Duel

Duel is a ritual of turning rivals into enemies by mutual agreement.  But killing is killing.  It may be characterized as a mutually-greed premeditated manslaughter. See also Rivals Are Not Enemies.

06.12.18

Hatred into Violence

Wars, large and small, are waged all over the world, and they seem never to cease. Hatred is at the root of all fights, from squabbles to shouting matches, fist fights, shooting, and to gunning riot and raging wars. Anger, unrestrained, leads to hatred, and escalating hatred to violence; and wars in turn promote hatred.  This is self-evident and yet history woefully proves that the world could never free itself of wars. 

世界中あちらこちらで戦争が続き、絶えることのない近頃ですけど、争いは大小すべて、口論にはじまり、怒鳴り合い、殴り合い、射ち合い、そして暴動から荒れ狂う戦争にいたるまで、その元はすべて嫌悪でしょう。怒りが、抑えられないと、憎しみにいたり、憎しみが募ると暴力となるのです。そして、また、戦争は嫌悪をつのるものです。これは、解り切った真理ですけど、歴史の明らかにする所では、悲しや、この地上の戦争から解放される事は不可能みたいです。

Religious wars

So many wars have been and continue to be fought in the name of religion that it is tempting to think that religion is not merely the opium of the people but even more destructively the staple of the world’s violent conflicts. 

Hate

Hate feels righteous while it lasts but in the end one who harbors it feels terrible and finds it hardly worth the ulcers it causes. The sooner one learns this simple truth, the happier she or he will be.

A well regulated Militia

This is the opening phrase of the Second Amendment to our Constitution.  “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”  In my naiveté, regarding law and politics, I question how essential is a Militia in modern metropolises and wonder why it is not more prominently, if at all, brought up in the current debate on gun control. See also Random Shooting and Violent Society.

Random Shooting

A bomb dropped on a metropolis will do a massive damage unlike a bomb dropped on a rural area; similarly, a random shooting in a vast farmland will kill perhaps one unfortunate farmer and injure a cow or two but a random shooting in a dense urban area will easily massacre a hundred citizens at once. A stringent control of firearms may not be called for in the countryside but mandatory in cities and certainly in any crowded place.

Violent Society

A society that celebrates violence cannot escape being a violent society, and it is doomed to remain violent with no escape from violent actions since it is incapable of censuring them.  It is not enough to tolerate violence to create a peaceable society; it must actively condemn it.  The recent mass massacre in a Connecticut school, a rerun of the Columbine massacre, makes it patent that the problem lies in our society’s underlying violence.

Psychologically unstable individuals existed everywhere at all times and always do, and one way or another, one time or another, they work havoc; there is no way preventing it, no way even predicting it.  But before the age of fire arms, the damage was small. A gun can slaughter many in a single action.  Gun control, even if less aimlessly debated than heretofore, is no solution. Guns are already widely spread among the citizens; there are too many supporters of gun sales; and restricting sales and possessions will only promote undercover gun trade.  The proposal to arm school principals and teachers is insane; the proposal to man school yards with police is absurd.  Improving mental health care is no guarantee that potential malefactor can be so easily identified in advance of acting out their violent fantasies. 

It is essential that the society realizes that children taught that the show of physical strength -- in the form of hitting and clobbering -- is bravery as a way of solving a conflict or of defending one’s right grow into adults with a penchant for destruction of property and lives as a means of resolving anger, general or targeted.  Teaching children to manage anger without violence early in life is of utmost importance; and yet they are today given, if not toy guns, full exposure to fashionable movies and video games which inculcate in them the excitement of vicarious shooting and killing.  It is sad that politicians are virtually silent on this obvious fact; it is deplorable that the media is failing to address this point.

Killing is Killing

Killing is killing, I insist.  Killing is killing -- by hand, with a weapon, or dropping bombs. Killing is killing, lawful or unlawful.  Or, is killing lawful unless it is considered unlawful?  Or, conversely, is killing unlawful except in those cases where it is sanctioned by law? 

The dictionary definition of “murder” is “unlawful killing,” which suggests that killing can be lawful in certain cases, and it is not hard to think of generally accepted instances of lawful killing: slaughter of enemies in a battlefield, execution of condemned criminals, and killing in self-defense.  Justification in these instances is a sanction set by certain human authority, and to that extent it is arbitrary; killing is lawful or unlawful depending on the rules set by human law.

