War and conflict have marked most of my adult life.I learned that war forms its own culture. The fever of battle is a powerful and deadly addiction often, because war is a drug.Is that they promote the myth-makers --- historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists and the state --- all of which give qualities often possess: excitement, exoticism, power, opportunities rise above our small station in life, and a strange and fantastic that has a grotesque and dark beauty. It dominates culture, distorts memory, corrupts language, and infects everything around it, even humor, which is concerned with the grim perversities of coal and death. The fundamental questions about the meaning or the meaninglessness of our place in the world are revealed when we see those around us sink to the lowest depths. War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks not far beneath the surface within all of us.
The enduring appeal of war is this: Despite the destruction and carnage it can give us what we want in life. We can give purpose, meaning, a reason to live. Only when we are in the midst of conflict and vapidness superficiality of much of our lives become apparent.War is an attractive elixir. Give to solve a case. Allows us to be noble.
The attacks on the World Trade Center show that those who oppose us, instead of coming from another moral universe, have been well educated in modern warfare.Where else but in the industrialized world, did the suicide hijackers learn that huge explosions and death above a city skyline are a peculiar and effective form of communication? They have mastered the language. They ...