Reading about foreign policy issues has been strangely fascinating to me since I was about 15 and I had to do research for a paper on neutron bombs and the policy implications of them.
[note: I still can’t figure out why some people are perfectly fine with dropping napalm the enemy but have “moral qualms” with vaporizing them with a nuclear weapon. If you plan on killing people in a grand scale why is efficiency evil and tedium of having to fly a bunch of missions bad? Pure emotionalism pisses me off. If you’re happy with killing people in war, or just to prove a point, the way you do it doesn’t really matter since those motherfuckers are dead at the end of the day.]
And I still read about foreign policy issuse for the hell of it since that’s where all the interesting human drama plays itself out. Nations, ideologies, economies, vast complex systems battling to the death. What’s more dramatic than that? Way more interesting than who’s fucking who.
In that vein, this article on a conservative foreign policy oriented weblog
describes war in a way most people never quite think about it…killing and converting the enemy at all costs. It’s not just about a bunch of soliders in a field shooting and dying with honor. Or snazzy planes and impressive tanks or really cool ships all show on MSNBC with clips of marketing videos spliced into talking heads pondering the bodily fluids of a politician. War is killing human beings to kill an idea and everyone should remember that.
Ideas are what it’s all about and if the other person won’t listen, convert and join the right group, then in war they fucking die.
So the next time you think the world is a happy carefree place remember that there’s someone out there who is your enemy and would gladly kill you for their ideas to win the field.