The Sixth Commandment states, “Thou shalt not kill,” without fine prints. Yet Christians and Jews alike exercised killing through history as did other believers.  Biblical commentators thus debate that the commandment most likely should be understood to mean, “Thou shalt not murder.”  We are instructed that the term in the Greek text was “φονεύω/phoneuó“ which meant both “to kill” and “to murder,” and so the English translation could go either way.  The Hebrew text, we are told, also uses the word ”ratzákh/רצח” which had a broader meaning covering both “kill“ and “murder.”

Killing is deliberate when it is premeditated and malicious -- another definition of “murder.”  Is killing then justifiable unless it is deliberate and malicious?  Or are we to understand that killing is deliberate and malicious unless deemed lawfully justifiable?  We come back to the same two questions.  What constitutes the exception -- lawful killing or unlawful killing?

Lawful killing is an annoyingly slippery concept, however.  Law is not absolute.  If capital punishment is lawful, criminals are justly executed; when it is abolished, execution is no longer just.  An enemy a combatant is intent on slaying lawfully ceases to be one a moment after the truce, and then it will be unjust to kill the same individual who had been an enemy but no longer.  At the war’s end the battling foes become innocent citizens if not friends.  If a man in self-defense shoots another and kills him prematurely at the perceived threat on the understandable assumption that he will be killed if he delayed his action, is the killing justified, or is it justified only after being injured first but alive enough to act in defense as it is possible if he had been attacked by a knife, say, rather than a hand gun?  In dueling, when it was legally practiced, killing was justified in the name of honor. Is killing justified when exercised in defense of the family honor to avenge the killing suffered by a member of the family generations earlier in the hand of the killer in the rival family?  Is killing in a crime of passion ever permissible?   Killing of a human being in a ritual sacrifice was practiced in some cultures in the past.  Suicide, considered honorable in one culture, as in the ritual harakiri, is unjustifiable killing in the sense of taking a human life. As to when killing is lawful or unlawful, justifiable or unjustifiable, the distinction fluctuates.  But in one respect it is clear.

It is noteworthy that the person killed in most killings deemed justifiable is seen to be not only dangerous but despicable and therefore deserve to die.  Intruders are vile, criminals are wicked, the enemy in a combat is foul and by extension all the members of the enemy tribe or nation are considered evil even in recognition of innocence of most of them as individuals; they are only unfortunate victims even if inescapably.  “You dirty cur,” a knight shouts as he pierces his lance in the breast of his combatant.  Conquerors treat the natives of the land of their conquest as subhuman and don’t have qualms about annihilating them. Captives in a war are often treated as being less than human, enslaved or imprisoned.  In a religious war, the opponents are infidels who are morally inferior or even depraved; zealots are eager to see non-believers demolished.  So, in genocides, atrocities are committed in the belief that the victims en masse are destined to be decimated.  It requires a sense of superiority over the potential victim to be able to accomplish the slaying of another human being.  Killing easily seems justifiable when it is done to those judged to be inferior as a being.  But if we truly respect a human life, no killing is conceivably justifiable.  Killing, in whatever form, is immoral, lawful or unlawful. 

Killing seen in this light is an extension of aggression, often an escalated action done reciprocally in response to another aggression; and aggression is an exercise of power fueled by anger.  If one killing induces another in revenge, it might be said in reverse that every killing is motivated by another and therefore inevitable and to that extent justified.  But if the initial killing is damned, so are the succeeding killings it caused.  In short, anger leads to aggression, and aggression to hostility and violence; and, violence in excess results in the willful destruction of goods and lives.  

If anger is contained, there will be less killing.  Yet, in most known societies, anger sadly is condoned, if within limits, and, so, fighting in defense of one’s ground, property, and life is glorified as bravery. Those who fail or are unwilling to fight are disdained as cowards even when they refuse to fight on principle rather from the lack of physical prowess.  Boys are often taught to fight to assert themselves; they are egged on to smack, smite, slug, and strike, to knock down and win by physical force with a show of strength, that this is bravery and righteousness. Resorting to violence to resolve a conflict is seen as moral strength even though, deplorably, it can easily accelerate to killing.   So, there will be no end to killing in the human race until it learns to manage anger better and cultivate tolerance and compassion from childhood instead of show of force as a manly virtue.  But that is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future, and tragically killing will go on.

