I’ve been doing some thinking lately about what it takes to kill your enemy during war, and keep killing them. I’m sure I have some more thinking to do on the subject (…hey, that’s what blogs are for, no?), but I’ve come to some preliminary conclusions I want to put out there.
In the "Who Defeated the Nazi’s" thread, constant reader Phil posted an excerpt from a review of a book by Uwe Timm, a German whose brother died trying to kill Russians, but not before complaining about the way the English were bombing Germany in a letter:
The diary also reveals what Timm regards as German disregard for suffering anywhere except in Germany. [His brother] Karl-Heinz writes, " I’m worried about everyone at home, we hear reports of air raids by the English every day. If only they’d stop that filthy business. It’s not war, it’s the murder of women and children — it’s inhumane ." To which Timm responds:
"It is hard to comprehend and impossible to trace the way sympathy and compassion in the face of suffering could be blanked out, while a distinction emerged between humanity at home and humanity here in Russia. In Russia, the killing of civilians is normal, everyday work, not even worth mentioning; at home it is murder. . . . I have now read other diaries and letters of the time; some observe the suffering of the civilian population and express outrage, others speak of the killing of civilians — Jews and Russians alike — as the most natural thing in the world. The language they’ve been fed makes killing easier: inferior human beings, parasites, vermin whose lives are dirty, degenerate, brutish. Smoking them out is a hygienic measure."
That strikes me as the essence of maintaining the will to kill: "the way sympathy and compassion in the face of suffering could be blanked out," but whereas Timm feels it’s impossible to trace, I feel there must be some identifiable paths to this state of mind.
So I asked myself: If you want to maintain your nation’s willingness to kill other people, what emotional strings do you pull? What tools do you use to blank out sympathy and compassion in the face of suffering?
Now you all know I opposed the invasion of Iraq, so I’m not going to pretend I’m objective here. I will attempt to be fair though. I think there are three primary tools nations can use to maintain their populace’s will to kill: fear, information operations, and the rhetoric of "the other."