| In The Psychoanalysis of war, still the most important book ever written on this topic, Franco Fornari says that war is a "voluntary destruction of previously accumulated resources of human capital, an act performed with the implicit intention to sacrifice a certain number of lives." Proceeding with this empirical statement that war causes the death of young men, Fornari cites Gaston Bouthoul as follows:
War is deferred infanticide, a voluntary destructive institution, the aim of which is the elimination of young men. War thus appears to be a recurrent social function, characterized by the accumulation of human capital, a part of which, at a given moment, is brutally ejected.
Deferred infanticide: men are permitted to grow up to a certain age (eighteen), then some of them are killed in battle.
Warfare might be viewed as a kind of child abuse--or as the abuse of young men (the most abused class of people in history). Of course, we all know this (200 million men died as a result of war in the Twentieth Century), but we paper it over: call men heroes, honorable and patriotic, etc. to pretending that abuse is a form of glory.
Men are courageous enough to fight in battle, but are too cowardly to face the reality of their abused state of being, which they prefer to call "masculinity."
This is an interesting dialectic: the submissive, passive nature of men who consent to go to war--and their portrayal as real men. It's a sad phenomenon. A terrifying reality. When people talk about war (it's happening on television today), they talk about the deaths of "women and children," as if men don't count: their job is to die (for the country).
We portray men as aggressive warriors, as Carolyn Marvin puts it, so we don't have to feel guilty about causing their deaths (killing them).
Marvin calls the killing or sacrificing of young men the "totem secret." It's the secret that keeps civilization alive. As long as men are dying for their countries, everything is all right.
Putin acts in the name of civilization. Mass-murder in the name of a "beloved" country. Keeping the old game alive: as long as people are dying for countries (it doesn't matter which country), the template perpetuates itself: till death do us part."
Am I writing about ancient history when I write incessantly about the First World War? Nope. That is where societal mass-murder got its start in the Twentieth Century. The distance between the First World War and what is happening today is about twenty minutes. It's the same template. Slaughter in the name of nations. Keeping the game alive. The specious present. The repetition compulsion.
Of course, in today's world, women can be killed as well as men. It's part of the movement toward equality.
Richard Koenigsberg
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