War is sadistic

I found the below excerpt to be ground breaking in understanding war.

Coincidentally enough, I was speaking briefly with a friend about war this morning, and said that the reason for the destruction must be about gaining power. Though in my mind I wondered, how could gaining power for a leader be a strong enough reason to be able to be so violent?

In looking up blood and sexual sacrifices committed in cults, I came across this statement from a psychohistory journal about the reason for wars, and how they connect to the energy harnessed in sacrificial rituals.

"Real wars, as I have described earlier, involve nations hallucinating a rebirth fantasy that they are 'pregnant with events,' like a 'heaving volcano,' with a 'tight, tense, trapped feeling' in the air, 'unable to relieve herself of the inexorable pressure' or 'gain at least a breathing spell,' being 'picked up bodily' after diplomatic relations are 'ruptured' and beginning 'the descent into the abyss' as the nation starts its 'final plunge over the brink.' Each of the six elements of cult ritual I have given above are enacted in war. Tribes and nations regress during prewar periods and fear individuation, claiming that progress and prosperity 'makes the nation soft' and 'turns men into women,' making them 'wimps' and robbing them of their potency. Then they go into a trance and use dissociation to deny any empathy for the 'enemies' they are about to slaughter. Then they merge with their leader and put their intolerable feelings into him, sometimes even staging 'merging dramas,' political meetings like the Nazi mass meetings, where people held up their arms like an umbilicus and imagined they were pouring their polluted feelings into the leader, shouting 'Heil!' (heal me). Next they deify the leader, making him into a terrifying figure who can help them avenge their traumas, organize the nation into totalitarian structures and go off to war as a sacrificial rebirth ritual, during which the nation reenacts earlier traumas and rejuvenates its potency by becoming the powerful one torturing and killing the helpless one.

It is less apparent that war, like cultic ritual, is also a sexual perversion. Cults rape, torture and kill with the aim of orgasm; the sexuality is manifest. But it is only our defensive habit of compartmentalizing the various acts of war that makes us unaware that war, too, involves ritual rape, even if we think of it as only incidental 'collateral damage' like all civilian slaughter. Rape occurs because men are turned on by torture and killing. Violence is aphrodisiac. Prostitutes used to hang around the Colosseum in Rome to service the sexually aroused men after they finished watching the slaughter. In the past, according to the world’s leading historian of war, 'The opportunity to engage in wholesale rape was not just among the rewards of successful war but, from the soldier’s point of view, one of the cardinal objectives for which he fought.' Men who didn't rape during war were suspected of being homosexual. In earlier wars, lust as with cults, the killing of children was often preceded by raping them. Virgins were the favorite group rape targets for invading armies until well into the Middle Ages.

I admit it is hard to accept the conclusion of this line of thought and admit that those who watch bodies of people killed in wars pile up on TV are participating in a ritual rejuvenation of their potency. Hard to accept, that is, until we recall that before the Gulf War most of the country felt that the American Dream was 'withering' arid that our leader was a 'wimp', while after the war, after killing 300,000 Iraqis, mostly children, these same people felt the country was strong again, the stock market soared and our leader ended up being approved by 91 percent of the country. It seems to me that during the war we absorbed the vitality of those we slaughtered. Slain warriors in earlier cultures often were eaten in order to internalize their strengths. Early armies used to collect enemies' penises and present them in a big pile to their king. When U.S. soldiers in Vietnam collected penises as 'souvenirs,' we thought the soldiers perverted. Perverted they were, but perverted we all are when we choose to engage in war. Only our rationalizations prevent us from seeing this."

Mars: God of War and Sex