|
estebanana -> RE: The Dam Busters (May 30 2023 13:42:13)
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: Piwin
quote:
and call all combat leaders mass murderers then that’s not a very intelligent way to process history. It’s not productive
It can be. Just that it leads to questions that nobody wants to ask among those who wish to uphold our current state model(s). You can find anything and everything in the archaeological record of our species. Such is the ingenuity of human beings. And yes, it includes examples of social organisations that are thought to have not placed such a high premium on violence as we do (and conversely social organisations that are thought to have placed a much higher premium on it than we do). Refusing to ask that question is like spending all of your time looking at how one slave owner cared deeply about the plight of his slaves while another was gratuitously cruel to them, but never bothering to question the institution of slavery that put people in that situation in the first place. Both lines of inquiry are interesting in their own right, but only the latter actually matters for future political change, which, to my mind at least, makes that one a lot more productive than the other.
"Wars are messed up, but until we figure out how to stop having them (...)" you say. Well, I'd suggest the starting point to figuring that out is to posit that all combat leaders are indeed mass murderers. That the social organisations we've developed require mass murder to function; as they say, it's a feature not a bug. Unfortunately the current paradigm is so firmly established that many don't actually believe in the possibility of a world without war. It's treated as a childish pipe dream, and often dismissed with arguments each more fallacious than the next (the "human nature" one wins the cake though. Geez that one is dumb...). In the meantime, when the topic of war comes up we're served with arguments which are essentially glorified versions of "he started it" or "he did it too", and these days even "I did it first but only because if I hadn't he would've". And somehow we're the childish ones...
In fact, I think the refusal to qualify all combat leaders as mass murderers is really an admission of not believing in the possibility of a world without war. We can't qualify them as such because we need them to keep our state model(s) running. And since we can't call into question our state model(s) either, then yeah, we have to create a categorical distinction that exempts those forms of killing from being considered murder. Many of the arguments used today to justify state killings date back to the Enlightenment. While not the sole reason for those arguments, it's not coincidental that they came at a time when Europeans were discovering new worlds, with their own forms of social organisation and, when asked, their own critique of what European society looked like. Not just on the topic of war, since many so-called indigenous societies also had a culture of war, but it did include that and many other topics. To exclude the possibility of combat leaders as mass murderers is to exclude the indigenous critique, and to refuse to consider the possibility that this state of affairs may have less to do with our "nature" and more with the choices we make in how to organize our societies. Hence why there is a very strong drive in that camp to belittle, and in some cases dismiss entirely, human agency.
In the same way as our views may change depending on the time-span we take into account, as per the discussion above, the same is true of the scope of social organisation we take into account. To say they're not mass murderers we have to limit that scope to a certain kind of social organisation and exclude all the others. It seems a bit too convenient if you ask me. If we broaden the scope even further and look at our two closest relatives in the evolutionary tree, we have one that raids and kills to solve disputes, and another that fùcks to solve disputes, with AFAIK not a single recorded instance of intra-species killing. I know of several well-regarded primatologists who don't shy away from using the term "culture" to explain that. Though granted, if I was told that to prevent WWII from happening my only two options were to either kill or fùck Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin and Hitler... erm... yeah that's a tough one ngl ^^
None of that need get in the way of a proper appreciation of historical facts. We just need to be cautious with the usual exercise of separating fact from opinion. That's often more difficult than it sounds, but I'd suggest it is nowhere as difficult as when the opinion we hold is so widespread as to constitute a paradigm. In those cases, it's easy to not even notice that that opinion is there and coloring our interpretation of the facts. And sometimes, just sometimes, it isn't the "overdetermined leftist" who is struggling to separate fact from opinion...
Churchill was a mass murderer. Carry on.
Bill,
Would you like to field this one? Because I thought I made my position of seeking grace as transparent as I could.
S.
|
|
|
|
