Are all soldiers psychopaths?

[loreta]

Is seeing a movie, yesterday, that I asked myself this question. The movie is a portrait of a psychopath that kills little girls during the WWI but is also (the movie) about the folly of the war. It is a very obscure and hard movie and puts you in the presence of devil, devil everywhere. This is the movie: Les âmes grises (Grey souls)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0431493/plotsummary

East of France, December 1917. In a village situated close to the front but protected from it by a hillside, the body of Belle de Jour, a little girl, is found by the canal. Judge Mierck, assisted by an Colonel Matzev representing the Armed Forces, investigates the case in his own way. The fact that the young victim's corpse lies a few yards from the manor of Destinat, the withdrawn, haughty-looking district attorney, who has always despised and humiliated him, doesn't escape him. To make matters worse, a witness has seen the magistrate not only talking with Belle but patting her cheek as well minutes before the little girl was strangled. But vengeance is one thing and class privilege another..

War is the worst thing in this planet, a mirror of psychopathy in front of us and soldiers, even if they fight for words like: la Patrie (homeland) (specially during the WWI) they became psychopaths, killing and destroying everything. They become part of the Big Game, in every war. Even if they are robots killers they still are robots killers. I had a "romantic" vision of the soldiers of the Great War after reading some letters of soldiers to theirs families but yesterday this vision disappeared completely. I think war is psychopathy in march and soldiers are all part of it. But not just soldiers. Civilians are part also of this psychopathy that touch everything...

I am evidently obsessed by war. Reading the journals of soldiers or their letters you see humans that feel love, desperation, joy, sadness but also they accepted to kill and destroy. From victims of a system now I start to see them as an accomplices. What is the difference of a sadistic psychopath and a soldier?

This movie reminds me of a very interesting one that treats the same subject: Le juge et l'assassin where you see that between a killer of little infants and a judge, the judge is almost worst than the killer.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073219/

 

[mnmulchi]

War is the worst thing in this planet, a mirror of psychopathy in front of us and soldiers, even if they fight for words like: la Patrie (homeland) (specially during the WWI) they became psychopaths, killing and destroying everything. They become part of the Big Game, in every war. Even if they are robots killers they still are robots killers. I had a "romantic" vision of the soldiers of the Great War after reading some letters of soldiers to theirs families but yesterday this vision disappeared completely. I think war is psychopathy in march and soldiers are all part of it. But not just soldiers. Civilians are part also of this psychopathy that touch everything...

I feel the same loreta. This reminded me of a passage I recently read in 'The Varieties of Religious Experience' by William James:

"'Live and let live,' " writes a clear-headed Austrian officer, "is no device for an army. Contempt for one's own comrades, for the troops of the enemy, and, above all, fierce contempt for one's own person, are what war demands of every one. Far better is it for an army to be too savage, too cruel, too barbarous, than to possess too much sentimentality and human reasonableness. If the soldier is to be good for anything as a soldier, he must be exactly the opposite of a reasoning and thinking man. The measure of goodness in him is his possible use in war. War, and even peace, require of the soldier absolutely peculiar standards of morality. The recruit brings with him common moral notions, of which he must seek immediately to get rid of. For him victory, success, must be everything. The most barbaric tendancies in men come to life again in war, and for war's uses they are incommensurably good." -C.V.B.K.: Friedens- und Kriegs-moral der Heere. Quoted by Hamon: Psychologie du Militaire professional, 1895

These words are of course literally true. The immediate aim of the soldier's life is, as Moltke said, destruction, and nothing but destruction; and whatever constructions wars result in are remote and non-military.

 

[loreta]

I feel the same loreta. This reminded me of a passage I recently read in 'The Varieties of Religious Experience' by William James:

"'Live and let live,' " writes a clear-headed Austrian officer, "is no device for an army. Contempt for one's own comrades, for the troops of the enemy, and, above all, fierce contempt for one's own person, are what war demands of every one. Far better is it for an army to be too savage, too cruel, too barbarous, than to possess too much sentimentality and human reasonableness. If the soldier is to be good for anything as a soldier, he must be exactly the opposite of a reasoning and thinking man. The measure of goodness in him is his possible use in war. War, and even peace, require of the soldier absolutely peculiar standards of morality. The recruit brings with him common moral notions, of which he must seek immediately to get rid of. For him victory, success, must be everything. The most barbaric tendancies in men come to life again in war, and for war's uses they are incommensurably good." -C.V.B.K.: Friedens- und Kriegs-moral der Heere. Quoted by Hamon: Psychologie du Militaire professional, 1895

These words are of course literally true. The immediate aim of the soldier's life is, as Moltke said, destruction, and nothing but destruction; and whatever constructions wars result in are remote and non-military.

