Warlike and maladjusted

Warlike and maladjusted
The gap that has emerged between those in favor of war and those in favor of peace is based on an ability that some have and others do not: empathy.

The new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer visited the White House last week. Not just to introduce himself. No, he wanted to get something else out of outgoing US President Joe Biden: permission to allow the Ukrainians to use British long-range missiles on Russian soil. This story makes it quite clear, without much expertise, how the hierarchy in NATO-West is set up: the British ask the Americans, the Ukrainians ask the British. Stamer's efforts were presented in the media as a marginal note – often they were not even mentioned. Yet the use of Western long-range missiles in this still limited war would be the West's final entry into the war. The Russian president has already formulated it that way – and promised to relax his nuclear doctrine.

by Roberto J. De Lapuente

[This article posted on 9/18/2024 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.manova.news/artikel/kriegstuchtig-und-verhaltensgestort.]

The talks in Washington would have been worth a top story. But in Germany, they were just one item among many. Isn't the attempt to finally help a third world war into the cudgels big news? Apparently not. Not in Germany – because, as we have known since the last election evening in Saxony and Thuringia, when ARD and ZDF claimed in unison that concerns about a growing war did not determine the election result in any way, peace does not move people. This was repeated so obsessively that it quickly became clear: something quite big is being played down here.

What war is
While the German Chancellor suddenly spoke for a moment like a bringer of peace and declared negotiations possible, his defense minister made it clear a few days ago that Western weapons striking Moscow would be unobjectionable under international law. In this country, war and the willingness to finally be ready for war are discussed as if it were the mundane question of whether to accept a neighbor's invitation to a barbecue next Saturday or to stay away. Many people use the word “war” as casually as others use the word “sunshine.” Readiness for war is mentioned in passing, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. As if it were the most normal thing in the world.

War is mentioned as a sterile topos, a place that is subject to a certain control – which is forced upon you, but which also passes: Then you just fight. If it has to be, then it has to be! This fatalism ignores what war is at the core of its essence. Of course, you can imagine that you will see some dead bodies in a war. Maybe someone fighting by my side will be shot right in front of me. Of course, you can't rule that out. Even this idea is still too sterile, too clean and hygienic – like a crime thriller from the 1950s, in which murdered corpses were draped strangely alive and free of blood.

War must be imagined in the most drastic of images. If it is not a nuclear strike, but conventional war, then we are not just talking about dead bodies that will be seen before our very eyes. No, we will witness bestial brutalities. Skulls will burst open from our wounded neighbor, brain matter will be sprayed. You wade in blood, holding the spilling innards in your comrade's torso while he cries out for his mother and can no longer hold his excrement.

The stench of decomposing human beings becomes your constant companion. Sometimes only the forgotten leg of an unknown soldier stinks away, somewhere under collapsed walls.

Death, which comes in this brutal way to those who experience war, makes no distinction between soldiers, women, children and the elderly.

Those who today talk openly about being ready for war should think about this. And they should ask themselves how they think they will ever be able to forget. The truth is: they will not forget. Those who experience war in this way will never leave war. Their life will be a continuous war, even later in the deepest peace. A glance at war veterans is enough to see that.

Many report that they are still at war. Night after night. Sometimes during the day. They stay away from the barbecue because it smells of burnt meat and that brings back memories. How many of those husbands and fathers who returned from World War II and helped build the new West Germany had a drinking problem? Countless numbers were prone to violence. Or they simply remained closed and unsolvable secrets for their sons and daughters – and their wives. They were eternal strangers and troublemakers in families.

Do you have to have experienced that?
If today one speaks so succinctly of the willingness to accept a war, all this would have to be considered. War has a tendency to get out of control and transform the face of the earth into a hell. Brutality is inevitable. Quite a few soldiers use intoxicants that they can get hold of. The German military used a perverted drug during the last war: amphetamines, a form of what many people today consume as crystal meth. The military had specifically ordered the drug from the pharmaceutical industry, knowing that it would be necessary to intoxicate its troops so that they could endure the stresses of war. Norman Ohler provides eloquent information about this in his book “The Total High: Drugs in the Third Reich.”

Anyone who naively says yes to war should also plan for drug addiction. The intoxication that makes the conditions bearable is the ferryman on an ocean of blood.

