The Human Hell and the Demons of War: Think Never Again? Try Again and Again.
PART TWO OF TWO
Contributing Editor Axisoflogic.com
May 11, 2004, 00:22
See also Part 1
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PART II
Evolving Brain, Advancing Civilization, Destructive Violence
Spit out of the jungles by evolution after we landed on solid ground from the dense branches of our trees above, we
began our great Diaspora, ever-slowly traversing savannah, desert, forest, tundra and oceans, reaching the far reaches
of the globe. Yet within us we carried the virus that to this day continues to plague our existence.
Attaching itself to the human condition like a blood-sucking leach firmly entrenched on a mammalian body, our propensity
towards violence has never left us. Like many species of animal, including our primate cousins, aggression and violence
are deeply entrenched in our psyches. The real danger, however, lies in the evolving brain we have over the millennia
allowed to develop.
What separates our aggression from the instinctual one residing in the animal kingdom is our capacity for intelligent,
analytical and cognizant understanding. That is, our intelligent brain has the capability to mutate our many passions,
emotions and aggressions into organized violence against our own kind, done methodically and purposefully, thereby
superceding any instinct we might possess to the great detriment of our fellow man. The threat to our race is that
unlike animals, whose aggression is minimal and based on instincts of survival that also serve the laws of nature, our
propensity towards violence exerts pressure to endanger our own kind thanks to the complex mechanizations of the mind.
Our deep thinking and highly intelligent brain unleashes violence not according to the laws of the jungle but for much
more sinister purposes dealing with our highly volatile and misunderstood animal passions.
With feelings of anger, hatred, competition, revenge and jealousy so ingrained into our animalistic selves, it becomes
extremely difficult to sequester them in our daily lives. These emotions, and the reactions inherent in such
circumstances, are unique to the human race. It is our species that can act out violently against such passions; we are
the only animal that can direct our passions in violent outrage, whether at one person, an entire army or an absolute
nation. Our vast superiority in intelligence over the animal world, combined with the same behaviors and propensities as
our mammal relatives, makes us much more dangerous animals than previously existed. It is our mind, combined with our
animal passions, that allows our violent and aggressive selves to mutate to the kind of destruction, death and misery we
are so capable of.
It is this Molotov cocktail of human intelligence and animal passions that makes of man that most dangerous of animals.
Intelligence and passion, when mixed together, can create a volatile concoction that has been manifested in the often
bloody history of man.
When combined with the collective brain of the many, such as in the case of tribes or nation-states, the propensity
towards violence against competitors or rivals becomes even greater, escalating into full-fledged war. The same
parameters that led to fighting among our primate ancestors and the animal world of today helps bring to the surface the
human hell that has shackled us from our earliest beginnings and that today leads to untold levels of misery worldwide.
Competition for food, resources, sexual partners and territory condemn humans to releasing into the open the virus of
violence attached to our psyches that lingers hibernating in the innermost closets of our minds, ready at any moment to
makes its ominous entrance into our lives.
With our more intelligent mind, however, new non-nature parameters that open the scabs of violence have emerged in the
last several hundred thousand years. As differences of religious dogma arose, eroded and mutated throughout tribal
societies, so did the propensity for war based on differences of belief. Indeed, wars of religious inclinations have
killed, maimed and destroyed more humans than any other excuse for warfare. The untold suffering caused by religious
wars cannot be adequately described in words. The “my god is better than your god” syndrome, combined with the ‘my
religion is the true and only religion’ belief in which battles for the true religion continue to be fought, has
condemned hundreds of millions and perhaps billions of human spirits to the nadir of nothingness.
Wars of religious proclivity are the greatest example of the malignant human hell that legitimizes the murder and
killing of our fellow man. Added to the already prevalent munitions of aggression our animal selves are born with, this
breed of violence, encompassing a small timeframe of our life on Earth, against differences of religion, nationality,
ethnicity, race, beliefs, goals and vision of the world, has elevated the violence against one another to a scale the
first humans to inhabit the world could never possibly envisage.
Conflict has defined human society from time immemorial. Our gravitation to violence has characterized our existence and
our history. After leaving our cradle in Africa, from our earliest nomadic tribal predecessors to our most advanced
societies today our fate has in large measure been determined as a result of warfare. Competition for land, homes, food,
sexual partners and resources were once the sole reason for human combat. Today, added to those just mentioned we can
include the much more sinister wars based on differences of religion, ethnicity, nationality, race, beliefs and goals.
With the advancement of human civilization our primitiveness only grows. The introduction of new anthropological
creations in human societal evolution have only exacerbated the need to kill one another. The reasons for human hell
keep increasing with the advancement of our existence and the continued growth of our species.
