Part 2: War Cries

Songs of Grief

FEAR: The Guide of Children 

Defence is our necessary preparedness for the dangers threatening a physical body: protection against cold, burning, rockfall, flood, attack, starvation.
Good Defence is forward planning, preventive measures, careful distribution of resources such that none are unfairly deprived or oppressed, and thereby made desperate.

FEAR is our proper emotional device to trigger self-defensive action. Fear has a high and rightful place in Life :  to make us careful about our fragile, mortal bodies.  Fear is, simply, a vital gift to ensure Self-preservation :  the danger of a hot log,  or leaning too far over a riverbank,  or playing too hard with cats,  or neglecting to detoxify our wastes,  or shrivelling with cancer as our poisoned de-forested world loses its grateful skin of ozone.

 Early sharp lessons of Pain and Fright teach Caution: the only defence of young minds against a world which is alive with simple perils for those who have not yet learned to manage its complexities.

Fear is necessarily a Giant in the minds of children ;  a beneficent guide and deliverer from danger.

And yet in the mind of every child, the presence of Fear can magnify and malform to become a Monster :  if they are not introduced kindly to their towering benefactor.  To an unguided child, Fear can remain the ruling tyrant of their whole lives :  and so deny them the joy of growing confidently into this fearless adult world of generous provision.

And it is only when scared human beings with full-grown bodies make a god of Fear ~ make a devil, in fact  ~ that they lock themselves into the extreme terrors of childhood nightmares :

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FEAR :   Kill or Be Killed

ALL OF US, Men and Women, have together fallen into this nightmare of Fear : throughout our remembered warrior history.
Our lives are prolonged duties of Care, for each other, for our children, for our disabled, old and sick people.

In a world of incessant Fear of each other’s Attack, those Women and Men who care for the young and old and disabled, need and expect the protection of Warriors, male and female.  Without our soldiers  ~  chiefly Men  ~  we and our children and grandparents are utterly exposed to the Assault of enemy regimes.

~ That men in love with Power do Fear, profoundly, women, age, disability, defencelessness :  are chained to these needy Vulnerabilities, which hold within them the threat of their own violent Death.

~ That Men’s attacks and annexations are directed, in subconscious ultimate truth, not against other men, or against philosophies or regimes :

There is no war in history which does not climax in annexation, possession,  terrorisation,  and often murders of the defenceless.  The bloody triumph over their defeated defenders.

~ Fighters are therefore trapped forever in a savage Cycle of Assault,  injury,  abuse of power,  and Self-Hatred,  which drives their persecutions and retaliations. 

FEAR :  of the Defenceless

AND WHAT IS IT, THAT MAKES THE MALE SO FEAR THE FEMALE ?  ~  harbour such Fear and Anger, that men break out intermittently into a frenzy of killing women, and often children, and old and defenceless people: these families traditionally barricaded within the citadel, in times of both war and vigilant peace.

 And in modern urban times: unpowerful people barricaded within their homes against muggers, night-stalkers, estranged husbands, drug-peddlers, rapists, anonymous killers of women and elderly pensioners.  Huddling in their domestic citadels.

MANY GREAT AND INSIGHTFUL philosophies and researches have understood the primal relationship between Ignorance and Aggression and Fear :  the pre-emptive Attack of the Fearful, Ineffectual and Unknowing upon those who represent what is Feared  ~  be it a growling enemy, a threat of take-over ;  or a smashing of whoever stands symbol for a hated oppressor.

For this last  –  the victim is often the Weakest in sight :  the one with insufficient strength to retaliate :  the one whose easy felling can deliver, at last, a transient delusion of Power to the attacker.

AND THERE IS THIS FURTHER, DEEPER TRUTH, well-understood by many thinkers : that it is our passionate human attachment to physical survival, to our Bodies and Possessions, to Material things, to Matter, which gives rise to Fear :

The fear of the immaterial.  Of the intangible, of ghosts, of spirits, of dissolution of bodily solidity, of the unknown, of the Un-Understood.

The immaterial :  some undefended state of being which needs no corporeal form, no armour in which to defend itself :  being as it is, protected utterly by its impregnable evanescence.  Apparently vulnerable, in its utter exposure :  yet absolutely unassailable.

Thus have ghosts and fairies and witches and wizards and gods and spirits always struck men with terror :  not merely for their assumed malice, but for their unarmed inviolability :  Men who have chosen only to understand the Clash and Power of Arms and Armour.

Fear :  the terrified clinging to Matter, to Body, to Physical Life  ~  at absolutely Anyone’s Cost :  in a dominating history of fear of God and fear of Death.

Fear :  the Terror of Spirit :  in the mind of he who is hollow,  Separated from Spirit  –

               ( –  he who has pushed away the balancing Feminine within his own Masculine mind,  seeking and hearing only man-gods and their priests  –                        –  the goddess-spirit silenced.)

The male animals of the bush and plains seldom seriously hurt their captured prizes. Human beings have far more complex objectives :  and inflict upon each other vastly more grievous casualties.

No. There is some deeper reason why male human beings have for several millennia treated women as they have, in near-every culture :  suffered some profound Fear of them, Anger at them, which drives men to inhibit, control, crush, silence, shroud, veil, subordinate, disenfranchise, and disempower them ;  to kill them, even :  defenceless though they be.

Listen to them : those diverse colloquial virulences for Women (for which we can find ~ can we not ? ~ no equivalent epithets for Men : for whom the most our slang tolerates is prick or deadshit or bastard.  (Though let’s not forget one ultimate insult about them too  – fucking cunt).

And that gross american pals’ bonhomie which utterly revolts all other nations :  son-of-a-bitch and motherfucker.

