...befuddlingly yours
Dear Governments waging war
I’ve always found the human condition rather tragic. But I suppose, on some unavoidable level, everyone does. Hence the constant mining for meaning along with the countless social and personal vices serving as opiates in attempt to alleviate this predicament.
The root of the tragedy lies in one's constant awareness of your inevitable demise and the uncertainty of when, where or how it is going to happen. When you go to war, these variables become a little more defined. Perhaps this futile choice relieves the primal fear of uncertainty for those who decide to partake in this age old human custom, using man’s inherent rage as conduit for acceptable and effective population control. But there’s also the possibility of being maimed beyond recognition or to lose every one of your limbs, which will make enjoying the spoils of your hard earned victory so much less gratifying (…if you in fact receive any of the spoils or you don’t fall in the former category of those who subconsciously want to perish).
The reasons for war has ranged from anything as petty as jealousy of another ruler’s seaside mansion or mistress to run of the mill economic or territorial expansion. There is often very little tangible anger between those who actually wage the war beyond the obvious indoctrination of standing the chance to lose your right to pray five times a day or listen to Megadeath as loud as you want to. Furthermore, waging war has become little more than pointing something and pushing a button. Men are but mere shadows of the axe yielding warriors we once were. From my own limited perspective of war, it has always seemed that capturing and not killing people were much more of a trump card and imputes for surrender than blowing everyone in sight to smithereens. Why not simply shoot with ammunition that tranquilizes the opposition. From this point it’s game on. If you were, for instance, on the Allied’s side and you’re fighting a radicalized Jihadist sect, once you’ve sedated and relocated them, you can literally do anything to them. Dress them up like Pete Dorothy and tattoo them like Ninja from Die Antwoord. You can force them to inhale vaporized Extreme Original Gangsta Kush and show Arabic dubbed Episodes of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 on repeat until there has been a dramatic shift in their antagonistic behavior.
You can take pictures of them with hookers, bottles of Rotguthooch strewn around a recreation of a pimped out Miami beach penthouse. These pictures can then be channeled to the families of these militia men under strict advice from the bearer that they were taken under great personal duress. Force them to spend an endless amount of time with Korean teenagers, make them lick the balls of a donkey, but simply put, there are much more effective ways of winning a war than launching the most lethal missiles or having the most wide reaching sanctions. I think that science has already played its role quite effectively here in having come up with a range of mind altering drugs that reroutes neurotransmission and makes people want to be bathed in bright colors, hum in a delightful high pitched tones and find things that are contrary to the accepted, acceptable. Your war would have been won without so much as spilling a drop of blood and having converted your enemies into supporters of your ideology through a kindly chemical lobotomy of sorts.
