From: blamb@rodan.hri.com (Bill Lambert)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.japan,soc.culture.china,soc.culture.hongkong,soc.culture.taiwan
Subject: Siggy on War (was: An open letter
Date: 1 Sep 92 22:17:25 GMT
Reply-To: blamb@rodan.hri.com (Bill Lambert)
Followup-To: soc.culture.japan
Organization: Horizon Research


This thread has been interesting and informative, but something
just doesn't sit so well for me. I would like to offer something
from a book titled "A History of Knowledge" by Charles Van Doren.
This book is a chronology of progress in science, philosophy, and
political systems. As such, it certainly lacks depth, but some
of the author's insights on trends and connections are occasionally
interesting.

(The following is reprinted without permission)

From Chapter 11 - The World in 1914 - Thoughts on War and Death.

Early in 1915, when the first phase of the Great Twentieth Century
War still seemed new, Sigmund Freud published an article titled
"Thoughts for the Times on War and Death." By then, after the
appearance in 1900 of "The Interpretation of Dreams" and other
seminal writings, Dr. Freud was beginning to be respected by a wide
public, even if he was still not loved by most people, who persisted
in shock from what he told them. It was recognized further, that he
might well have valuable insights concerning the ordeal which the
human race, Europe, and especially Germany had undergone. The paper
on War and Death was full of wisdom, but it may have been, to quote
the title of a play by Bernard Shaw, too true to be good, that is,
too wise to be popular among its readers.

Freud began by describing the disillusionment felt by so many people,
not only in Germany, upon their discovery of the cruelty and brutality
of which previously civilized nations and individuals were capable.
Stories were told about the soldiers of all the warring nations, how
they gang raped young girls and then killed them, skewered pregnant
women on their bayonets, shot captives to cripple but not to kill them
just for the pleasure of it, or tortured children and animals because
it was interesting to hear them scream, were too close to the truth of
everyone's experience of the war to be denied. (Naturally, it was easier
to believe such stories about the enemy's soldiers than about your own.)

And if cruel and brutal murder were not enough, the governments of all
the combatants, while maintaining that their own citizens should
continue to obey the laws of civilized life, showed no compunction about
acting toward enemy governments and individuals without any regard for
law or civilized custom. Governments lied as a matter of course, and
threw themselves with enthusiasm into the development and deployment
of ever more monstrous weapons, including poison gas, and the bombardment
of unarmed civilian populations. They were as merciless as any
barbarian, and this did not seem to embarrass them in the least.

How different things had been before the war! Then, cultured Europeans,
Germans especially, had believed that finally, after eons, the human 
race, or at least their special part of it, had achieved a level of
civilization that would forbid the kinds of actions and behavior that
were now commonplace. And not only forbid them, but be able to enforce
those prohibitions. Above all, humankind would find some reasonable
alternative to war, and particularly the kind of war that was being
fought.

German civilization, especially, had been viewed by Germans and other
cultivated Europeans as the acme of human accomplishment. German
science, German music and art, German scholarship, German ethical
philosophy, had set standards for the rest of the world considered
to be higher than ever before.

And now the German, most of all, was hated by the world as a primitive
barbaric savage. Collectively, he was referred to as the Hun, that hated
name that had stood for centuries as the type of utterly uncivilized,
semihuman beings who had swept into Europe from the east and devastated
the Roman world.

Let us hope that they are wrong, said Freud, and that we Germans are not
as bad as they think we are. But, he added - this being his point - we
are not as good as we would like them to think we are, either. We are
human, and they are too. And the human being is not as happy being
civilized as he says he is. Psychologically, civilized man has been 
living beyond his means, for there is a deeper self, a kind of primitive
savage in all of us, who wishes to be freed from civilization's restraints.
I know this, Freud said, for I have seen it in all of my patients, without
exception: men and women, old and young, cultivated and uneducated.
Therefore I am not surprised by what the war has revealed, and you should
not be surprised, either.

The idea that civilization is an all but bearable burden for most people,
even Germans, was not a popular one in 1915, but at least it was some sort
of explanation. And Germans, as well as their allies and all of their
enemies, continued to act as if they did not want to be civilized
throughout that first phase of the war. The strange thing was that in
1918, after the shooting stopped, no one seemed to want to return to
being - or acting - civilized in the old way. Nor have they resumed
doing so in the last seventy years. That is what is meant by the thought
that the Great Twentieth-Century War had destroyed the high civilization
Europe had known before 1914.

It was cold comfort to be told by Dr, Freud that this civilization had
been just an illusion. People are not like that, he was saying. People
are not at heart very good. "The element of truth behind all of this,
which people are so ready to disavow, is that men are not gentle
creatures who want to be loved, and who at most can defend themselves
when attacked," he wrote in a later, more carefully structured treatment
of the ideas he presented in 1915; "they are, on the contrary, creatures
among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of
aggressiveness," He added: "Homo homini lupus. [Man is a wolf to man] 
Who, in the face of all his experience of life and history, will have
the courage to dispute this assertion."*

* from "Civilization and Its Discontents" by Sigmund Freud (1930)

(End of book quotation)

I couldn't contain this sinking feeling while reading many of the
posts in this thread that there was a perception that the Japanese
were somehow, if not singular, then at least peculiar in the 
commission of atrocities that seemingly defy logic or reason. I
presented the above as a reference that is removed from the
issues of Japanese actions in asia in order to make a point.

I don't condone, justify, or apologize for the actions of the Japanese
Government in WWII. What they did was not understandable, and is to
be condemned by the world at large, and hopefully never to be repeated.
But I will take exception to the point that their actions are somehow
characteristic to either their people, their society, or their form
of culture. I think we can all realize that there is thin veneer of
reason that covers the unreasonable in human beings everywhere. At
certain points in history, that veneer has been rubbed thin, and the
results have been Nanking, My Lai, Armenia, Serbia, Rostok, Watts,
Wounded Knee, Auschwitz, Paris in 1793, Soweto.... whatever.... you
name it. 

At times, the scale has varied, but the causes have always been the
same: 1) Leadership encourages the erosion of the veneer of civilization
as a means of accomplishing its goals in the conflict; 2) The enemy
is defined to be undeserving of equal consideration; 3) Men are prone
to accept this and even thrive in this environment when knowing there
are no direct punitive consequences to their barbarity.

I don't believe Japanese are any more susceptible to this phenomenon
than anyone else.... just they were one of the last and most noticeable
occurances. Pushing off the responsibility to a certain people, or
a certain form of government, or a certain cultral aspect belittles
the advice and experience of historical fact. To do so is counter-
productive to the very serious business of preventing such occurances
from happening again. 

As long as you blame "them" - whomever they may be - you are practising
and prolonging the conditions that will allow that veneer to be stripped
off and the "man who is wolf to man" to have his day again.... and again
and again. They is us. We must prevent us from killing ourselves when led
by us. There isn't any other way, but for history to repeat itself time
after time after time after time.

Flame Freud, if you like, but I don't have his email address :-)
<siggy@cigar.dream.com ?>

- Bill Lambert





Newsgroups: soc.culture.japan