This is very interesting, mnmulchi. After reading it I thought about the Spanish Civil War, where many young man, idealistic man from abroad, came here to fight fascism for the Republic. But in fighting they were as bad as the Nationalists. They killed as the others, in the name of Liberty. And even if they were used by the PTB of the Republic, they participated in the game. There is no "good" side in a war. Not at all.

You have always the choice. Many refused to go to war, even if for this decision they were put in jail or did some social work.

 

[mnmulchi]

And even if they were used by the PTB of the Republic, they participated in the game. There is no "good" side in a war. Not at all.

You have always the choice. Many refused to go to war, even if for this decision they were put in jail or did some social work.

Yeah, the psychopaths are always going to promote whatever benefits them directly, be it war or profits. It's then the duty of every non-psychopath to see through their games and act against them.

 

[Horseofadifferentcolor]

I was talking about this to a friend the other day. This is a very hard problem to solve. Even though we see it as greed and evilness. When a man is holding his dying bloody son, that is a reality to him. It is him against them. That is how the game(war) works. That father now has a real reason in his reality to kill another for the death of his loved one.

My ex was a high ranking army guy. A great person but cant see outside of what they are brainwashed to think.
One time we were at a National Gaurd conference where everyone was dressed in their best, a man passed out while standing at attention for a speech. The room had mabey 1500 people sitting at tables of 8 to 12. Nobody, even at his own table did a thing. My natural reaction was to run to him but my ex grabbed my arm and stopped me. The speaker kept talking and everyone ignored the man lieing on the ground. It was a wake up call for me on how insane these army folks are. I thought for 5 years I could help him but the system was much more powerful than I. I asked him one day after we were apart why men and women still go and fight even though most know it is all lies and he said most just fight to keep thier friends coworkers alive.
As long as people are poor and the goverments offer money, fathers will keep giving thier sons to the machine for "honor". Very sad indeed.

 

[LisaR]

Boy, what a tough question! If you watch or read anything about the Rape of Nanking, you get the distinct impression that psychopathy, a fixed disorder in a relatively small percentage of the population, can also be a transient phenomenon in otherwise 'normal' people. I guess that is the difference between psychopathy and sociopathy. Soldiers, particularly mercenaries, clearly fighting wars of offence rather than defence, not caring the cause or consequence, as long as they are paid, are most definitely psychopathic. Among their numbers would be many who get a kick out of tormenting, killing, raping and abusing people....They do it just for the thrill of it.

I often feel that I just want to get off this planet and return home, wherever that is--because just knowing that there are so many cruel, soulless individuals here makes life very very difficult, very sad.

 

[Voyageur]

This might speak on this for some:

We often think of peace as the absence of war, that if powerful countries would reduce their weapon arsenals, we could have peace. But if we look deeply into the weapons, we see our own minds- our own prejudices, fears and ignorance. Even if we transport all the bombs to the moon, the roots of war and the roots of bombs are still there, in our hearts and minds, and sooner or later we will make new bombs. To work for peace is to uproot war from ourselves and from the hearts of men and women. To prepare for war, to give millions of men and women the opportunity to practice killing day and night in their hearts, is to plant millions of seeds of violence, anger, frustration, and fear that will be passed on for generations to come.

It is the planting of these seeds too that the pathological’s do so well at, as history attests, and then they steer us directly to these ends.