Victims are not Heroes

All dead should be mourned, individually or collectively. Victims, however, are not heroes. Heroes are those who died in brave actions for a cause, in defense of another. If you jumped in the torrential river to save a drowning stranger you are a hero. If you were maimed in this effort, you are a great hero; if you died by saving another, you are a noble hero. Heroes should be revered; they deserve to be memorialized. There are war heroes, and there are war victims. From the time immemorial, there were wars and war victims; innocent defenseless people perished with no cause except for being in the wrong place at the wrong time -- in the blitz, air raids, and senseless brutality and massacres. We have them all over the world in war zones. There are also victims of natural disasters -- earthquakes, floods, and volcanic eruptions as well as of catastrophes like collapsing buildings and urban conflagrations, and of individual criminal actions. Catastrophes are tragic; and they bring people together in solidarity and promote communal mourning. But there are in every disaster innocent victims and heroic rescuers. Disasters of major scale call for mourning on a national scale. But if we honor and memorialize victims, we are doing less than justice to true heroe.

Rivals Are Not Enemies

Rivals are not enemies. They compete against each other. They compete to test and whet their strength, skill, and speed, whether the contest is physical or mental, toward an endeavor to do better.

So, the ancient Greeks instituted athletic competitions as games at Olympia in 776 BCE. From the beginning contests took two distinct forms. There was one in which the contestants moved or stood facing the same direction, as in footrace, long jump, and discus and javelin throwing, and there was another in which they charge face to face and dash in opposite directions to crash into each other, as in boxing and wrestling, and, later in history, jousting. In the latter form, rivals were therefore opponents, and as opponents they could easily get combative; boxing, in fact, could get brutal, and a boxing match is still called a fight. There is no doubt that athletic exercises had their practical merit as a training for real life combat. But games were games. Wrestling and hand-to-hand combat, though similar in form, differ importantly in their objective; wrestlers test their might and endurance but combatants fight to harm each other, and kill, if necessary, not only in defense but for victory. A Greek boxer, if killed by his opponent, was automatically the victor. Rivals were not to be mistaken for enemies. The duel, incidentally, is a ritual which turns rivals into enemies by mutual agreement.

In team sports, the sense of opposition is magnified by the fact that the players are not competing as individuals but as members of a concerted group even though it may be one single player who dashes forward to put a ball into the goal or a basket, or hit it as far afield as possible. Participants and spectators alike know, of course, that opposing teams are playing a game, not fighting a battle. Parents tell their children trudging out of a defeated team that it’s only a game, and winning is not everything. But attending a game, in their overflowing enthusiasm, they often get much more serious themselves, cheering and jeering, stomping and raising their fists, quite contrary to their admonishing words. Tennis players, after an intense game, shake each other’s hands demonstrably that they are still amicable, even if only out of politeness. Rivals are not enemies even after shouting curses and breaking a racket.

Enthusiastic fans, in support of the team they side with, at times go wild and even abusive, even though, as spectators, they are not even struggling under pressure to win, like the players. They express winning, then, more in terms of the defeat of the opponent team; words like destroy, demolish, and decimate are freely thrown about, and the fans of one team insult those of the opponent team and sometimes get violent. Rough language may be metaphorical; but anger is an outburst of hostility.

In those games in which the contestants face the same direction, they are less likely to develop enmity. To take a stance of attack, one needs an adversary. In some athletic activities, participants work in isolation, as in the legendary long-distance runner. In an artistic and intellectual endeavor, for a contest or otherwise, one struggles to do better by competing with oneself. and so, too, in some athletic activities, like gymnastics, swimming, and high jump. The player challenges her or his own past achievements, not so much those of a rival.

So, perhaps it makes sense that violence is more evident in spectator sports than in solitary exercises. A football field simulates a battlefield. Opposing teams are seen as troupes charging on to attack their enemies.

Politicians who speak of politics in analogy with athletic games may be motivated by the idea sportsmanship, such as fairness, decency, and integrity. May the best man (or woman) win, they say. Yet, it is not uncommon nowadays for rival candidates in a political campaign to attack one another more as mortal enemies than righteous rivals. They challenge the opponents with vicious words and a battle cry to slaughter them. Then, wittingly or unwittingly, they make politics a battlefield that it should not be. This is a sad affair.

