Murdering Efficiency
By Jerre Skog
When two male apes or other higher mammals fight over the leadership of the group, the fight usually is short and relatively harmless. They may repeat and the outcome may change but they will not kill each other. The weaker individual soon finds out he is unable to win and, to avoid further damage to himself, he sends clear signals to the winner that he gives up the challenge. A defeated wolf bares his throat to the antagonist and this surrender-signal blocks the killing insticts in his opponent. Other species have other signals, but the common effect is to stop unnecessary bloodshed of another member of the species. Actually most life forms have this in-built reluctance to cause serious harm to their own species.
Human beings have the same sort of instincts. But we can overcome them.
In the good old days the warlords and warring kings often had to get the troops drunk on alcohol to overcome their reluctance to kill and in all times the enemy had to be made out to be evil and different from us. Yellow, brown, black or red was obviously good colours to feel free to slaughter for white men. And if they could seem to pose a threat, such as a strange religion, so much the better. After WWII the allied military brass found out that in a combat situation, man towards man, a high percentage often couldn´t force themselves to fire upon the enemy. Especially against the white look alike Germans. The “kill-reluctance” rate was estimated to around 45%. By the Korean war more efficient military training, conditioning, propaganda and demonization of the enemy managed to cut down that kill-reluctancy to less than 30%. In the Vietnam-war it had sank to 10% and the My Lai massacre was probably one of the results.
Soldiers nowadays don´t learn to shoot on targets in the form of round circles. As part of the conditioning the targets are man-like, often with colors and faces to make them look foreign or savage. The training aims at making the soldier shoot and kill with complete abandon of his normal instincts. And it works. Tell him who is “the enemy” and he kills. Even so, a sane person has a limit to how much horror he can cause. A normal man finds it difficult to aim and shoot between a child´s eyes or in the shrunken breast of an old woman. The instinct is hard to overcome completely.
Hence the long-distance killing where where you can´t see what you cause. Would the horror of the criminal bombings of civilian areas in London or the likewise criminal fire-storm bombings of Hamburg or Dresden have taken place if the pilots and bombardiers could have witnessed what their pressing a button caused? Could Nagasaki and Hiroshima have happened without the perpetrators going mad with remorse? The cruise-missile attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan? We have depersonalized the killing to a point where the signals between humans cannot any more be exchanged. The fighter or bomber pilot often doesn´t even question what he attacks. Following orders based on more or less correct intelligence he bombs or shoots up a given target at certain coordinates and just assumes that all hit are enemies. If not they are written off as collateral damage, this inhuman phrase in tune with the times. The people giving the orders have for a long time been far removed from any slaughter which is a prerequisite for all modern war.
We even tend to applaud the invention of new even deadlier weapons that allow us to kill any imagined enemy from great distances, well knowing from history that others will have the same or deadlier weapons sooner or later. Stupidity is following scientific “progress” with naivity holding its hand.
We have consistantly removed soldiers reluctance to kill. We have given armies means to kill on computer-monitors away from the battlefield and from the skies at altitudes of 30.000 feet. The real carnage and suffering has at all costs to be kept from the ones who causes it (and those on whose behalf it is claimed to be done, the public). The “kill-reluctance” is close to zero.
The inhumanization and distancing from living creatures is taking place in our civilian societies too. A 15 year old child in USA has watched more than 100.000 murders, killings, and other serious acts of violence on TV. The kids get used to the heroes they identify themselves with solving all problems, not by reasoning and compromising, but by shooting, bombing and intimidation. The heroes are Rambo and other brain-dead muscle men. The man riding in triumph towards the setting sun is the fellow in the white hat who shot the fastest and killed the most. Might is right. The titles of the films tell the tale. “Without mercy”, “revenge”, “in cold blood”, “harder than steel” and such beautiful expressions. And the scenes have to be virtual instruction manuals in murder. Repeat shots, often in slow-motion, of the blood and carnage and bodies exploding in bits in the air.
The PC and video-games that clog up the shelves of the youngsters rooms are overwhelmingly violent and perfect blunting tools for the reluctance to violence. The more human-like figures they can kill by shooting first and straightest the higher the points-score they get. The video-game arcades are full of 9 to 14 year olds happily banging away and the violent online games get more participants every day. The teenager, that run amok in Erfurt in Germany recently and killed 18 others, is reported to have spent almost every free minute by his computer playing such games. Most other such senseless acts of violence seems also to have been carried out by youngsters very occupied with violence in TV or video-games and always highly fascinated by the tools of death. A psychology professor working for the US army noted in a report on ZDF-TV news the other day that the conditioning and preparation to kill was as efficiently done by the video-games and action movies as when carried out by the US army.
Most every nation on earth have managed to sign and ratify the Geneva Convention regarding rules of war. Much disregarded though it might be, it still sets some rules and has done some good. Movies depicting (too explicitly for hypocritical minds) acts of love between two persons can easily be forbidden.
But “entertainment” in forms that teach people to kill, instill false and perverted values and lower the barrier, inherent in all sane persons, against causing fellow beings bodily harm is allowed. The industry doing it is blossoming and exports flourish.
I don´t know all arguments against putting a stop to the madness. The reason for not wanting it is obvious, money. Or do we really enjoy belonging to a species where dominating leaders and businesses in their pursuit of happiness and wealth slowly succeeds in taking us to the civilization-level of the cancer cell?
But we surely are more efficient than the apes whether it comes to corrupting minds or killing.