mil-observer

I read your cross post, which was excellent and I fully agree.

My comments above were gender based, but my intent was to raise awareness about how ordinary people keep war alive for reasons within ourselves that, as a society, we still don't seem to want to analyse or even confront.

Anti-war criticism tends to focus on the warmongering of the powerful and treats ordinary people as unwitting victims. Yet, our leaders would not keep involving us in war after war if there weren't so many eager young warriors to fight them.

Confronting male masochism - particularly the type found in the song 'The band played WM' - is an absoute taboo, but until we confront it as a society, we will continue to be trapped in endless war.

SJF: I take back my suggestions that your anti-war position could imply anything merely fashionable or even vacuous. Your explanation inspires a useful anti-war case that I'll pursue in future.

We're probably thinking about the same constitution, but with only different wording in the preamble. ;-)

A good one by Karl-Erik Paasonen can be found here: <http://www.geocities.com/paasonen/songsmain.html>.

Thank you, Peter Coates, for this article, and particularly for that little hidden gem lurking behind the textual link 'a song' in the sentence "This is a song from Australia's main former enemy.", near the bottom of the first page. I give that link again here for those that may read the thread without having seen it in the article. See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVpM8OPixds&feature=related

The song is "Ich hatt' einen kameraden", and I can detect no choral difference between the singing in the version to which the link delivers viewers and that in another attributed as being sung by members of the Waffen SS Division Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler. I hope that as a consequence of such Nazi era affiliations the song is not on the banned list in Germany today. Unfortunately the article's linked version has no English sub-titles.

Another version, with different visuals, does have English sub-titles. See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwixM9KBuGo&feature=related . Interestingly, one of the visuals in this version shows a German soldier in an armoured vehicle in Afghanistan today.

Here are the English sub-titles from the alternative version:

"I had a comrade,
None better I have had.
The drum called us to fight.
He is always on my right,
In step through good and bad

A bullet it flew toward us,
For him or meant for me?
His life from mine it tore.
At my feet a piece of gore,
As if a part of me.

His hand reaches up to hold mine.
I must re-load my gun.
My friend I cannot ease your pain.
In life eternal we'll meet again,
My good comrade.

Be warned, those who have not already heard the song, that it is most stately, reverential even. If its subject even remotely relates to your own experiences, be prepared to be unable to get the tune out of your head. Or the memories.

Funny how they don't age with you, isn't it?

Germans: those most musical of peoples. Prost.

SJF, "{What I love about ‘I didn’t raise my son to be a soldier’ is that it boldly strips away all this war mystique and reveals the prosaic ruthlessness of men’s cultural conditioning to view war as essential to their identity"

What a load of old feminist tosh. Maybe you weren't around during the Vietnam War but the women were to the fore then in sending nineteen year old conscripts to war. Go back and have a gander at the voting in elections and also have a look at the views of women reported in the media.

I am anti-war but I don't pretend for a minute that women haven't been always been well represented in voting for the Coalition and for wars. This alone is a compelling reason to support feminist calls for women serving in front line combat - women voters need to see other women coming home broken and mad. Maybe then they will vote against war.

There is no evidence whatsoever that wars start through "men’s cultural conditioning to view war as essential to their identity" (as you claim), however there is plenty of evidence that some men and some women don't mind taking a risk with the lives of others in proposing and supporting war.

It would seem that despite the beautiful anti-war ballads like those of The Fureys and Liam Clancy, many people are easily led to hatred and war. That was one of the lessons of Vietnam and again I suggest you have a good look at Press reports and TV footage from that time. Students mainly male opposed the war, whereas if your assumption was was correct, males and especially young males would have been all for the war with women opposed. Fact is, the reverse was closer to the truth.

Let's face it, if you are going to be 'informed' by your feminism on simply everything you are going to miss the odd few facts, right?

Forrest Gumpp,
Your posts are like a box of chocolates!