Violence

Those who attribute shooting rampage in the political arena to polarization in politics are betraying their inverted notion that political polarization justifies violence, oblivious that such violence is itself an act of polarization; no heated argument justifies physical assault either.

A Bomb Exploded

A bomb exploded in the neighborhood. It was a fine April morning in 1942. The blast was shattering; the whole house shook. As a nine-year old, I thought I was deafened and blinded momentarily. It took only a few seconds to realize that I was alive and so were Mother and my sister two years younger. Father was already away in Singapore.

Air raid warning was in effect for a few hours that pleasant morning, but as best as I could remember it was only another practice warning. Shortly after 12:00 noon, we heard the All Clear siren. So, the three of us sat down for lunch. Right at that moment there was the blast and the earth shook and appeared to collapse. After that it was all quiet. The blast was nothing like an earthquake tremor -- even the very intense kind; we knew those well. This was a detonation though I had no idea what it was; I didn't even know the word. It was a completely new experience.

Four months had passed since the outbreak of the war, and the radio fed us news of Japan's continuing victory overseas. As we ate, we wondered what the blast was. We said it was perhaps an explosion at an armory somewhere; but we also thought we saw the shadow of a huge plane flying low over the house; but the idea of an enemy plane flying over Tokyo was simply unreal.

But that was what it was. We learned later in the afternoon, that American planes flew over Tokyo and bombed the city. We figured that the plane that came our way targeted the Yoyogi military training ground, north of the residential area, Aoyama, where our house stood. Either the bomber missed the target badly or, more likely, it dropped one left-over bomb on the way back from the mission. I never knew the extent of the damage it caused. I only know that it did not close enough to decimate us.

But we also learned that afternoon that a five-year old boy, returning from a friend's house minutes after the All Clear siren, was found dead up on a branch of a huge tree.

The blast was a tremendous shock; but in retrospect it was only a firecracker. Before long, Tokyo was subjected to massive air raids that made bomb blasts a routine event and severed body parts strewn on sidewalks a common sight. As a child, I was spared from seeing them in the flesh; but I heard enough about them. Later, the city lay in conflagration under the nightly raids of incendiary bombs that unbundled in midair like fireworks out of control and came down with an ominous hissing sound. Eventually we were evacuate and took refuge in a remote village, where we were safe but starved from shortage of food.

In 1952, after finishing high school, I sailed to California. It was not until 1970 that I learned about the first air raid over Tokyo. John Toland's book, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire 1936-1945 came out in that year, and I read it with interest. In it, I read that on April 18, 1942, at dawn, sixteen B-25 bombers, each with four 500-lb bombs, flew from the aircraft carrier Hornet and reached Japan's mainland and accomplished the very first air raid of Tokyo virtually unsuspected by the Japanese military. Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle commanded the mission.

So, that was it. The blast struck terror. But we were evidently well outside the damage radius of 450 meters or 1500 feet where the bomb fell. So, our house did not collapse -- for the time being; but I was awakened with a jolt to the reality of the war.

Catching Terrorists

War against terrorism. I don't understand this. We've had war against poverty, war against crime, war against drug traffic, war against cancer. War is waged between two bodies -- between nations, between cities, between religious bodies, between individuals. Not only is the term misplaced; the metaphor is warped; the concept is wrong. A war is resolved by victory of one body over the other; there is the victor and the vanquished. The victor decimates the vanquished or the latter surrenders to the former and allows it to be incorporated, swallowed up, enslaved. Or else, a truce is drawn and the warring parties agree on a compromise. No society ever succeeded in eradicating crime; sickness and poverty, no less than drug use, will ever vanish from modern society. There is no victory over terrorism. To claim it as a goal is a deception. To believe that a potential terrorist can be screened and caught anywhere is a delusion. Terrorism can be dealt only as a crime, not as a war. The best we can do is to contain and abate it. But, of course, what do I know.

Full Body Scans

There is much debate on the full body scans at airports at a great expense. I'm surely not the first to say this but a simpler and cheaper solution is neither a full body scan nor a full strip search but a full strip down for all. Have the passengers go aboard the plane fully naked, and if all are publicly and democratically naked there is no invasion of privacy. The airline will supply towels and sunglasses for those who will spend the flight in the tanning section of the plane. At the destination you pick up your clothing on a conveyor belt before walking out in the sun, clothed or naked, according to the individual's whim.