Our children need to be carefully taught . . . to hate their true enemies
Bookworm on Sep 04 2009 at 10:29 am | Filed under: Uncategorized
Back in the 1950s, after WWII and as America grappled with Jim Crow, Oscar Hammerstein wrote about the way in which people have to be “carefully taught” to hate:
You’ve got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught
From year to year,
It’s got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught.You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught!
That may have been true then, but we’ve gone too far the other way. Our children are being carefully taught that there are no enemies. I take issue with that at American Thinker:
Back in 1991, during the First Gulf War, the media was awash with profiles of American troops expressing sympathy for the pathetic Iraqi soldiers Saddam Hussein had placed in the desert opposite American tanks. The stories definitely showed off American magnanimity, but my parents were still horrified. Each time one of those profiles came on, one of them would holler out, “You have to hate your enemy to win a war.”
My parents knew what they were talking about. My Dad was a refuge from Germany and, once in the British military, fought the Germans all over Southern Europe and North Africa. He survived the evacuation at Crete and made a stand at El Alamein. My mother spent her war years interned in a Japanese concentration camp.
Aside from native fortitude and the blessing of youth, the one thing that drove my parents them to fight and survive was hatred. They truly and deeply hated their enemy. Compassion was not a part of the equation.
Read the rest here.
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12 Responses to “Our children need to be carefully taught . . . to hate their true enemies”
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BW, as always, you post items that are not only incisive in themselves but also broad in their implications.
I’d like to sketch a few conjectures on why we, or at least our intelligentsia, bend over backwards to deny the reality of modern enemies:
1) I think that it is essentially a form of wish fulfillment, i.e., if I don’t hate them, they won’t hate me. Unfortunately, this approach founders on the simple fact that it takes two to make peace but only one to make war. It is a slippery slope from the disappointment of high-minded intentions down to the practice of cowardly appeasement, and all too easy to rationalize one’s motives along the way.
2) There is a closely related second psychological mechanism connected to the desire for a rational and humane society. It contains a worthy germ of moral idealism within and depends on the (overvalued) power of good intentions and the idea of reciprocity. Again, if I demonstrate my good intentions and rationality, surely the “other” will do the same in return. But what happens if, instead of a handshake, I get punched in the nose? Clearly, good intentions are not enough, and not everyone is rational (at least not rational on the same scale; otherwise, what good is multi-culturalism?. The Left is incoherent and thus self-contradictory here.)
3) The liberal cocoon. Victor Davis Hanson has done a wonderful job of skewering the mentality behind the EU conflict resolution model in a therapeutic world. It’s not bad for Europe, given its bloody history. But the model only works if, in George Orwell’s words,
4) Kant is the great philosophical progenitor of the twin themes of good intentionality and political rationality. He wrote an influential essay entitled “On Perpetual Peace”. His modern day descendent in social contract theory is the enormously influential John Rawls.
5) Kant was reacting against a Hobbesian state of nature, a war of all against all, which is the natural state of international relations. Hence the desire for a world government to create a kind of peace.
6) This desire for a world government is one reason why the Left denies American exceptionalism and denigrates American sovereignty at every opportunity. Multiculturalism is merely a stalking horse; it is theoretically incoherent, and is therefore really just another form of self-loathing.
7) The liberal impulse for inclusion provides another reason to deny the existence of enemies: If there is no “us vs. them”, then there can be no war. (An obvious fallacy but psychologically appealing.) Historically, liberals have sought to continually expand the franchise–democratic rights, voting rights, economic rights, civil rights, social rights (gay marriage), etc… — so from their perspective, why not give health care to illegal aliens, or rights to animals (I am NOT equating illegal aliens with animals; the idea is to demonstrate a perpetual widening of the political horizon). This impulse also fits in nicely with the Left’s desire for egalitarianism (i.e., leveling).
9) I might add that it is an unrealistic form of moral vanity and condecension to think that we are so mighty and morally pure good that we can win wars with one hand tied behind our back. War is a grave business.
10) Finally, intellectuals tend to value words over deeds and are not noted for their physical courage.
I apologize for the numerous typos in the hastily-written piece above. (Had to pick up a kid and as it was kept him waiting an extra ten minutes at the high school.) The omitted quote from George Orwell was the familiar “”People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf”
Just got word from my better half and teacher extraordinaire that the word came down from her Liberal-leaning school district administration in our Liberal-leaning community that children in her school district will NOT (I repeat, NOT) be allowed to interrupt their studies to watch the Messiah’s address but that teachers, but only if they want to, can tape the speech for future reference.
Believe me, even the most Liberal teachers won’t bother.
Yay!
gpc31, your #1 is a thoroughly wonderful, fantastic piece of commentary. It’s awesome.
I’d recommend a re-edit and have Book post it in the main page. Book?
Danny #3,
Wonderful news on a Friday! When even the most liberal institutions are seeing through this for the shameless propaganda schmeil spiel that it is, there is hope for America. Today the Administration is trying to say that they just want to tell the kiddos to study hard and succeed. You wanna bet that that may be what they actually end up doing, now that it is blowing up in their faces? No… I actually STILL think he’s going to tell the kiddos to tell their parents how important their health care is, and that he, President Obama, REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY Cares About Their Health Too. So Pass That Bill! Sheeesh.
We’ll see.
Book and gpc31
This was truly a gospel moment – can I get a witness!