 

[Ares]

Hi loreta, in my opinion just because they seem like ruthless killers doesn't make them psychopaths automatically. they could just have been normal people who have made so many choices towards the 'dark' side that their natural empathy was snuffed out (doesn't matter if the choices made were what they thought to be 'right'). I believe this is what Andrew Lobaczewski calls the ponerization of society which basically means the 5% or whatever of the psychopathic elite has succeeded in making the rest of the population like them - without empathy and conscience. I don't believe the process is perfect though, it would be very hard to get EVERYONE to become like that, but if you have turned a majority then you have succeeded.

For a rigid system like the armed forces where carrying out orders without question is the rule, this might be easier to achieve because it doesn't give you the choice of dissent.

 

[loreta]

In a war, like the Spanish Civil War not only the soldiers were killers. But your neighbor, like in Nazi Germany, can denounce you to the authorities and the next day you were dead. In the movie Les Âmes Grises not only the soldiers are assassins but judges also. So it is all the society, war or not, that is really, really sick. I remember to read that in the WWI the soldiers, the majority very young, were given wine so the majority of the time they were drunk. It is so sad, so disgusting that I don't see a solution in this planet. War is the leitmotiv of humanity and I remember also the life of Andrei Rublev, the Russian painter, that made paintings that were beautiful, with light and love, because for him the only way to survive in this chaos was creativity, art.

"Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order." said Virginia Woolf.

This might speak on this for some:

We often think of peace as the absence of war, that if powerful countries would reduce their weapon arsenals, we could have peace. But if we look deeply into the weapons, we see our own minds- our own prejudices, fears and ignorance. Even if we transport all the bombs to the moon, the roots of war and the roots of bombs are still there, in our hearts and minds, and sooner or later we will make new bombs. To work for peace is to uproot war from ourselves and from the hearts of men and women. To prepare for war, to give millions of men and women the opportunity to practice killing day and night in their hearts, is to plant millions of seeds of violence, anger, frustration, and fear that will be passed on for generations to come.

It is the planting of these seeds too that the pathological’s do so well at, as history attests, and then they steer us directly to these ends.

So true!!!

I am not a religious person at all but this icon by Andrei Rublev is so beautiful. It is in fact the other face of the war, inside and outside us.

 

[wanderer]

When the son of a friend of mine left the Marines, the Marine psychologist told him that his training had turned him into a functional psychopath.

 

[obyvatel]

Lobaczewski had some interesting observations regarding soldiers in Political Ponerology. He cited previous work by other scientists (like his professor Edward Brzezicki and German psychologist Ernst Kretschmer) and introduced the term "skirtoids".

[quote author=Political Ponerology]
Skirtoids are vital, egotistical, and thick-skinned individuals who make good soldiers because of their endurance and psychological resistance. In peacetime, however, they are incapable of understanding life’s subtler matters or rearing children prudently. They are happy in primitive surroundings; a comfortable environment easily causes hysterization within them. They are rigidly conservative in all areas and supportive of governments that rule with a heavy hand. Kretschmer was of the opinion that this anomaly was a biodynamic phenomenon caused by the crossing of two widely separated ethnic groups, which is frequent in that area of Europe. If that were the case, North America should be full of skirtoids, a hypothesis that deserves observation. We may assume that skirtoidism is inherited normally; not sex-linked. This anomaly should be taken into consideration if we wish to understand the history of Russia, as well as the history of Poland, to a lesser extent.
[/quote]

He mentions later that these individuals may abuse their wives and children in regular life but are sufficiently in control to not cross the line of law.

I would think that such individuals exist in other societies as well. There are some groups or tribes in Asian countries who are known to join the army through multiple generations. There is also higher than average (compared to other groups who share the larger social environment) incidents of abuse of women in such groups.

Lobaczewski also poses the question of mercenaries.

[quote author=Political Ponerology]

Another interesting question suggests itself: what kind of people are the so-called “jackals”, hired as professional and mercenary killers by various groups, and who so quickly and easily take up arms as a means of political struggle? They offer themselves as specialists who perform the duty as accepted; no human feelings interfere with their nefarious plans. They are most certainly not normal people, but none of the deviations described herein fits this picture. As a rule, essential psychopaths are talkative and incapable of such carefully planned activity.

