Des Réfractaires
Assassinations, massacres, rape, torture: these crimes committed on the soil of what was once Yugoslavia are not the acts of uncontrollable savages; of educationless brutes.
No doubt as children they respected the family order; are now more or less faithful followers of religions; earnest sports spectators; content with television. In a word, civilized folks; normal people doing what society expects them to!
Each crime demonstrates the success of diverse processes of domestication which have come to be grouped under the heading of Civilization.
The killers, rapists and perpetrators of massacres have exceptionally well internalized today’s world’s fundamental logic: to survive, other people must be destroyed! This mutual mangling takes different forms, such as economic competition or war. But the result is always the same: some must be trampled in order to give others the impression that they are living more and better. Being civilized signifies not taking your own life and those of others into consideration. It means letting your life be used, exploited and dominated by the always-superior interests of the collectivity where fate decreed that you would be born and live your life. And all for the financial etc. gain of the authorities of the collectivity in question. In exchange for this submission one is granted the possibility of being accepted as a human being.
Being civilized, as well, signifies sacrificing your life, and those of others, when those in power attempt to solve their management problems with wars.
Aside from a variety of benefits they offer, wars represent a very efficient means of directing feelings of frustration against people who, designated as prey, can then be oppressed, humiliated and killed without qualms. Those who suffer, as with those who take pleasure in making others suffer, become nothing more than instruments of the conditions of social existence, conditions where lives are only important in relation to the use that can be made of them.
Continue reading How Nice To Be Civilized! →
