The Evolution of Brutality and the Skills of Peace

UPDATE: Leads the list for "diary rescue" at Dkos and front page at E Pluribus Media.

We are in a period of brutalization that continues to intensify. The latest uptick in violent language and brutal policy may be evidence of the Bushites and the Rabid Right fighting for their political lives in the face of majority opposition, but it sets a new standard of brutality that affects the whole public dialogue, and all of us as individuals.

“Brutality” means humans acting like beasts (or at least how humans interpret animal behavior.) It carries with it the expectation that human beings in a civilized society should progress beyond this automatic behavior when it is clearly inappropriate and counterproductive, especially in the long term. It assumes a consensus on life as sacred. Progress used to include moving farther away from brutality to the rule of consciousness and more “human” means of solving conflicts.

Brutalization is shifting individual and societal standards to accepting higher levels of brutality as normal and acceptable. In civilized humanity, it is retrogression. So how in the world, early in the twenty-first century, did we get here?

Our sense of the word “brutalization” comes from historian George Mosse, in his analysis of French culture during World War I. In a recent issue of the Times Literary Supplement (June 16, 2006), Jay Winter characterized the “war culture” of the period, as described by two other historians, concluding:

“Thus the war became a kind of crusade, a morality play in which good and evil were evidently divided that those who cried ‘enough’ were deemed either deluded or dangerous.”

World War I remains such a profound event in European culture that a colloquium was held recently “on the explosion of extreme violence in 1914-15, marking a kind of degeneration of war into slaughter on a scale the world had never seen before.” France and England lost 2 million men, four times the number killed in World War II.

The slaughter on one battlefield in 1917 was so extreme and so needless that a half million French soldiers refused to fight. This forced a change in tactics, and changed the nature of the war. After the war, a vast veterans movement of some four million arose in France. They formed “overwhelmingly pacifist associations, determined to make war unthinkable…They hated politicians, those self-serving evildoers who sent men to war, but never paid the price for their policies. Their voices were angry. They had a cause and defended it as fiercely after the war as they had defended their part of the front during it.”

This war and this movement, Winter writes, had a lasting effect on French culture and policy. He does not explicitly say it affected the skepticism and refusal of the French government to get involved in the US invasion of Iraq, but the implication is there.