The Nomadic Alternative – Page 270

Those nations who have, for economic reasons, put themselves on a professional, that is, on an 'aggressive' war-footing, have been obliged to manipulate their young fighters through a youthful initiation of a rather different sort, and so whet their appetites for human bloodshed.

First, indoctrination must start young, but the critical phase of military indoctrination coincides with the boy's accession to manhood. Asked the question, "Do you belong to Man or Beast?" he is expected to reply, "BEAST". The aspiring warrior does not journey into the wilderness to fight and find the Beast or Devil. Instead he becomes the Beast or Devil's Advocate. By a process of auto-suggestion, he degrades his own humanity and subsumes the appetites of a carnivore. The young warrior in Archaic Greece lived for a time wild in the forest. He lived a wolf's life, tore at raw flesh like a wolf, and when he returned to his companions, joined the wolf-pack, for they all marched under wolf-standards. And men were their legitimate prey. Herodotus writes of the Neuri, a tribe of Northern Asia, all of whom changed themselves into wolves for one day in the year. The Ancient German mannerbünde, or secret military confraternities, which have so powerful an influence on warfare in the 20th Century, dressed their initiates up in bearskins (berserkir) and they went, literally, berserk. The busbies of the Royal Guards are the lineal descendants of these battle costumes.

The totemic beasts of military powers reflect the dehumanizing effect of war on a national scale. The British Lion was a lazy creature, but powerful and dangerous if roused. The Hunnish - and later German - Eagle swooped on occasions, and the American Bald Eagle still does. The Russian Bear hugs those who come too close. The Emperor Nero used to wear the freshly flayed and steaming hide of a beast before savaging young boys and girls, and the leather gear of sadists belongs to the same class of amusement. Metallic birds of prey, whose pilots feel one with their machines, now rain destruction from the sky. Che Guevara said that a true revolutionary must turn himself into an "effective, violent, selective, and cold [illegible]".