Trying to Understand People

--by Robert Arvay

 

Most people tend to be restricted to their own social circles, rarely interacting with people far outside their sphere.  The wealthy associate mostly with their peers, the poor with the poor, and people in the middle with their neighbors.

 

Those who are most likely to read this commentary, tend to be interested in academic subjects, social theories, and the arts and sciences.  They gravitate toward each other, and usually avoid people outside their social and economic class.  Most people are not interested in the kinds of subjects that interest me, and presumably you, since you are still reading this. 

 

Most people are only peripherally interested in the larger society, and only on certain occasions.  Otherwise, the things they care about are less intellectual.  They involve themselves in tasks, in making money, in seeking pleasure.  Most people, in all classes, show some degree of dishonesty, and among the poor, they tend to be more physically violent, and more abruptly so, than people of comfortable means.  Of course, exceptions abound, but they are after all, exceptions.

 

The poor tend to be less educated than the economic higher classes, a fact which increases their tendency toward poverty.  Those who strive to be better educated are often stymied in their efforts, first by educators whose personal self-interests compete with their students, and even by the culture of poverty, where learning is considered “acting white.”

 

One altruistic teacher who visited some of his seemingly intelligent, but poorly performing, students, was dismayed by the chaotic environment of inner-city poverty.  Amid the continuous, loud, raucous cacophony of music and violence, it was all but impossible to focus on study.  There was no realistic escape from those circumstances.

 

Out-of-wedlock motherhood is well known to be a severe disabling factor that impedes upward mobility, and it is exacerbated by loosening standards of sexual morality.

 

Among the upper economic classes, the disconnection with the lower classes is profound.  Many people in the upper group promote theories that seem to them to be commonsense solutions to poverty, but which make matters only worse.  They are no more moral or hardworking than those in the lower class, but they can more easily find social environments which are conducive to their wellbeing.

 

In the middle, the average working man has little time or energy remaining in which to actively involve himself in his community.  He tends to be far more interested in sports than in politics, far more likely to visit bars and nightclubs than libraries, and sadly, willing to abdicate his parental responsibilities to a corrupt education system and government.

 

Drug addiction and alcohol abuse have greatly increased the morbid behavior of large numbers of people in all classes.  These social ills are literally killing tens of thousands of people, and ruining the lives of their loved ones.  Especially tragic is the incidence of child neglect, and worse.

 

People are not inherently good, but they are redeemable.  That is the true condition of human nature.  The sooner that is recognized, the better society will become.

.

 

 

Trying to Understand War: the Why

--by Robert Arvay

Why do nations go to war?  Some of the answers seem obvious, but others are mystifying.

On the one hand, nations go to war for what they deem practical reasons.  They compete for scarce resources, they vie for territory, and sometimes, they suspect that if they do not strike first, their enemies will.

On the other hand, sometimes they go to war for ideological reasons, or over religious differences, or other causes that are not directly connected to their practical interests.  Unlike territorial wars, ideological wars seem never to end.  Even if a warring party’s military force is destroyed, its territory seized, and its leaders killed, somehow, the ideology continues to be a motivating dynamic.  The worldwide terrorist cells have demonstrated that.

World War Two seems to be the clearest example of many aspects of warfare, and is illustrative of war in general, not only because of its enormous scope and magnitude, but the historical factors that led up to it and caused it.

Although historians pin down the date of the beginning of that war to 1939, actual fighting had begun well before that.  The Spanish Civil War began (historically) in 1936, a war in which the Nazi Luftwaffe modernized its combat capabilities.

The Japanese invaded Manchuria even earlier than that, in 1931, making clear its expansionist intentions and its cruel methods of conquest.  A further irony is that Japan invaded Korea in 1910, well before the onset of World War One, a war in which Japan sided with Britain and the United States against Germany.

To understand how these and other nations came to participate in World War Two, we must look first at the leaders of the aggressor nations, and later, at their followers.  After all, wars are not fought by territories or ideologies, but by actual people.

Three of the most infamous leaders were:  the Japanese Emperor, Hirohito, the German Chancellor, Hitler, and the Russian dictator, Stalin.  (Notably, we have skipped past Italian dictator Mussolini, and Chinese warlord Chiang-Kai-Shek.  Please be patient.)

