Let us weigh two evils
against one another: rape and warfare. Wherever they are not equated in action,
as a “strategy”, the one is condemned as though it were the basest of human
evils, whilst the other is exalted as though it were the noblest of human
sacrifices. Both are acts of violence, involving some considerable element of
risk to the actor, guaranteeing suffering, almost invariably, to at least one
of the parties. One of the two is an example that, once followed, propagates
the deaths of millions, yet the other only tends to result in death when the
aggressor fears for his or her own well-being after the fact, or when the
resistance with which he or she is met is in itself so violent that he or she
must resort to surpassing means to surmount it. (I must confess that, at this
moment, I speak like an amateur tactician.) One of these evils is carried out
by highly regimented mobs of unthinking people, mostly men, who act under
orders and appeal to vague notions of “collective” or “national” identity; the
other is most often carried out by individuals who consistently provide their
own, imaginative justifications for the violence. Both are carried out to serve
a fairly basic human interest, though the warrior tends often to fight to seize
power, whereas the rapist wants only to feel sexual satisfaction. One is
considered inevitable to human life, whereas the other is considered
intolerable. Imagine if conservative men raised their sons to be rapists
instead of warriors!! How does one reconcile, therefore, this cognitive
dissonance? As we have learned by now in our maturity, experience can do
nothing to contend with logical contradiction; it only reinforces the
desperation with which the thinker must produce a solution. One solution would
of course be that of radical(ly) satirical action: for instance, to hold a food
drive for rapists fighting the good fight. Another is to establish a new form
of moral hierarchy, one informed by the principle of non-violence instead of
the pursuit of power in “groups”. I can say, with some certainty, that I owe
nothing to temperamentally violent people who must find an outlet for their
baser instincts through “national identity”. I can hardly imagine any set of
circumstances wherein I might call that a “service”, and I would seldom
hesitate to venerate the rapist with surpassing honours, for his or her example
is one that I might wish to follow should I believe that a need more basic than
the will to power could truly be fulfilled by no other avenue. I would, of course,
present this case before the General Public in the format of a public service
announcement, since there is plenty of evidence to suggest that most adults
prefer to have sex. (I should note, however, that I have found absolutely no
evidence for either the phenomenon of “sex trafficking” nor the equally absurd
statistic which claims that people in their teens and twenties, ON AVERAGE,
manage to so bypass every legal stricture and moral convention that they first
mate before they reach thirty years of age, even in so repressive a society as
the United States.) Supposing also that someone were to contend that he or she
was not an aggressor but simply “answered the Call of Duty” by responding to an
external aggressor, I would be speechless, only because one knows the relevant
retorts by the time on reaches Middle School:
1.
How can you be certain that the Other is
the instigator?
2.
How are you less guilty for fighting
back?
3.
Why presume upon the integrity of the
status quo?
Yet none of these
retorts seem to hold up against the greatest intoxicant of ethical thought: the
Group. And that is one drug I have yet to take, and which I stay avoid at every
corner where it may be sold.
It’s obvious what
motivates the Individual to “take up arms against” foreign agents. One fears
for one’s own well-being, including all that one belongs to and all that
belongs to one’s self. It would be comforting if such a concern could be
universalized, but instead of beginning to consider that the aggressor has already
thought it through, one instead seeks solidarity with some wretched FRACTION
(otherwise spelled “faction”) of the Global Family and begins to take part
directly in the destruction and betrayal of this family. While such acts of
self-defense are understandable in small communities, such AS families, wherein
one has grown sufficiently accustomed to the aggressor so much so that domestic
abuse is something one cannot project any honour upon, it is precisely BECAUSE
people can be so violent once cut off from the General Human Body that simply
fighting to “protect one’s family” (the originally violent environment) is
paradoxical. The outcome is even more disastrous when that family is the
Nation. It seems that only identification with the Species truly produces harmonious
results, for the Human Species has produced enough civilized ideals to account
for actual heroism: the protection of the Global Environment, human and
non-human. How is one to protect the Species whilst murdering members of it?
One might entertain the conceit of disowning enemy combatants from the Human
Family, as if on the authority of a patriarch. One might begin to imagine that
others are perverse genetically. Yet any movement in such a depraving and
delusional direction would only assure that those who are most well-acquainted
with one’s self regard one’s self as being doubly base. One might project the
virtues of a gender role such as “being-a-man” upon the act of warfare, yet
this would never stand the test of reason; one would have to institute a double-standard
by which other violent men, such as rapists and robbers, are scapegoats for the
sins of all men. Perhaps in such a paradigm women too could participate, as
though part of the war effort, by insisting that rapists are simply those men
who lack the “courage” to be warriors? But what courage can be found in
numbers, when one acts not on one’s own devices, when every action of one’s
body is absolved of responsibility because some stranger, to whom superiority
is arbitrarily accorded, commands it? Who decides what interpretation of an “order”
is valid? Clearly, the adult male must laugh upon the entire process, since it
is such a hysterically tragic subversion of the entire process of maturation:
the Growth of the Mind as an Autonomous Agent. The rapist RETAINS that; the
warrior surrenders it “with valour”. It is disturbing, furthermore, to imagine
that any man who is not violent ENOUGH to “win a lady’s favour” (as though ladies
still favoured gentlemen, who must by definition remain “gentle”) would sooner
be suspected of a predisposition to rape than the warrior. Clearly even the most
retarded Freudian (or is “regressive” the progressive term?) would not think to
dismiss all moral deductions to this end as though they were MERELY the
sublimation of sexual frustration in an “inferior man”, for that would be
tantamount to saying “you want to rob me of my right to genocide just because
you can’t get laid like I can.” It is self-interested, indeed.
I suppose that our
last line of defense lies in this: that the Pacifist knows not where his own
Goodness comes from, and that only through the disciplined used of violence can civilized ideals be protected from
undisciplined violence. But how has our
hard-nosed advocate treated the obverse: undisciplined Peace? How many insecure
men would not outwardly open fire upon peace-loving hippies, whether they
trespass upon the Public Office Buildings or simply his manicured lawn? And
what about the disciplined use of
non-violence, such as the likes of King, Gandhi, and Gyatso have demonstrated
in every generation to be effective? How
would you classify this very article? It might move you to violence in the
defense of Every Thing Which You Believe In, (welcome to the Real World, as
they say) but am I the aggressor, truly? The answer to that can be found in one
last question: who is truly attacked? A human being, or an all-too-human ego?
If
it’s the latter, better go back to rape, for the sake of the body count.
[({Dm.A.A.)}]
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