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I will post this at the risk of being downvoted because I am all but a pacifist and it is not a popular position. This is not surprising at all for two reasons.

I will post this at the risk of being downvoted because I am all but a pacifist and it is not a popular position. This is not surprising at all for two reasons. Despite what films will depict, people fighting on the front lines in a war do not generally begrudgingly respect each other. They hate eachother in a way most people probably cannot understand. Many would not pass up the opportunity to rid the world of what they see as the most evil upon its face unto the very last minute. The grudging respect you see discussed in documentaries comes decades later. After the continual trauma and memories of dead friends have time to fade. War beaurocracies transform people into rational psychopaths. They create an order in which a letter of the law is utmost and that letter is laid by your betters. If your betters find some purpose in ordering you to kill pointlessly, you will. We all like to think we could find the courage or clarity to disobey an unethical order. But history is much more full of compliant atrocities than righteous mutinies. Soldiers kept firing because that is the perogative that came out of the leadership black box.

admax88q 7y ago
Imagine being brainwashed to the point that you purposefully get yourself killed because you only have a minute left to kill the others.
- agapon 7y ago
  I think that the kind of brainwash that we typically think about evaporates very quickly at front lines. But the actual fighting -- trying not to get killed, seeing your comrades killed, killing in return -- is a 'brainwash' of its own.
- Rebelgecko 7y ago
  Henry Gunther's story is particularly sad. He was a sergeant who got demoted due to private after writing a friend a letter containing some antiwar comments that were perceived as cowardice. He was obsessed with regaining what he perceived as his lost honor, which is why he led a futile charge in the final moments of the war. IIRC the Germans he was charging were reluctant to actually shoot at him
- CaptArmchair 7y ago
  It wasn't so much plain brainwashing as it was a total lack of modern communication on the battlefield. Especially in 1918. Back then, communication happened via carrier pigeon, runners, telegram, telephone or telegraph. In extremely hostile conditions. Trench newspapers were the only alternate source soldiers and availability depended entirely on the situation on the ground. In fact, fighting didn't necessarily seize at 11AM all over the world because communication was hard: https://history.blog.gov.uk/2018/11/09/the-war-that-did-not-end-at-11am-on-11-november/ https://history.blog.gov.uk/2018/11/09/the-war-that-did-not-... As for the Western front in particular, it didn't help that some generals disapproved of the ceasefire and armistice: > General John Pershing, Commander of the American Expeditionary Force, did not approve of the armistice. Consequently he gave no instructions to his commanders to suspend any new offensive action during the remaining hours until 11am. This gave individual commanders latitude to determine their actions in the last few hours and in some quarters there was fierce fighting up to 11am which was difficult to stop. On 11 November alone were nearly 11,000 casualties, dead, missing and injured, exceeding those on D-Day in 1944. Over 3,500 of these were American. Pershing had to face a Congressional hearing to explain why there were so many deaths when the hour of the armistice was known in advance. Officers at the front at that time pretty much were left to their own devices. With an absolute minimum of orders or context, the 'safe' approach was to assume that the enemy might have ignored the cease fire and overwhelmed those who would have let their guard down. Being partly blind, many of them doubled down on the fighting "just in case". Let's not forget. 4 years of atrocious fighting had passed by. By then, soldiers new perfectly well that life on the front carried little value. They could only hope for a break as refusing to fight or dodging orders meant martial punishment. Plus, it wouldn't have done them any good anyway since there was little to no practical way out of that theater anyway. http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/firstworldwar/service_records/courts_martial.htm http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/firstworldwar/se...
  - DubiousPusher 7y ago
    There are many historical examples of generals and frontline troops continuing conflict after the fact for multiple reasons. Some as innocuous as communication issues. Some as numbing as military bureaucratics. Some as terrible as hatred. My point was never to attribute all such instances to hate or a desire to kill. But I see that all demonstrate well why war should be avoided at all costs.
Retric 7y ago
The 1914 Christmas truce demonstrates otherwise as five months of fighting was insufficient to guarantee hate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce It’s surprisingly difficult to train civilians to kill each other, but governments have discovered how. You don’t do it on the front lines, you do it before they get to the battle field.
- JoeAltmaier 7y ago
  Simple. March them to the front lines and say "If you don't kill them, they'll try to kill you. Go get em!" And lo and behold! they were told the same thing, so everybody starts shooting.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - natmaka 7y ago
    It works mainly because the audience was 'educated', and part of this process lets the power instill its 'values' into youngsters' brains. In most of the Western World and a not-so-distant past some Christian Church was in charge of this, and we had Crusades, clerics baptizing guns... The main cause may be the will to 'enhance' the populace by using education in order to inoculate values. We may escape by only teaching fundamentals (either politically neutral or boosting a critical mindset). Letting a central power mix proper education with its messages leads to total war.
- DubiousPusher 7y ago
  December 1914 was a very different world upon the front lines of WWI from Movember 1918. People still thought that war would looks something like the Franco-Prussian War. > You don’t do it on the front lines, you do it before they get to the battle field. I think you do it by exposing people to years of misery and loss. But a boatload of propaganda doesn't hurt.
  - jimmySixDOF 7y ago
krapp 7y ago
>Despite what films will depict, people fighting on the front lines in a war do not have a begrudgingly respect for each other. They hate eachother in a way most people probably cannot understand. Many would not pass up the opportunity to rid the world of what they see as the most evil upon its face unto the very last minute. So... either you're some kind of omniscient telepath, or you're making this insight of yours up because you believe it should be true.
- DubiousPusher 7y ago
