Very interesting, as a civilian this is a real eye-opener. Sustaining a military action is so complex.
I remember in the movie Patton, George C Scott surveys the remains of a battlefield, death and destruction everywhere, and he proclaims his love of war saying “compared to war all other human endeavours shrink too insignificance(paraphrase ).
What a different perspective. Do you think war has gotten a bad name? It is our magnum opus. What you’re admonishing in this piece is simple incompetence and the toll it has taken on the Russian aggressor. It is our heritage and our inheritance, war, and when prosecuted well, its sophistication is breath taking. You know we still love it: Predator drones and hellfire missiles and patriot defence systems, such jingoistic hyperbole. And our movies, come on, we love war and our humanist protestations against the horrors are sincere but kinda performative, the polite necessity.
I understand what you’re saying, and it’s something I’m actually kind of writing about right now in the next post–the phenomenon you’re alluding to. Those who know the storm, sicken of the calm. When you experience a heightened degree of existence in any capacity, not just war, everything else tends to fade into insignificance. You never feel more alive than after you’ve almost died; the sunset looks a lot more beautiful, the color of the grass a lot greener. On a more accessible everyday level, it’s the psychological anomaly whereby doing hard shit sharpens life thereafter; as a simple example: If you go without food/water for a week, lost in a forest somewhere but you end up getting out, for the next month (at a minimum) you’ll savor tiny little ordinary things you never appreciated before, like how great it is to sit down at a restaurant and eat great food. The thing is though, I think this phenomenon is potentiated when it involves comradery, and there are a lot of fascinating examples in which this bears out.
Very interesting, as a civilian this is a real eye-opener. Sustaining a military action is so complex.
I remember in the movie Patton, George C Scott surveys the remains of a battlefield, death and destruction everywhere, and he proclaims his love of war saying “compared to war all other human endeavours shrink too insignificance(paraphrase ).
What a different perspective. Do you think war has gotten a bad name? It is our magnum opus. What you’re admonishing in this piece is simple incompetence and the toll it has taken on the Russian aggressor. It is our heritage and our inheritance, war, and when prosecuted well, its sophistication is breath taking. You know we still love it: Predator drones and hellfire missiles and patriot defence systems, such jingoistic hyperbole. And our movies, come on, we love war and our humanist protestations against the horrors are sincere but kinda performative, the polite necessity.
I think war has been mistreated.
I understand what you’re saying, and it’s something I’m actually kind of writing about right now in the next post–the phenomenon you’re alluding to. Those who know the storm, sicken of the calm. When you experience a heightened degree of existence in any capacity, not just war, everything else tends to fade into insignificance. You never feel more alive than after you’ve almost died; the sunset looks a lot more beautiful, the color of the grass a lot greener. On a more accessible everyday level, it’s the psychological anomaly whereby doing hard shit sharpens life thereafter; as a simple example: If you go without food/water for a week, lost in a forest somewhere but you end up getting out, for the next month (at a minimum) you’ll savor tiny little ordinary things you never appreciated before, like how great it is to sit down at a restaurant and eat great food. The thing is though, I think this phenomenon is potentiated when it involves comradery, and there are a lot of fascinating examples in which this bears out.
What a great formulation, I’ve never really thought of it in those terms.