A minion suggested the book “On Killing
” and another followed up on it. This constitutes a ground swell of interest. The book sounded interesting, so I put it on my Amazon wish list. However, I have no idea what the book is going to say, other than “we CAN all just get along and we love each other and it’s okay to feel love for everyone and everything so let’s all just give a big group hug and shower each other with big sloppy wet kisses, and isn’t it just terrible how soldiers who are forced into killing by being viciously manipulated by the government ( who we also love, by the way, especially our new messiah
from Kenya who swears green shoots will be coming out of his butt any day now ) have to feel so bad about the whole thing?” Well, it didn’t exactly say that, but that was the gist of it that I got. It also told me two things. One, the Oil Age has allowed parasites like lawyers and head shrinkers to flourish and two, we are born, breed and indoctrinated to be soft and gooey and pretty friggin spineless.*
Please don’t take the parasite thing too literally. Almost all of us are parasites in today’s system who don’t do much of anything of value. Myself included. We all try terribly hard to justify our existence, but in the wake of imminent collapse
it all looks pretty feeble. Oh, look, I gasp, batting my eyelashes and putting a note of pious sincerity into my voice, I help out the homeless and families in need. I am a poorly paid cog in yet another money making machine. Our surplus has been so great that lazy or crazy people are allowed to survive. The drug users keep theCIA 
in business, as well as a big chunk of the military industrial complex. They also are kept alive. Businesses donate perfectly good food that isn’t 100% fresh ( you can’t charge $6 for a dozen donuts if they don’t melt in your mouth ) for a tax write off, which translates into the same as a customer sale. This also encourages them to over-bake, over-stock, etc. In between the organizations that got in on the ground floor make good salaries administering this surplus redistribution. Now, I’m being very cynical here. I discount the actual good done, and put a bad face on mostly noble intentions. I’m merely pointing out how there is a huge waste built into charities now. What was done decades ago out of good will is a big business ( how many get rich building a ten million dollar homeless shelter that has, literally, only thirty beds? ). Almost everything, even the purest, is under the thumb of monied interests. And almost none of it is much more than make work.*
You don’t need a head shrinker telling you how screwed up you are. I could tell you that for free. If you are ever in Elko, NV, buy me a $7.77 prime rib dinner at Gold Dust West and I’ll tell it to you face to face. We are all screwed up. The whole system has turned evolutionary species survival
upside down in an attempt to take millions of surplus eaters and employ them and allow them to think that their existence matters. Oil surplus is great. It allows a lazy slacker
such as myself to sit behind a cash register and ring up nicotine and alcohol for other overpaid, unproductive workers. And I earned twenty grand a year doing it ( okay, there was built in overtime since even that simple activity was beyond most others selling crack and collecting Food Stamps 
). So here you have a college educated idiot telling us how hurtful and wrong and hard it is to get young innocents to kill for Queen and country
( if I’m wrong, after reading the book, I will offer an apology ). It traumatizes them. Now, please, I’m not trivializing the effects of combat on individuals. I never experienced combat and I don’t presume to know how it feels afterwards. I am saying that in the past, before we let couch commandos tell us how sensitive we all are, combat was a thing a man did. It didn’t matter the effects. And, I’ll wager that there was not the huge problem of getting him to actually try to kill the enemy. *
I am not claiming to be macho and wishing for combat and trying to come off like I wouldn’t curl into a fetal position and whimper like a bitch as I voided my bowels. I most likely would. For all I know, that is natural. Or, I am a natural wuss. Whatever. I am just saying that this is a huge non problem that just recently was discovered. Another reflection of our natural laziness and divorce from the harsh dictates of reality. In the past, I don’t think getting combat soldiers
to fight was an issue. Life was brutish and nasty and short. Life was cheap. And, more likely than not, if you didn’t fight, you were kicked out and then starved. Let me repeat myself to minimize misunderstanding and troll attacks. I’m not judging soldiers today. I’m judging societies training from birth that goes against species survival. I am not judging this book, as I have yet to read it. I am questioning if a book like this would ever have been needed 150 years ago. END
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8 comments:
James,
Maybe you're alright after all. A guy who could readily admit he may well assume the fetal position in the face of fire, may be just intellectually honest to deserve a readership.
Just think how far removed we are from our ancestors who fought hand-to-hand combat with swords. Now THAT would get one's testosterone flowing!
Yep, we've become useless pussies.