Conquest, usurpation, power and control have sealed destinies and advanced humankind to where it stands today. It is
these same that will help seal our fates the more we clash and more we bump into each other’s vested interests. Under
growing pressures for the finite space available and as nation states compete for Earth’s dwindling resources, the human
hell we have known since the dawn of time will only resurface once more, continuing to dance alongside humanity’s
unsustainable desires, animalistic passions and our voracious inability to understand the complexity of who and what we
truly are that has scarred us during our entire time on Earth.
The Human Hell
What is it about war that makes beasts and demons of man? What is it about destroying our own kind that unleashes such
anger and passion? What is it about the human hell that returns us to the savage and barbaric days of the past? Our
animal and primitive selves are resurrected with the call to war, opening in our minds the collective memories of an
entire history of death, destruction and misery. The human hell opens the conveyor belts of accepted violence, a time
when those in power make it moral to destroy a fellow human energy along with the advancement of entire societies. The
human hell allows warmonger leaders to condemn to death the citizens comprising the military while permitting those who
survive to destroy their fellow men.
From nails and teeth to stones and branches to arrows and spears to guns and cannons to missiles and bullets the human
condition has evolved. Along with us, however, is our twin called violence, sitting on our side waiting patiently for
the bells of carnage to be heard, clandestinely shrouded in the inner bowels of man, released with the call to arms that
mutates us back to the animal world we claim to rule, not be part of. For violence knows that she will eventually reap
what man sows, commandeering entire armies of enraged men to become exactly that which human morality and religion
stands firmly against.
Through the cross-hairs of a rifle or the aiming of a weapon man stops being man. He who fires and aims has become beast
while he who is fired upon is but a subhuman target, losing all personality and humanity. The human hell turns man into
beast, Jekyll turns into Hyde and the world becomes a bastion for the demons running rampant in the human condition.
Atrocities become accepted, rapes become desirable, carnage fills the air and humanism erodes more and more with each
new devastation of land and man.
The human hell legalizes those most heinous crimes our civilization condemns. It makes heroes out of war criminals,
replaces justice with destruction and executes devastation upon innocence. Murder and cold-blooded execution are given
the legal justifications never granted in society. The losers of war become war criminals while the victors become war
heroes, to be honored and rewarded for the crimes against humanity they helped perpetrate. War presidents are given full
reign to decimate tens of thousands of civilians and to make toxic entire nations, ruining countless lives in the
process.
The human hell orchestrates a symphony of macabre manifestations, unleashing the most deadly weapons known to man upon
cities and standing armies. Artillery rains down from the clouds, missiles strike like thunder from the gods. Bullets
spray mercilessly onto fragile human bodies while rockets devastate both homes and lives. The human hell war is called,
released from the innards of the human condition, magnifying the worst symptoms in our disease.
Death, destruction and misery enliven the energy that feeds from human blood. The animal inside us awakens with the
adrenaline rush of death and survival. Hatred, anger, animosity and revenge are spawned as our animal selves usurp our
human minds. Humans become worthless, their lives easily taken, their deaths expected. Entire cities are sacked,
children and women are murdered without impunity, human morals and virtues are made extinct. Human hell makes monsters
of entire peoples acquiescing to the crimes against humanity being committed in their name.
The enemy is hated, though he is unknown. The desire to kill him grows, though he never hurt us. Unleashing pain upon
him and his people is ingrained into our minds, though we fail to realize he is as human as us. The human hell blinds us
to a humanity we once possessed, unearthing our animal passions that, combined with our human intelligence, causes a
weapon of death and destruction, unrepentant, unrelenting and unforgiving. The human hell makes man the incarnation of
evil, released upon civilization, thrusting decimation upon our own kind.
It is evil born of man that our religions warn against. It is our violent selves our scribes write about. It is man at
his worst that we must fear.
The development of stereotypes, differences in beliefs and racial identity, the arrival of fears and ignorance, ethnic
and cultural complexities, different goals and ways of seeing the world, auras of superiority along with competitive
pressure for land, food and resources contribute to the ever-growing need to unleash the human hell onto our
environment.
Genocide and ethnic cleansing have, along with war, been a part of the virus we call human violence from the very
beginning of human understanding. Entire groups have been extinguished, entire regions cleansed of humans. It goes on
today as much as it did sixty years ago. Our history has been marked by genocide after genocide, ethnic cleansing after
ethnic cleansing, war after war. After every atrocity cries of ‘Never Again’ rise as if this time humanity will learn
its lessons. Yet, as we know too well, the cries go mute as the deaf ears of mankind once more tremble with yet another
thunderous blast from a hail of bullets and missiles wiping out an entire grouping of people.