  No. I have read a lot of history books which delve into diaries and correspondence of individuals fighting in front line situations. The respectful weighing of the other side's reasons for fighting is overwhelmed by a desire to kill them in graphic and brutal ways. This is a product of putting people under the pressure of fear of death for hours, days or weeks at a time, propagandizing the enemy as less than human and trauma from the loss of loved ones at the hands of what in modern war is an unknown enemy. This understanding escapes us in popular culture. It isn't often that HBO series or history books focus on the enmity that abides long after conflict has ceased. Those who return from war with hate still in them are our 'Taxi Driver' type villains or freaks. We don't reckon that to a certain extent everyone we send into combat has hate in them.
  - krapp 7y ago
    > I have read a lot of history books which delve into diaries and correspondence of individuals fighting in front line situations. The respectful weighing of the other side's reasons for fighting is overwhelmed by a desire to kill them in graphic and brutal ways. Odd. I've read a lot of war correspondence and history as well, being kind of addicted to that stuff on Youtube, and I haven't encountered the sort of overwhelming pathological hatred and programming you describe be mentioned often enough to assume that it applies as a near-universal constant. Are you sure you're not just taking one or two instances from, say, World War 2 and the Vietnam War and assuming all war is like Full Metal Jacket or something? It certainly seems like you're projecting.
    - 7y ago
gumby 7y ago
I’m not sure that’s true. Apparently very few shots are on target. People seem reluctant to just kill someone else. This “problem” has been ameliorated In recent times via increasingly distant and abstract warfare. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killology#The_problem_of_non-_or_mis-firing_soldiers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killology#The_problem_of_non-_...
- DubiousPusher 7y ago
  And war is full of atrocities because people just cannot being themselves to do bad things to eachother? I am not making a basic argument for the goodness or lack thereof in people. Only that war changes the rationale and emotional stability of people. It makes the illogical or unthinkable into the next logical step.
  - gumby 7y ago
    Wars are opportunistically encouraged and joined by psychopaths, of course, though armies often don't want those people because they aren't mission oriented. When they rise in the ranks it can be terrible. My point is that the majority of people don't "join the dark side"
    - DubiousPusher 7y ago
      Yeah, I overemphasized that point which I didn't even mean to originally honestly. See below.
- def8cefe 7y ago
  https://www.newsweek.com/myth-military-history-94505 https://www.newsweek.com/myth-military-history-94505
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
Ididntdothis 7y ago
My dad fought in WW2 and I have overhead quite a few conversations about the war. Most soldiers just wanted to go home in one piece and did whatever it took to do so.
- DubiousPusher 7y ago
  My father fought in Vietnam and that is how he began. By the time he left he wanted to kill as many VC as possible or leave or whatever but that is one man's experience. Are you so sure that if you had been able to ask your father immediately after his return what he thought of the Germans or the Japanese he'd tell the same story?
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    My dad is German :). Did your dad have a desire to kill VC after going home?
    - DubiousPusher 7y ago
      I sometime forget the international nature of the folks on this site. Rephrase that question but about his feelings toward Americans, Englishs or Russians. To answer your question, yes he did. He was racist amd embittered for many years. Sometime before I was born he began to soften that hate. He is different now but sometimes I still see it beneath the surface.
      - Ididntdothis 7y ago
        I have heard this hate only from people who fought the partisans in Yugoslavia. I can imagine Vietnam was a similar kind of war which is even more brutal and disturbing than regular warfare. I have never heard any of them having ill will against the brits, French or Russians. They especially liked the Americans because they treated POWs and civilians by far the best.
        DubiousPusher 7y ago
jdietrich 7y ago
>They hate each other in a way most people probably cannot understand. Many would not pass up the opportunity to rid the world of what they see as the most evil upon its face unto the very last minute. That really isn't true, which is largely why the First World War was characterised by immobile trench warfare. A group of experienced and highly motivated soldiers were perfectly capable of breaking the lines and holding territory, as demonstrated by Stoßtruppen and Arditi, but most soldiers weren't experienced and highly motivated - they were barely-trained civilians who just wanted to go home in one piece. They might have occasionally fired a few shots over the barricades to show willing, they might have chosen to risk death in a charge over the lines rather than face certain death by firing squad, but they really didn't want to be fighting and certainly didn't want to risk death or live with the consequences of having killed. Snipers can achieve remarkable combat effectiveness, partly because of their marksmanship and fieldcraft skills but mainly because they're actually shooting to kill, due to an innate or acquired psychological difference from ordinary infantrymen. Most infantrymen weren't really trying to kill anyone, which is why the overwhelming majority of combat casualties were inflicted by artillery - it is psychologically far easier to fire an artillery piece at a grid coordinate than to fire a rifle at a human being. The burden of sustained combat or psychologically-informed training can increase the propensity of people to kill, but it's not a natural psychological state. Ordinary men under prolonged stress sometimes become hardened killers, but they're more likely to become disaffected and depressed. Modern military strategy is based on this reality - a small proportion of elite infantrymen at the tip of the spear, supported by vast numbers of men in support and indirect combat roles. Tanks, aircraft and drones provide firepower, but just as crucially they provide psychological distance from the act of killing. The significance of psychological distance is a crucial but often overlooked aspect of the Milgram experiments.
- ummwhat 7y ago
  If you haven't seen it yet, this is the basis of the blackmirror episode "men against fire". [spoiler] in the very near future, the military uses neural implants so that soilders see grotesque mutants instead of humans on the battlefield. The episode presents itself as a zombie horror type thing until we find out the truth at the end. Most of the missions were actually against civilians and the dehumanization tech is being used to make genocide palpable.
ArnoVW 7y ago
To anyone having doubts about this: this has been an active field of research by the military for the last 70 years, when it was found that the efficiency of the average conscripted soldier was lacking due to non- or mis-firing soldiers. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killology