If you really delve into the American Civil War, they were just as cynical as we were about the Powers That Be. But somehow they could mass for human wave assaults that would kill half of them, in a war where 90% of infantry attacks failed. Look at France and the British performance in WWI (aggressive), then look at their skittish dog performance in WWII. Look at Germany and Japan now, a bunch of pacifistic hippie, cubicle hounds. Eventually violence gets beaten out of people.
Rather than patriotism or some obscure political creed, educated people don't want to fight anymore unless there's something really at stake. Like ending up in some other human being's stewpot. Israel, in particular, was hardened by The Holocaust into being a kickass nation. Until lately.
Most will probably summon the nerve to stay alive when the time hits. During the Siege Of Leningrad, the Russki troops (who were substantially better fed than the starving civilian population) had to walk through the city in packs, because solo soldiers had a disturbing tendency to be eaten alive.
Read Harrison Salisbury's "The 900 Days" and Antony Beevor's "Stalingrad." The Eastern Front was one of the best laboratories for what human beings are capable of at the lowest rung of the civilational ladder.
Yea, you really should read the book before judging it. Your comments are going to feel really silly once you get done with. Hint: Lt Col Grossman was an Army Ranger and a West Point professor.
On Killing is pretty good at describing the training process involved in getting Soldiers to kill their enemies. As I recall though, after the first three or four chapters he repeats himself ALOT! Enough to turn what would have been a long thesis paper into a book.
Craig
Not gonna type much because you don't always print my comments and my longer more effortful posts often don't get printed, and because not only is this keyboard down to manual-typewriter speed and effort, but I have a huge blood blister on my right index finger from actually BUILDING something yesterday so my typing from Apocalypseville is slow AND painful.
I got through the first 2/3rds of the 08/09 winter by living off of a girlfriend. She made/makes over $20 an hour as a kitchen assistant at the local hospital. 8th grade education. The most I made as an ace electronics tech was $11 an hour - the basic shit pays. Who do I shoot or garrote to get your old stop-n-rob job? But I digress....
My girlfriend lived off of this pay just barely because she had it all spoken for through debt and stupid shit like a newish car and constant visits to the mechanic - transmission acting up? Don't change the fluid, change the transmission out! Even she hated that car, and said her best car ever was an old T-bird, hello, you can find those all over the place for a few thou. But again dammit I digress....
She lived on food taken home from the hospital, surplus. Not off the patient's plates as Orwell's described, but just extra food cooked up as a matter of course. Enough calories flowed through her place to support her, myself, two daughters, 2 cats, a small dog, and a pig. Of course the cats and dog had their own food, and the pig was theoretical - in reality the extra stuff once I moved in was regularly cycled out first in first out and disbursed to a rather large flock of weaver finches and night time visitors like the neighbor's dog, who collectively ate enough to raise up a pig.
The thing is, we're talking about a minimum-wage level job, being paid 3X as much, plus $300-$1000 worth of food depending on how you count it, a month. And she's screwed. She loses her place, her hours, etc and she's utterly screwed. Her world will melt down as quickly as mine did in mid-2007, which happened about as quickly as what you see when you pour a nice refreshing drink of gasoline into a Styrofoam cup.
Landing where I am now is really on a par with winning the Lottery. Stuff grows here. We grow some and some just grows. This place is ideal for a slow crash, not sure for a fast crash, we'll see.
As for "On Killing" read it before you review it ok? I was not able to afford it when I skimmed it, and sure as hell can't afford it now, but I don't remember it being full of touchy-feely bullshit. I think it will provide rich insight for your excellent writings.
Terms to learn: breed/bred
It is true our American society has become a feminine democracy, and therefore a "touchy feely" one. I was just noticing the misandry that now is pervasive to college curriculum. When the SHTF, things will invariably change, but until then we have to put up with nonsense like 'On Killing' and the realization that making everyone equal equated to the destruction of TWAWKI.
Keep your head to the grindstone and chip away, preparing for collapse.
Your negativity is appreciated and shared.
Jim: Does it seem as if you keep preaching to the converted. Most of us would agree that some form of implosion is imminent, we may argue about the when and the how much of it will be coming but we can all feel it coming. I am a diabetic with the complicating factor of polycythemia. Just how long after medical supplies (insulin, intron and hydrea) run out do you think my life expectany will be.
I live and work in a small northern community supplied by one road atrery to the south. Currrently there is about a three day food supply (of all stocks) in the community. If this road supply is cut off or becomes undependable just what do you think life will be like here?
January and February temperatures run -35 to -40 deg. If the fuel oil supply or electricity becomes undependable try to imagine what our lives would look and feel like.
The end will be the end regardless of whether it happens over night or it takes a few years.
Respectfully
MUKWAH
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