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A U.S. war veteran pulls his medals off his uniform before throwing them towards the site of the NATO Summit during an anti-war protest in Chicago in 2012. (Photo: AP)
We have this tragic misperception that humanity is predisposed to violence.
The truth is that humanity is predisposed to peace. The default position for humanity is that of conscientious objector to war and violence.
In our work at the Center on Conscience & War, this is proven to us daily, through our individual conscientious objectors. Science has proven it, too. This tendency for cooperation over competition is evident in daily life: on an average day, most people will witness countless acts of cooperation, kindness, and humanity towards one another, and not one act of violence or competition. And most of it is so commonplace, we barely even notice it. We take our nonviolence for granted.
And so does the news. What makes the news is violence, not cooperation. Particularly, on our local news programs, the top stories are the ones that depict street crimes and “home invasions.” Seeing this interpersonal violence, I am convinced, leads us to believe that people are predisposed to acting violently toward one another. We all make decisions based on patterns we observe, and if the patterns we observe are highlighting violence, we are going to decide that humanity is violent.
How does this relate to war? If we believe that violence among humans is natural, we will believe that war is inevitable.
But violence is not natural. Our conscience tells us killing another human being is wrong. And it is the military that knows this better than anyone.
The military has taken notice that, over time, and through the history of war, the vast majority of individuals refuse to shoot to kill. That means, instead of firing directly at an “enemy,” soldiers (used here to cover all members of the Armed Forces: soldiers, Marines, airmen and women, and sailors) would fire their weapons away from their “targets,” or pretend to shoot. One investigation found -- and these studies have been replicated -- that in World War I only about 5% of people shot to kill; in World War II, about 15% of people shot to kill. By the US war in Vietnam, the rate at which soldiers were shooting to kill was found to be 90%. Today, that number could be even higher.
What happened? Training evolved to meet the military's goals.
There is a science of teaching soldiers to kill and it is called killology. It is the science of circumventing the conscience.
Please continue this article here: http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/09/09/us-military-and-myth-humanity-predisposed-violence
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