All three of these men were sociopaths, utterly indifferent to the suffering of others, and interested only in their own perceived wellbeing.  They surrounded themselves with equally brutal and uncaring acolytes who did their bidding.  (Hirohito’s situation was a bit more complicated, but he nevertheless made no effort to moderate the butchery which was carried out in his name.)

Stalin is listed as an aggressor, even though he eventually joined the Alliance with Britain, France and the United States (among others) against Germany and its allies, including Japan.  Stalin initially sided with Hitler, agreeing to divide the invaded nation of Poland between them, the invasion which officially launched World War Two.

Hitler is possibly the best-known arch-villain of the era, and certainly was not exceeded in his psychopathic crimes, but Hirohito and Stalin were equally culpable.

As for Chiang and Mussolini, they are less remembered, perhaps somewhat less evil, but nevertheless brutal conquerors.

Mussolini had invaded Ethiopia, in hopes of establishing a new Roman Empire.  His ability to organize and control a functioning dictatorship was admired by Hitler, who considered him a role model.  In the long run, however, Mussolini’s Italian military machine never became as powerful, nor as brutal, nor as effective, as the German and Japanese armed forces did.  Italian partisans killed him.

Chiang-Kai-Shek, the Chinese nationalist leader, was already at war with Japan before the United States declared war, so he was happy to join with the Allies.  Chiang was, however, more similar to Stalin than to Churchill.  Chiang was a warlord, a would-be dictator, and as much an enemy of Chinese communist tyrant Mao as he was of Hirohito.  Japan was, however, the immediate threat, and therefore Chiang invited American and British forces into his borders, promising to send his Nationalist Army into the fray, a promise which was often broken whenever Chiang had other self-interests at the moment.

The Americans, British and other Allied nations (notably France and the Netherlands) had already established economic interests in China, long before the war began.  The Americans and British, much to their national shame as we look back on it, had used force to impose the opium trade in China, a trade which inflicted immense suffering and death on the Chinese people.  The Japanese, in part, were able to use such colonialist abuses as a convenient pretext, an excuse, for attacking American and British (and other) forces in Asia.

While there can be no excuse for enforcing an opium market, this crime, as serious as it was, pales by contrast, to the vicious mass murders, of millions, committed by the Japanese and Germans from beginning to end.  Had the leaders of those two nations ordered the forces under their command to be more merciful, many unimaginable atrocities could have been avoided.

There is little point in listing the gruesome details of those atrocities, but by no means should those atrocities be overlooked, not only as a factor during the conduct of the war, but in its origins.

No less important is the fact that literally millions of underlings were willing to personally carry out those atrocities.  It is highly doubtable that American, British and Dutch soldiers could have been persuaded to murder innocent men, women and children up close and personally, without fomenting disorder in the ranks.  Even German soldiers sometimes objected to their orders, and the German commanders found it necessary to minimize the involvement of the ordinary German soldier, selecting instead a cadre of sociopaths.  The American and British soldiers were inculcated in a culture that would have prevented nearly all of them from gratuitous acts of needless cruelty.

It is a sad commentary on human nature that the Nazis found little difficulty in getting cooperation from large numbers of private citizens, not only German, but even French, Ukrainians and others, with the major notable exception being their ally, the Italians, who declined to round up Jews.  Hitler did not cause the Holocaust by himself; he was abetted by large numbers of willing killers.

The Japanese also fielded forces which willingly carried out war crimes, against both military captives and civilian populations.  While the European Holocaust gets the majority of the public attention, and not undeservedly, the Asian Holocaust should not be considered less tragic.  While Hitler gave orders to exterminate people whom he deemed as subhuman, Hirohito shielded himself behind men whom he knew were committing unspeakable crimes against innocent people on a massive scale—and he said nothing.

For the Japanese leaders, the motives for war were economic and territorial, purely the greed for power.  For the ordinary Japanese soldier, the motive was more religious in nature, the worship of Hirohito, whom they were told was a god.  Whether they actually believed that or not, to deny it was to suffer death for themselves, and unbearable humiliation for their families, if not their outright murder.  Indeed, to refuse to intentionally commit suicide for the Emperor was considered not merely cowardice, but treason.  So instead of surrender, Japanese lives were squandered by their own leaders, by the many hundreds of thousands, in futile battles that were lost before they began.

