitz).

      Keegan tells us about the "long lines of young men, shoddily uniformed, 
heavily burdened, numbered about their necks, plodding forward across a 
featureless landscape to their own extermination inside the barbed wire." The 
soldiers went like sheep to the slaughter.
      
      Clayton Robarchek suggests that violence in warfare occurs when it is 
"perceived and selected from a field of possible alternatives as a viable 
means of achieving goals and objectives." How determined and persistent is 
the effort to transform an irrational, monumentally destructive institution 
into something that appears to be consciously chosen or adaptive.

      Beneath the institution of warfare lies the thrill obtained by the 
spectator--the fantasy of national glory that occurs "over here" even as 
soldiers are being killed and wounded "over there." Soldiers are promised 
that they will be "made into men."

      We exploit masculine fantasies of honor, virility and "aggression" in 
order better to TRANSFORM THE YOUNG MAN INTO A SOLDIER, OR SACRIFICIAL 
VICTIM. Of course, once he arrives on the field of battle, the soldier knows 
he has been duped. No amount of aggression or masculinity or virility can 
compete with cold steal.  

With regards,

Richard Koenigsberg

Richard Koenigsberg, Ph. D.
Director, Library of Social Science

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