The Paradoxes of War teaches us to understand that war is not only a normal part of human existence, but is arguably one of the most important factors in making us who we are. Through this course, I hope that you will come to appreciate that war is both a natural expression of common human emotions and interactions and a constitutive part of how we cohere as groups. That is, war is paradoxically an expression of our basest animal nature and the exemplar of our most vaunted and valued civilized virtues. You will learn some basic military history and sociology in this course as a lens for the more important purpose of seeing the broader social themes and issues related to war. I want you to both learn about war, but more importantly, use it as way of understanding your everyday social world. So, for example, the discussion of war and gender will serve to start you thinking about how expectations of masculinity are created and our discussion of nationalism will make clear how easy “us-them” dichotomies can be established and (ab)used. I will suggest some readings for you to complement the class and assign some activities through which you will be able to apply the theoretical insights from the course to your observations of everyday life. At the end of the course, you will start to see war everywhere and come to appreciate how much it defines our life.
Coercion/The Ideal Soldier
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Из курса от партнера Princeton University
Paradoxes of War
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Making Warriors
Warriors are taught a set of values of which duty and honor
are fundamental. These are taught through the imposition of
discipline.
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Miguel A. CentenoMusgrave Professor of Sociology and Professor of Sociology and International Affairs
Sociology
Hello.
So far, we've established a couple of things.
First, war is not a natural thing.
War is not something that simply reflects human nature.
We are not programmed for war.
War actually takes consciousness.
It takes planning.
And I keep saying it takes organization.
We have also established that war is an extremely unpleasant activity.
I probably did not have to convince you of that one.
We saw in the last class the horrors that these soldiers face.
Now we are faced with the true sociological question.
Given that it is not natural, given that it is
not instinctive, given that is has to be, in a
sense, produced socially, and given that war is such an
awful activity, how do we get people to do this?
How do we, in a sense, make warriors?
What is the process of making warriors?
Well the simplest way is coercion.
That is that we don't try to make warriors, we simply try
to create situations in which people have no choice but to fight.
So, for example, many formations such as
the phalanx are really designed to enforce discipline.
Are really in a way of assuring that this discipline occurs.
One by making everyone very visible.
To by making them conscious of the others dependent on them and
three there seems to be some human reassurance of being around others.
So these kind of formations partly have to do with strategy
but also have to do with trying to keep one group together.
Trying to force these individuals to become that
collective whole which can then perform these incredible tasks.
Even more straightforward is the corrosion of some special troops that
are there in order to make sure that nobody leaves the battlefield.
Cavalry sometimes plays this role, sometimes
you will see officers charging after
their men in order to make sure that none of them retreat.
The most infamous example is in the NKVD troops that were specially designed.
To serve as a reminder to the Soviet soldiers that they could not retreat.
That should they retreat, their possible death in the face of the Germans
would be replaced by an absolute certainty of death if they retreated.
Waffen-SS troops in Nazi Germany.
Also played the same kind of role, making sure,
again, that this coercion prevented people from deserting.
Almost all tyrants have used some kind of coercion.
The Persian armies were largely made of slaves, for example.
Or at least that's the way the Greeks, portrayed them and chose to portray them.
But slave armies are really relatively common.
Tyrants seek to impose this danger, impose this coercion on parts
of the population, and then use these parts of the population against others.
The problem is that coercion only works in very limited circumstances.
Coercion might work as in the case with the phalanx.
For example, or coercion might work in the case of
the NKBD troops, or might even work with the slave army.
But it's clear that armies that are not motivated, that do not
believe in their own goal, that do not believe in their own role.
Will not perform as well as those who are similarly motivated.
That coercion will go so far.
And coercion will go so far particularly in battlefield settings
where it's for a short duration and everyone can be observed.
When you get into the modern battlefield in which has,
it can last for days, or weeks, or even months.
And we require small unit autonomy that kind of coercion becomes more impractical.
So we return to the question how do we get people to do this?
What is, how do we create the ideal soldier?
Now, the ideal soldier exists in literature, but what we find
is that it basically, most human beings don't want to do this.
The vast majority of human beings, even the ones who are
being coerced are the or the ones who are not being coerced.
Really do not want to engage in this.
They are not the ideal warrior.
They are not Achilles.
Achilles fights because he wants to, because he gets joy out of the fighting.
Most soldiers do not.
Humans, by nature, are venal and fearful.
So why would we expect these people, these venal,
human beings, to engage in this element of self sacrifice?
Now there have always been attempts to
create and identify the ideal warrior type.
In some societies the creation of a warrior
is a big part of the training for masculinity.
And again this goes back to the gender discussion we had before.
That young men, as they grow up to be men or adults, are also taught to be soldiers.
Most societies favor the use of unmarried young men.
That is that this seems to be the demographic that is
ideal for creating these kinds of obedient cogs in a military machine.
Unmarried young men.
Have a greater perhaps a greater sense of their own immortality.
They might have fewer links to those back home so they're,
they're loss or they're sense of losing something if they die.
Or their sense of being lost in the
battlefield as opposed to being home, might be decline.
And of course, young men possess a very,
very important attribute, which is the physical condition.
The physical condition that allows them to behave.
In this manner and to withstand the kinds of pains we're talking about.
Moreover, these same young men might be the least able to
resist, often because of incentives, of the rewards that come to warriors.
The rewards that come with adulthood, and
also because they are still somewhat dependent on
the society of their families, they are in
a position, not only are they ideal physically.
maybe, perhaps, ideal emotionally.
But, also, they have the least room in order to escape and
the possibility that they will fight.
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