Fast forward to the present time.  Millions of people around the world are Moslems.  The scriptural teachings of Islam are harsh, allowing no freedom of expression, and demanding total obedience not only in matters of formal worship, but in every aspect of daily life.  The West considers these teachings to be misogynist and homophobic.  Ironically, Western Progressives advocate further Islamization of their countries.

For most Moslems, the teachings are little more than academic.  Even so, most Moslems express agreement with the Koran (their religion’s scripture), and a great many offer financial support to terrorists, at least when pressed.  They do not, at present, rise up en masse and wage open war against the so-called infidels.  Indeed, most Moslems killed in battle are killed by other Moslems.

The practice of terrorism among Moslems is no small thing.  It is likely that a majority of Moslems prefer to live a life of material prosperity rather than suffer violent jihad, but a significantly high number of them do wage violent war against unbelievers.  The atrocities they commit do not result in the same level of public outcry by Moslems that one would expect from Christians if Christians did comparable things.

The terrorist leaders are all sociopaths.  All, or nearly all, of their active fighters are also willing murderers and practitioners of torture.

Within Moslem dominated countries, large swathes of the populations give active support to their leaders.  For whatever reason, public murders, that is openly committed murders, can occur on a moment’s notice against anyone who commits a violation that in the West would result at worst in moderate punishments, or none at all.  Moslem women and girls are often publicly murdered by their own families if their behavior is deemed to have offended the family honor, and again, such behaviors would normally be considered trivial in the West.

Warfare in Moslem areas is often caused by a mix of territorial interests and religious ideology.  Iran, for example, seeks not only a worldwide caliphate of imams, but also, political, economic and military dominance of the Persian Gulf region.  Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, used Islam as a pretext, while acting otherwise according to his secular interests.

In China, warfare has for millennia been studied and developed into an art form.  The Art of War, by Sun Tzu, remains a classic of military literature even after about 2,400 years.

Today, the world faces the prospect of war between the United States and China, a war that might possibly engulf Western Europe, Russia, and Korea.

The factors trending toward war in Asia are mostly economic, with ideology being important but subordinate.  At present, the United States is the world’s preeminent economic powerhouse, due primarily to its mostly free (by comparison) capitalist system.  China has long been increasing its economic power, and has ambitious plans to supplant the US economy.  To that end, they have grudgingly permitted a degree of capitalist competition into their economic structure, but Chinese capitalism is severely hampered by its total subordination to its dictatorial system, which is often capricious and corrupt, as well as being distrustful of yielding power to wealthy corporate executives.

The competition between the US and China has recently become increasingly hard fisted.  The US is insisting that China cease its long-term practice of defrauding American businesses, a practice which previous US governments have protested but done nothing to stop.  The Chinese, for their part, however dishonest their business model is, may feel that to yield now to American pressure will destabilize their power structure, which in China, could be fatal to its leaders.

Moreover, the Chinese have been consistently building up their military forces, even to the extent of building islands in international waters, which thereafter they claim as sovereign territory, demanding that foreign navies steer clear of them.  The US has repeatedly made show-of-force incursions into those waters, demonstrating that the Chinese claim of sovereignty in those areas will not be accepted as legitimate.

It should not be forgotten that when in the 1940s the US stymied Japanese aggression in the Pacific, the Japanese responded by bombing Pearl Harbor.  There is a similar risk now, but this time, for both potential adversaries. While we should be cautious of backing the Chinese dictator into a corner from which he feels it necessary to attack militarily, the Chinese also should fear provoking the US into a major conflict.

Several recent technological developments have likely changed the face of warfare.  Methods of attack now include electro-magnetic-pulse weapons, which can disable a nation’s entire system of communications, transport, and banking, among others.  Another form of attack is known as cyber-warfare, the use of various internet and computer hacking tools, to disable those same infrastructure elements.  Espionage can be conducted by cyber or other secretive methods, including satellite or earthbound instruments.

In the end, wars are launched by leaders whose motives may be highly laudable, suspect, or a mixture of both.

They are won or lost by brave, determined warriors, who place their own lives on the line for the rest of us.

 

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