A (Book’s) call and (gpc31) response.
Amen & Hallelujah
I want to chime in, too: gpc31, masterful. Commentary like yours is why this is my favorite site.
Compassion can be shown to the enemy. But only once they are vanquished. Magnanimity may be extended to your opponent. But not until they have been defeated.
Any other way lies madness.
Thank you Mike, Sadie, Charles, Book, all. You are way too kind. In this case, I just took a small magnifying glass and was able to focus all the surrounding light that everyone here generates. It’s a great site.
I’m a johnnie-come-lately here…
Of course you have to hate your enemy. At least to a certain extent. You’re expecting soldiers to shoot at them in order to kill or at least maim them. Do you really want your soldiers to shoot at those they consider “friends” or “objects of pity”?
So I agree with your mother, and also agree that the entire purpose of the tone of the articles was to foment sympathy at home, so that the American public would turn on their soldiers – who were killing and maiming such a pitiful enemy. That’s much of what they did in the Vietnam war – publicized the poverty and terrible living conditions of the No Vietnamese – but not the horrendous barbarous things the NKs did. It’s a terrible propaganda crusade, carried on by fellow citizens and basically intended to undermine the country. They are treasonous people, the press.
Most people have lived their entire lives under the social contract that is America. People agree to support the Constitution and not break the laws, and in return they are given the protection of the law and the guarantee of certain fundamental human rights by the US Constitution.
However, in the larger world at hand, there is no such thing as the US Constitution and there may not even be such a thing as the ‘law’. The ‘law’ in the rest of the world can be loosely characterized as the will of the powerful stamping their boot heel on the necks of the weak. Reference Rwanda, Saddam, Putin, and China.
When confronted with a threat on the micro level, most Americans respond with what they have been taught works: social responses. They plead, they argue, they reason, they attempt to compromise or make deals or have an exchange, when in reality, a serial killer wants one thing and there is no compromise. He has the power necessary to get what he wants and you don’t have the power to refuse. People recognize that fundamental nature, and so they call out for laws to protect them. But laws can’t protect them against people that don’t care to obey the law. It’s a social contract, which means people must willingly obey it to make it work.
When taken on the macroscopic scale, people become uncomfortable with declaring war and seeking to kill America’s enemies. They have always and forever been taught that if they have a problem, that they should go and see an authority figure or somebody that cares. Tell a teacher, they said, if there is a bully. Call the police, if there is a crime. Never, ever does modern society in America recommend that individuals take the power of sovereignty in their own hands and end the problem themselves. But that is often exactly what is required. It works.
Most normal people won’t try to kill serial killers. So why should they seek to kill Saddam, someone who seeks to kill Americans? There’s no personal experience for them to fall back on, and given their ignorance of international affairs, that is enough to disarm them against enemy propaganda calling out for United Nations intervention, and International Law, and all that clap trap. It also becomes easy for people to be demoralized by war casualties, since most people’s natural reaction to a serial killer rampaging through their peers and friends is to run away: escape, withdraw, beat a windward path. If they care enough about their peers and friends, they may seek to help them escape as well (send the troops home) but it doesn’t mean they get all fired up about ending the threat. They couldn’t care less if that serial killer went on to another house and slaughtered the family there, so long as people got their own personal priorities safeguarded. It takes a peculiar kind of person to charge the threat itself, seeking to protect others.
The solution, as always, is to change the behavior and world views of the individual, to create more competition and initiative at the bottom, not at the top.
Most Americans, I dare say, simply do not understand why it is necessary to shoot to kill. After all, the gun (like American military might) is omnipotent, so why can’t you shoot to wound, to disarm? Why do you have to kill, when you have all the power on your side?
In truth, you don’t have all the power on your side. That’s not how wars work. That’s not how violent encounters work. It’s one person doing it to another person. When you stop, hesitate to, perhaps, give the foe a breathing space, you may find out (if you survive later) that he is now getting violence done on you.
Many intellectuals are comfortable thinking about a problem, but not actually using their intellect to attempt to resolve the problem. They always excuse themselves based upon some artificial construct, such as “the solution is through the UN”. Whereas, if they really thought about it, they would recognize the flaws inherent in such an approach. But their views aren’t based upon logic or reason, but on faith. They won’t change their assumptions, even though they could if they had wanted to. Violence, after all, is never the solution. All else then follows. If violence is never the solution, then the serial killer gets to have a monopoly on violence. That is a very comforting thought should you or your family fall under such a gaze, I am sure.
Target Focus Training, is in essence, a system designed to make you focus on targets, on destroying them. Your society never taught you this. Nor did your job, your family, nor your role models. Most people’s role models recommended peace (MLK), obedience, and proto-typical social responses. There are a substantial minority in America that have had ancestors that taught them the real deal, of course, but that minority is not enough to overcome the final majority of the ‘muddy middle’ (scared and afraid) and the ‘youth corps’ (naive and ignorant). But again, nobody is unable to learn these things. They just have not. And America suffers for it both domestically (gang crime) and foreign policy wise (Saddam, Iran, etc).
America needs more competition. People should not be kept in a locked box and told that this is their universe, as was the case for Duggard. There is a greater world beyond them than simply the social contract that they have been taught to obey, at the pain of death, in this great and peaceful land called the United States of America. Tyranny is born of a lack of competition, a lack of struggle. And the blood of both tyrants and patriots will be called for when it is time to eradicate tyranny once more.