admax88q 7y ago

Imagine being brainwashed to the point that you purposefully get yourself killed because you only have a minute left to kill the others.

agapon 7y ago
I think that the kind of brainwash that we typically think about evaporates very quickly at front lines. But the actual fighting -- trying not to get killed, seeing your comrades killed, killing in return -- is a 'brainwash' of its own.
Rebelgecko 7y ago
Henry Gunther's story is particularly sad. He was a sergeant who got demoted due to private after writing a friend a letter containing some antiwar comments that were perceived as cowardice. He was obsessed with regaining what he perceived as his lost honor, which is why he led a futile charge in the final moments of the war. IIRC the Germans he was charging were reluctant to actually shoot at him
CaptArmchair 7y ago
It wasn't so much plain brainwashing as it was a total lack of modern communication on the battlefield. Especially in 1918. Back then, communication happened via carrier pigeon, runners, telegram, telephone or telegraph. In extremely hostile conditions. Trench newspapers were the only alternate source soldiers and availability depended entirely on the situation on the ground. In fact, fighting didn't necessarily seize at 11AM all over the world because communication was hard: https://history.blog.gov.uk/2018/11/09/the-war-that-did-not-end-at-11am-on-11-november/ https://history.blog.gov.uk/2018/11/09/the-war-that-did-not-... As for the Western front in particular, it didn't help that some generals disapproved of the ceasefire and armistice: > General John Pershing, Commander of the American Expeditionary Force, did not approve of the armistice. Consequently he gave no instructions to his commanders to suspend any new offensive action during the remaining hours until 11am. This gave individual commanders latitude to determine their actions in the last few hours and in some quarters there was fierce fighting up to 11am which was difficult to stop. On 11 November alone were nearly 11,000 casualties, dead, missing and injured, exceeding those on D-Day in 1944. Over 3,500 of these were American. Pershing had to face a Congressional hearing to explain why there were so many deaths when the hour of the armistice was known in advance. Officers at the front at that time pretty much were left to their own devices. With an absolute minimum of orders or context, the 'safe' approach was to assume that the enemy might have ignored the cease fire and overwhelmed those who would have let their guard down. Being partly blind, many of them doubled down on the fighting "just in case". Let's not forget. 4 years of atrocious fighting had passed by. By then, soldiers new perfectly well that life on the front carried little value. They could only hope for a break as refusing to fight or dodging orders meant martial punishment. Plus, it wouldn't have done them any good anyway since there was little to no practical way out of that theater anyway. http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/firstworldwar/service_records/courts_martial.htm http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/firstworldwar/se...
- DubiousPusher 7y ago
  There are many historical examples of generals and frontline troops continuing conflict after the fact for multiple reasons. Some as innocuous as communication issues. Some as numbing as military bureaucratics. Some as terrible as hatred. My point was never to attribute all such instances to hate or a desire to kill. But I see that all demonstrate well why war should be avoided at all costs.