There is no male siren,  no magical tormentor who lured us all to our guiltless doom.

True and Dreadful Secrets

WE CAN SORROW FOR YOU MEN, that you have chosen to see Women’s discreet and evanescent powers as furtive or malevolent. How sorrowful for us all that, in your historic solo annexation of national rule, and of the world’s towering male monotheistic religious traditions, you have refused to seek or hear, nor codify nor elevate, the Truth of Women’s graceful spiritual and moral experience ;  and thus have had no other template than your own Male experience of warrior anger and pain, with which to guess at the Inward Form of your own Mothers, Wives and Daughters.

What a tribulation it has been for Women for millennia, to have been forcibly silenced ; and then accused of imagined evils in men’s voices in kangaroo courts, and delivered up to the gossips and priests and executioners as the primal harbingers of original sin.

What a tribulation it has been for Men for millennia, to fall into this Fear of an imagined female malevolence :  and so enter the cycle of annexation, repression, and forced confinement in chastity, false condemnation, honour-killing, war-assault, and consequent self-disgust, and self-hatred.

What unavailing ordeal :  this monstrous cycle of capture, imprison, guard, and defend against the assaults of other men suffering the same Fear :  That defenceless people are somehow the repositories of dark secrets, that they must be commandeered and disempowered and held ceaselessly captive by contempt and physical threat.  The tyranny of Weapon-Power.

The Dreadful Duty of Protection

THE CYCLE OF FEAR, of kill or be killed, attack and defend, capture and guardianship, has a wretched penalty for its entrapped soldiery.
No wonder that men not only fear women for their illusory powers of evil.

THERE IS NOT ONE BOY BORN ON EARTH who can face life certain of his safety and freedom. There is not one boy who can be assured that he will not be called up one day to fight a war,  perhaps to his death :  who can know that he has the Right to live out his own life with his own four good limbs, his own good head and heart.

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ORIGINAL SIN

What is it, this piece of fantastical biblestory moral legend ?  ~  which apparently moves most of us little enough, in our modern industrial sectarian lives  –

–  and yet which lurks in the depths of our euro-eastern mythic traditions, lies like a dark sea-bed beneath our ruffled post-Christ religious ocean.

–  And which, in its discreet and buried accusation, still haunts and guides our constructs of human action,  moral responsibility,  and blame, to this very day. 

Indeed ~ it is the very touchstone, whether we recognise it or not, of our perception of our fellow beings.

WHO HAS NOT, and never will, look sideways at a suspect neighbour  ~  or a relative, a friend, an ethnic group, a nation, a race, a political party, a civic institution, a convicted offender, a doubtful parent  ~  and will not lay upon them some sort of Blame, for some perceived offence or fault or error ?  ~  some kind of guilty responsibility?  ~  whether they bear it knowingly or not ?

WE ARE BORN INTO A WHOLE LIFESPAN OF MUTUAL ACCUSATION.  We spend an extraordinary part of our exchanges  ~  no matter how high-minded and serious  ~  in criticism and ascribing Blame.

Even those who seek, decently, to find compassionate causes for the wanton cruelty or deceit of an offender, must pursue a literally endless regression of responsibilities :  seeking into the remote past for the ultimate brutal parent, tyrannical regime, or blighted philosophy :  to take Blame for the legacy of like behaviour passed from generation to generation.

It seems, in the end, that we are stuck with it: an immemorial, generational succession of botched and blameworthy human ill-judgements ;  which by propaganda and example, live on today with our own dreary and repetitive inheritance of reprehensible family and national deeds.
For which we can all Blame each other, and right back to our remotest forebears.

So we have no choice, in the end, but to Blame some profound, primal, congenital defect within our moral being :

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Fear: and the Illusion of Evil

OUR BAFFLEMENT at our own savage behaviour is surely unchanged today. Our cultural styles and attitudes have passed through myriad variations in recorded history :  but we remain, in the end, grappling with the same dark monsters of Power-struggle, Violence, and Oppression, with greater or lesser measure of success ;  and never victory.

Thus the contemporary human being is as good a study as any, in which to look at the usual legacies of decencies, loves and attainments ;  but also of cruelty, greed, selfishness and aggression  ~  of original sin, or original unpleasantness, or original avarice, or whatever unattractive weakness currently on display.

For we have every reason to fear our foes, whoever they are.  They can rob us, sell our children drugs, smash us drunkenly on a highway, threaten our acquisitions, steal our family members to hostile religions, take control of our lives. All of them armed and defended, as we are :  with weapons, intolerance, anger, duplicity, bullet-proof vests, dogma : ~

~ just in case we attack first, or run drugs, or belt their children, or smash into their vehicle, or thieve their stash, or accuse their religion, or join the wrong party.

Yes : Fear that the other’s Fear may be even more intense than our own :  and that their fierce behaviour will be yet more fearsome than our own.

Hence the appalling face of Tyranny :  a regime in an agony of Fear, barricaded behind steel phalanxes of tanks, and walls of stone, and missiles guided from a safe distance ;  holding off the angry oppressed by control-militia and fearsome threat to kill.

Hence also, the lesser but equally real Fear and resentment of adherents to one or other political party in a democracy ;  who see (rightly or wrongly) a greater component of Fear in the opposition’s platform, reflected in policies of greater repressions, or, for that matter, of dangerous leniencies.

Hence our insistent, pre-emptive struggles for power, for prosecution of the weak by the strong, our tedious parliaments of traded insults, to hamstring the opposition before they can strike.

FEAR governs the entire historic chain of pre-emptive strike, fright and cruelty which marks our confrontations ;  and gives perennial anguish to those many amongst our number who long for Decency,  Fairness,  Justice,  and Peace.