In the unrecoverable echoes of our lost humanity can be heard wails of ‘Again and Again,’ never learning from our
atrocities or the evil born within us. War, that most dastardly of all human hells, as old as our first pioneers and as
dangerous as the most venomous human to ever walk among us, has created Holocaust after Holocaust, monopolized by no
group of humans, distributed to all corners of the globe, regardless of skin color, ethnic makeup or religious beliefs.
War is hell on Earth, affecting humankind throughout time and space, inconsequential to the perceptions we might have or
the delusion we might live. War makes demons of our soldiers, free to roam alongside evil as it infects once placid men
who respected human morality in peace but exterminate its principles in war. Through war humankind returns to our
primitive selves, becoming the smartest of animals, capable of exterminating its own kind and setting free the misery
that has befallen every generation of humanity from the time of first beginnings.
The absurdity of human war has yet to be stopped, for we have yet to fully understand who and what we truly are. Inside
us lie the answers; in knowing the animal world lays our salvation. We claim ourselves the epitome of modernity, of
civilization and of knowledge, but ape like creatures prone to violence is our reality, intelligent, sure,
self-destructive, you bet. War has never ceased, and there is no reason to believe that it one day will. War is
violence, and violence is humankind. Our reason is no match for our animal passions; our younger, analytical mind is
easily clouded by our older, primitive one.
The salvation to the greatest symptom of our disease has been at our hands since the first human opened its eyes. Yet
over the course of our brief stay on Earth we have been made blind, thanks to our own devices, to a reality that is as
humbling as it is frightening. Our egos refuse to listen, see or touch that which emanates from all corners of the
globe. We fear knowing that which for centuries has been denied, afraid that we will see that we are not what we once
thought ourselves to be.
The human hell will continue to linger and determine our fates. It will continue to maim, murder and decimate. For as
long as we have walked this now scarred Earth the demons running in our veins have dominated us, corroding our societies
and humanity, manipulating us toward unleashing the great evil living within us. In the end, the human hell called war
will be our demise as our inability to comprehend who and what we are will crash with the ever-expanding lethality of
our technologies. From rocks and sticks to mutually assured destruction, our violent selves have never changed. Except
today’s version of yesterday’s rocks and sticks could conceivably annihilate entire regions and indeed the entire
surface of the planet.
Warfare is ingrained inside the human condition, unrelenting and dominating. We have yet to exorcise this most terrible
demon from our wake. Humanity and violence are conjoined twins, it seems, inseparable brothers thriving off each other.
Where man goes violence and war soon follow; where violence is found man will most certainly be found. In all regions of
the globe, in all peoples and societies, violence lingers about and controls us, from spousal abuse to declared war
among nations. All it needs to resurrect itself from outside the crate that lies hidden in our mind is a war like leader
eager to launch the trumpets of war. All that is needed for violence to release its most toxic cancers upon our
civilization is for good men to do nothing upon the calling of the masses.
As long as we fail to understand the world around us and the true psychology of the human condition violence and war
will continue to lead to death, destruction and untold misery. As long as we remain ignorant and silent to the control
violence has over our race children will continue to be buried by their parents. For, as Plato is claimed to have once
said: “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”
To deny the fruit of our impulses is to deny the very existence of our being. Our denial and failure to accept the
reality of what we are is guiding us down the road to perdition. The corrosive unwillingness to delve into the internal
realizations of our past, present and future will inevitably lead to our never putting a stop to the dastardly deeds our
species is capable of unleashing upon ourselves and the lands we inhabit.
As a result, ‘Never Again’ will continue to be shouted in vain after yet another war, act of genocide or ethnic
cleansing. The impotence of such words will only be seen in light of the omnipotence of continued human violence and
war. In time, ‘Again and Again’ will come to be seen as the perpetual reality that haunts our existence, plaguing
humanity from the beginning to the very end. We seem incapable of stopping ourselves from repeating a history that is
all too familiar to us.
In truth, perhaps our very existence is defined by war and violence, and addicted we have become to the horrors our
creative energies wreak upon our world. Maybe violence is as ingrained a part of our psyches as love, affection and
happiness are. How else do we explain an entire existence, spanning many hundreds of thousands of years, scarred by
death, violence, destruction and suffering? Only when we confront our animal selves and escape this delusion of
ourselves as almighty creatures of chosen prowess will we find respite from our evil ways. Until then, only the dead can
be assured of never again experiencing that most devastating of human hells called war.
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© Copyright 2004 by AxisofLogic.com
Manuel Valenzuela is social critic and commentator, activist, writer and author of Echoes in the Wind, a novel to be
published in Spring of 2004. His articles appear weekly on axisoflogic.com where he is also contributing editor. Mr.
Valenzuela welcomes comments and can be reached at manuel@valenzuelas.net. Read More articles by Manuel Valenzuela.