Retric 7y ago

The 1914 Christmas truce demonstrates otherwise as five months of fighting was insufficient to guarantee hate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce It’s surprisingly difficult to train civilians to kill each other, but governments have discovered how. You don’t do it on the front lines, you do it before they get to the battle field.

JoeAltmaier 7y ago
Simple. March them to the front lines and say "If you don't kill them, they'll try to kill you. Go get em!" And lo and behold! they were told the same thing, so everybody starts shooting.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- natmaka 7y ago
  It works mainly because the audience was 'educated', and part of this process lets the power instill its 'values' into youngsters' brains. In most of the Western World and a not-so-distant past some Christian Church was in charge of this, and we had Crusades, clerics baptizing guns... The main cause may be the will to 'enhance' the populace by using education in order to inoculate values. We may escape by only teaching fundamentals (either politically neutral or boosting a critical mindset). Letting a central power mix proper education with its messages leads to total war.
DubiousPusher 7y ago
December 1914 was a very different world upon the front lines of WWI from Movember 1918. People still thought that war would looks something like the Franco-Prussian War. > You don’t do it on the front lines, you do it before they get to the battle field. I think you do it by exposing people to years of misery and loss. But a boatload of propaganda doesn't hurt.
- jimmySixDOF 7y ago

krapp 7y ago

>Despite what films will depict, people fighting on the front lines in a war do not have a begrudgingly respect for each other. They hate eachother in a way most people probably cannot understand. Many would not pass up the opportunity to rid the world of what they see as the most evil upon its face unto the very last minute. So... either you're some kind of omniscient telepath, or you're making this insight of yours up because you believe it should be true.

DubiousPusher 7y ago
No. I have read a lot of history books which delve into diaries and correspondence of individuals fighting in front line situations. The respectful weighing of the other side's reasons for fighting is overwhelmed by a desire to kill them in graphic and brutal ways. This is a product of putting people under the pressure of fear of death for hours, days or weeks at a time, propagandizing the enemy as less than human and trauma from the loss of loved ones at the hands of what in modern war is an unknown enemy. This understanding escapes us in popular culture. It isn't often that HBO series or history books focus on the enmity that abides long after conflict has ceased. Those who return from war with hate still in them are our 'Taxi Driver' type villains or freaks. We don't reckon that to a certain extent everyone we send into combat has hate in them.
- krapp 7y ago
  > I have read a lot of history books which delve into diaries and correspondence of individuals fighting in front line situations. The respectful weighing of the other side's reasons for fighting is overwhelmed by a desire to kill them in graphic and brutal ways. Odd. I've read a lot of war correspondence and history as well, being kind of addicted to that stuff on Youtube, and I haven't encountered the sort of overwhelming pathological hatred and programming you describe be mentioned often enough to assume that it applies as a near-universal constant. Are you sure you're not just taking one or two instances from, say, World War 2 and the Vietnam War and assuming all war is like Full Metal Jacket or something? It certainly seems like you're projecting.
  - 7y ago

gumby 7y ago

I’m not sure that’s true. Apparently very few shots are on target. People seem reluctant to just kill someone else. This “problem” has been ameliorated In recent times via increasingly distant and abstract warfare. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killology#The_problem_of_non-_or_mis-firing_soldiers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killology#The_problem_of_non-_...

