The Dogs Of War
Henry here. What a crazy world we live in where people blow themselves up in an act of war as they’re doing in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. Twenty years ago, if someone had said that this would happen we would not have believed it. It goes so far beyond the bounds of rationality that years after it began it’s still amazingly bizarre.
It seems to me that our young soldiers faced with such suicidal determination have to begin to think that they are faced with evil in one of its most terrible forms. It is likely inevitable that, surrounded by such evil, some of them will slip to a similar level of savagery themselves.
We citizens like to think that that is not possible or if it happens it is only a few bad apples. According to the CBC, several such incidents have come to light:
“Five U.S. army soldiers in Iraq are being investigated in connection with the rape and murder of a young Iraqi woman, and the killings of three members of her family, a military official says.
The soldiers allegedly burned the woman’s body after the assault, the official told the Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
U.S. military investigators in Iraq are also looking into allegations that 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians were killed by U.S. marines last November after an explosion killed a member of their platoon.
In other cases, four soldiers face murder charges after the deaths of three Iraqi detainees, and seven marines and a sailor are charged with murdering a civilian last April.”
As the psychologist Carl G. Jung tells us, the painful truth is that these alleged incidents are not so unusual. We all have levels of savagery and darkness within us that only waits for the moment to arise when it can be released. What we need to do is to get to know this darkness, admit it in ourselves and then consciously control it. As Dr. Jung reminds us” It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.”
August 15th, 2006 at 12:05 am
[…] lius Caesar writes, “Cry Havoc and let slip the dogs of war.” As I said in my post The Dogs of War, this king of evil is all about our own shadow side, or the evil in […]