Perhaps, we should assume this type to be the product of a cross between lesser taints of various deviations. Even if we accept the statistical probability of the appearance of such hybrids, taking into account the quantitative data, they should be an extremely rare phenomena. However, mate-selection psychology produces pairings which bilaterally represent various anomalies. Carriers of two or even three lesser deviational factors should thus be more frequent. A jackal could then be imagined as the carrier of schizoidal traits in combination with some other psychopathy, e.g. essential psychopathy or skirtoidism. More frequent instances of such hybrids are a large part of a society’s pool of hereditary pathological ponerogenic factors.
[/quote]

In modern times with the advent of violent video games and TV shows, it has become easier for the PTB to recruit more cannon fodder by conditioning the population from an early age to accept and glorify violence. In such an environment, it would be easier for deviant genes related to the above-mentioned pathologies to express and proliferate. The environment would also create secondary carriers of such anomalies through conditioning.

 

[Approaching Infinity]

Dave Grossman has written on this topic. I've only read short summaries and snippets from his books, but it seems that militaries realized after one of the world wars that the vast majority of soldiers deliberately would not shoot to kill. That inspired all sorts of conditioning techniques to create better killers. I'm sure there's more to be found in his books, but that's all I remember. His books are On Combat:The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and in Peace, and On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society.

 

[loreta]

Obyvatel and Approaching Infinity and everybody thank you so much for your insights.

I was thinking about the soldiers that commit suicide when they return from the battles. Maybe these are less psychopaths and they are unable to accept what they did. I don't know. Also, during battles, (I refer to the Spanish war) when soldiers did not want to fight for whatever reason or wanted to desert, they were killed by the generals or other soldiers as an example. So it was a very clear message for the others. I can not imagine what it is to be a soldier. You can feel some scents of it reading their letters, for example in the book Letters from a lost generation, First World War letters of Vera Brittain and four friends, you have the sense to see sensible men, young and beautiful, in the middle of something that they did not expect. How come these young poets, idealistic generation can kill? And be killed by others young men. This is terrible and really, really one of the most saddest thing in this planet.

 

[Esote]

Are all psychopaths soldiers?


Are all psychopaths soldiers? Obviously not. The reverse might also be true.

Reminds me of one of my grand-fathers, a very young soldier in WW1. In 1917 he had been injured in the knee and was lying down defenseless when German soldiers came after the wounded French to kill them. He had learned some German and managed to tell them "please help me, I'm wounded"! The Germans didn't kill him but took him on their shoulders back to their camp. As soon as they reach the place, the French artillery fired on them. These soldiers gathered around and above my grand-father, in order to protect him with their own bodies. What they did is greatly different from a psychopathic attitude...
FWIW

PS. I'm also thinking about an old friend of mine. He had been engaged in the war between France and Algeria in the late fifties, against his will. Being considered as a deserter, he was obliged to fight in the special disciplinary forces, or else he would have been executed. Then he found himself in the midst of horror and carnage, having to kill if he wanted to survive. And he told me that he first started to shoot at live targets once he saw his friends dying around him through utter suffering. And he spent his whole life, still is, betraying the PTB psychopathic system, never becoming one...

 

[Beau]

Re: Are all psychopaths soldiers?

Are all psychopaths soldiers? Obviously not. The reverse might also be true.

Reminds me of one of my grand-fathers, a very young soldier in WW1. In 1917 he had been injured in the knee and was lying down defenseless when German soldiers came after the wounded French to kill them. He had learned some German and managed to tell them "please help me, I'm wounded"! The Germans didn't kill him but took him on their shoulders back to their camp. As soon as they reach the place, the French artillery fired on them. These soldiers gathered around and above my grand-father, in order to protect him with their own bodies. What they did is greatly different from a psychopathic attitude...
FWIW

Unfortunately much has changed since then, especially in how well, from their perspective, the armed forces trains and programs their soldiers. Whatever humanity a soldier has before he joins is usually quickly taken out of him through powerful psychological programming learned through decades of research into the human brain. I doubt all soldiers are psychopaths, but a large percentage are capable of acting psychopathically in today's armed forces because of the training they receive. I would venture to guess that a situation such as your grandfather experienced would be quite unlikely to occur in today's armed conflicts. Can you imagine a soldier fighting against the USA being helped in this way today?