DubiousPusher 7y ago
And war is full of atrocities because people just cannot being themselves to do bad things to eachother? I am not making a basic argument for the goodness or lack thereof in people. Only that war changes the rationale and emotional stability of people. It makes the illogical or unthinkable into the next logical step.
- gumby 7y ago
  Wars are opportunistically encouraged and joined by psychopaths, of course, though armies often don't want those people because they aren't mission oriented. When they rise in the ranks it can be terrible. My point is that the majority of people don't "join the dark side"
  - DubiousPusher 7y ago
    Yeah, I overemphasized that point which I didn't even mean to originally honestly. See below.
def8cefe 7y ago
https://www.newsweek.com/myth-military-history-94505 https://www.newsweek.com/myth-military-history-94505
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

Ididntdothis 7y ago

My dad fought in WW2 and I have overhead quite a few conversations about the war. Most soldiers just wanted to go home in one piece and did whatever it took to do so.

DubiousPusher 7y ago
My father fought in Vietnam and that is how he began. By the time he left he wanted to kill as many VC as possible or leave or whatever but that is one man's experience. Are you so sure that if you had been able to ask your father immediately after his return what he thought of the Germans or the Japanese he'd tell the same story?
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  My dad is German :). Did your dad have a desire to kill VC after going home?
  - DubiousPusher 7y ago
    I sometime forget the international nature of the folks on this site. Rephrase that question but about his feelings toward Americans, Englishs or Russians. To answer your question, yes he did. He was racist amd embittered for many years. Sometime before I was born he began to soften that hate. He is different now but sometimes I still see it beneath the surface.
    - Ididntdothis 7y ago
      I have heard this hate only from people who fought the partisans in Yugoslavia. I can imagine Vietnam was a similar kind of war which is even more brutal and disturbing than regular warfare. I have never heard any of them having ill will against the brits, French or Russians. They especially liked the Americans because they treated POWs and civilians by far the best.
      - DubiousPusher 7y ago

jdietrich 7y ago

>They hate each other in a way most people probably cannot understand. Many would not pass up the opportunity to rid the world of what they see as the most evil upon its face unto the very last minute. That really isn't true, which is largely why the First World War was characterised by immobile trench warfare. A group of experienced and highly motivated soldiers were perfectly capable of breaking the lines and holding territory, as demonstrated by Stoßtruppen and Arditi, but most soldiers weren't experienced and highly motivated - they were barely-trained civilians who just wanted to go home in one piece. They might have occasionally fired a few shots over the barricades to show willing, they might have chosen to risk death in a charge over the lines rather than face certain death by firing squad, but they really didn't want to be fighting and certainly didn't want to risk death or live with the consequences of having killed. Snipers can achieve remarkable combat effectiveness, partly because of their marksmanship and fieldcraft skills but mainly because they're actually shooting to kill, due to an innate or acquired psychological difference from ordinary infantrymen. Most infantrymen weren't really trying to kill anyone, which is why the overwhelming majority of combat casualties were inflicted by artillery - it is psychologically far easier to fire an artillery piece at a grid coordinate than to fire a rifle at a human being. The burden of sustained combat or psychologically-informed training can increase the propensity of people to kill, but it's not a natural psychological state. Ordinary men under prolonged stress sometimes become hardened killers, but they're more likely to become disaffected and depressed. Modern military strategy is based on this reality - a small proportion of elite infantrymen at the tip of the spear, supported by vast numbers of men in support and indirect combat roles. Tanks, aircraft and drones provide firepower, but just as crucially they provide psychological distance from the act of killing. The significance of psychological distance is a crucial but often overlooked aspect of the Milgram experiments.

ummwhat 7y ago
If you haven't seen it yet, this is the basis of the blackmirror episode "men against fire". [spoiler] in the very near future, the military uses neural implants so that soilders see grotesque mutants instead of humans on the battlefield. The episode presents itself as a zombie horror type thing until we find out the truth at the end. Most of the missions were actually against civilians and the dehumanization tech is being used to make genocide palpable.

ArnoVW 7y ago

To anyone having doubts about this: this has been an active field of research by the military for the last 70 years, when it was found that the efficiency of the average conscripted soldier was lacking due to non- or mis-firing soldiers. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killology