Why doesn't this occur to those who speak so laxly of war and their willingness to go to war? Do they seriously believe that it is just war, that it will end after a while, and then it will continue as it was before? Where does this grandiose naivety come from, to act as if one could simply shrug off such a turning point? We live in a society today that cannot bear false gender pronouns, in which people plunge into a life crisis because of this and urgently demand a protective space from politics.

If they already perceive this as brutal, as brutal: how unspeakably traumatic must the moment be for many in this society when the first dead lie in the streets, disfigured and blown to a bloody pulp?

The generations that experienced the last world war knew this. They didn't talk about it. Our grandparents may have told us something about air raids, about collapsed houses, bombed streets. But they usually left out the details. For us – and for themselves. Who likes to remember how dehumanized a war dead can sometimes be? It is better to repress it, not to conjure it up. It was too hard to escape the trauma.

The 68ers reproached their parents' generation for this. They should finally come to terms with it, come clean — of course, desire was the right of youth, which one claims for oneself without knowing life. Of course, many of the old people remained silent because they did not want to and could not name the crimes — but to some extent they also remained silent because hell is not a place one likes to remember.

To now state that you have to have seen the war in order to visualize it would reduce this article to absurdity. The author has not seen war. Not in reality. Only in film: my first movie theater film was “Stalingrad” by Joseph Vilsmaier.

I discovered the cinema late, I was 15 years old when that film was released in 1993. Where others report “Bernard and Bianca” as their first cinematic experience, for me it was this German film with images of Wehrmacht soldiers going to the dogs. “Stalingrad” is an anti-war film, and as such it is unbridled, ruthless and cruel. Many such anti-war films followed. They showed me the horror without false filters. Fortunately for me, it wasn't enough for me to have a real war experience! Have those who peddle war never even seen films about the suffering of war?

Age of the maladjusted
What it definitely takes to understand the danger is imagination and empathy. But empathy is repeatedly neglected in this society. Not only when it comes to the question of war or peace. Just think back to the time of the coronavirus. There was one part of society that was able to empathize with what it must be like for a grandmother to have to eke out her existence in a nursing home, isolated and without visitors – and there were those who quite obviously gave it no thought at all.

Some could literally feel what it must have been like for children who were told that they were endangering the lives of their grandparents. But even if they were not directly affected, they could still relate to the situation. The others could not understand what it meant for a child's mind.

There is often talk of division and how the patterns of division from the pandemic years simply spilled over into the complex of issues surrounding the war in Ukraine. If you want to summarize in a nutshell what it is that divides us, then you could say: empathy or the lack of it. Some people have it and put themselves in the shoes of others – but others don't have this ability, they only feel for themselves and thus look at everything that happens solely from their own perspective.

A lack of empathy is classified medically as a dissocial personality disorder. This is generally accompanied by an excessive sense of self and thus an overemphasis on one's own importance, with a simultaneous lack of emotional depth. In a number of political debates, this pattern of behavior is evident in many people. This behavioral disorder often exhibits narcissistic traits.

It is surprising that, on the one hand, there is a social trend towards the strong emotionalization of certain topics – for example, in identity politics – but on the other hand, the emotional ability to empathize with others is neglected. But this is also explainable: it is not uncommon for the same contemporaries to lack empathy, but at the same time to react emotionally to marginal topics. For them, it seems to be a kind of displacement activity, a surrogate empathy that simulates feeling for those incapable of feeling.

The war enthusiasts of the hour, whether in prominent positions as politicians or media workers or in the private sphere, as fellow citizens who pretend to be brave, probably have a very banal behavioral disorder as a prerequisite in many cases. They are people who can no longer feel other people – and who therefore lack a certain power of imagination.

Those who approach war with glee and are unable to imagine the dangers are publicly acting out a behavioral disorder.

And although this condition is not contagious, it now seems socially imperative not to be infected by it.

Roberto J. De Lapuente, born in 1978, is a trained industrial mechanic and ran the blog ad sinistram for eight years. From 2017 to 2024, he was co-editor of the blog neulandrebellen. He was a columnist at Neues Deutschland and a regular contributor to Makroskop. Since 2022, he has been an editor at Overton Magazin. De Lapuente has a grown-up daughter and lives in Frankfurt am Main.