Cross Cultural

Management

Culture of War

- Aviraj Gupta
C19-042
Blowing stuff, watching people suffer and die, it’s exciting! Means violence, domination,
retribution and other attributes of this competitive warring fascination clearly dominates our
media with films, television and other expressions constantly glorifying and reinforcing this
gesture of conflict.

In fact, in America it was found that when an average kid reaches to the age of 14, he or she
has visually witnessed over 8000 depicted acts of murder. Given all of this, it might make us
wonder: Does art imitate life or life imitate art? While military forces routinely invade,
slaughter and steal from other nations at will, as of course all global empires have done
historically. With this time global civilian death toll well over 1 million in the past decade
alone, many of them women and children yet the same culture shutters in horror and
confusion when some random guy stumbles into a schoolyard and wipes out a couple of
dozens or so kids, We should know by what measure do we differentiate importance when it
comes to death of different groups of people? What makes few nations so special that they
are always ready to invade and take revenge.

While history is certainly full of xenophobic, racist, religious and nationalist conceits which
have served as convenient justifications for external dehumanization, subjugation and
imperial power abuse. A rather unnoticed yet profound scientific truth has also emerged that
today every person on earth can trace his or her lineage back to a single common female
ancestor who lived about 200,000 years ago “Mitochondrial eve” she is now known proving
indeed that we are truly one family. Likewise, the planet earth, the habitat this shares, it
knows no division. It is a unified, synergistic system at every turn fully connected. It has no
idea what a nation, a politician or a racist is, It has no notion of any such human conceit, for
that matter for division simply doesn’t exist in the order by which we are invariably subject.

Mark Twain once wrote “Man is the only patriot; he sets himself apart in his country under
his own flag and sneers at other nations and keeps uninformed assassins on hand at heavy
expense to grab slices of other people’s countries and in the interval works for the universe
brotherhood of man with his mouth”

While we all love to give lip service to the idea of peace and collaboration, holding up icons
such as Gandhi and martin Luther king junior something underneath the surface is clearly
holding us back. We know for a fact that if we took the total war budgets of all the nations on
earth and applied that energy producing capital towards creating an advanced, intelligent,
efficient system of earth human management, not only poverty and most deprivation be
removed from our lives on the global scale our progressive capacity to create, build and
improve rather than pillage seek and destroy could throw human family into an age of
prosperity. But we, as the intelligent mature human family now interested in improving the
lives of all, we use that incredible technology to help assist true developmental progress.
Imagine if the Manhattan project which harnessed about 130,000 people mostly scientists and
technicians was dedicated not to building a bomb that could destroy on a scale never before
seen but rather, utilizing that collaborative drive to solve true global problems perhaps those
very problems which are causing the interest in war to begin with.

Today the hyper glorified obsession with competition advantage and conflict has made it
almost every facet of our lives. Not only do we declare war against virtually everything that
annoys us “war on drugs” “war on crime” we also apart from near constant nationalist wars,
live in a perpetual state of common war or class war where we battle each other on a daily
basis for unnecessary economic survival. The fact is, something has been set in motion that
keeps us all on a multilevel war path, something in our psychology and hence sociology is
 constantly pushing us into justifications of these patterns. That something appears to reside at
very foundation of the socioeconomic conditions itself, a foundation which has given rise to a
destructive neurosis led to our culture of humans in decline.

History
The word 'war' comes to English by the old High German language word 'Werran' (to
confound or to cause disarray) through the Old English 'Werre' (which means the equivalent),
and is a condition of open and typically proclaimed equipped clash between political
substances, for example, sovereign states or between adversary political or social groups
inside a similar state. The first war in recorded history took place in Mesopotamia in 2700
BCE between sumer and Elam. The sumerians, under command of the King of Kish,
Enembaragesi, defeated the Elamites in this war and, it is recorded, “carried away as spoils
the weapons of Elam.”

War grows naturally out of the tribe mentality. A tribe is a society tracing its origin back to a
single ancestor, who may be a real person, a mythical hero, or even a god: they usually view
outsiders as dangerous and conflict against them as normal. The tribe mentality always
results in a dichotomy of an `us' vs. a `them' and engenders a latent fear of the `other' whose
culture is at odds with, or at least different from, one's own. This fear, coupled with a desire
to expand, or protect, necessary resources, often results in war.

The development of the composite bow would change the way in which war was waged in
that shock troops who were massed closely together made easy targets for archers while
looser formations invited decimation by opposing shock troops. This led to changes in battle
formations generally and the development of military tactics.

The Hebrew name for Megiddo is `Armageddon' well known from the biblical Book of
Revelation as the site of the final battle between good and evil and has come to be used as a
general term for a dramatic situation involving the end of the world

Formation of culture & language by great empires.

Think of war
When we think of war, we usually think about gun wielding soldiers, tanks and other
theatrics yet when we step outside the theater we find that war is a state of mind, a reaction
driven by some type of competitive condition, if we had to classify the different levels of
large scale competition

 Imperial war
 Class war
Imperial war otherwise known as national war is when aggressive nation decides to invade
some other nation justified by some form of perceived threat. Back in the day, this threat
often appeared as purely ideological with religious groups battling it out to make sure they
were in good relation with god like holy war in Islam termed as JIHAD. While in mildly
more literate scientific world today the threat is more often than not pitched as direct to each
of us. Such as a rogue nation getting nuclear weapon. Regardless in virtually every historical
case, the justification for war put forward for public digestion has always been far from the
truth but that threat has little to do with vast majority of population, instead it’s the threat that
bothers only elite class people of social hierarchy. I don’t remember any time when actually
citizenry cried out for war. It doesn’t happen only the politicians go for it.

Since the establishment would be hard pressed to explain to their citizens that they are going
to invade some nation for its natural resources, maintain currency domination along with
generally economic concerns to secure the interest of upper 1% various superficial
psychological ploys are used instead like one regime using military force against its own
people. Some country’s nuclear and ballistic missile activities pose a real threat.

We see, a large part of imperial war is a psychological war against domestic citizenry itself.

“FOR OUR NATION. FOR US ALL”

Is it saying to me or it sound like Orwellian doublespeak? If it’s for the nation, then it clearly
isn’t for us all as the human species is the closest thing we have to “all”.

If it’s referring to all of us in the nation as Americans that would be redundant.

Perhaps one of the most amusing aspects of national war is the circus like ceremonialism,
cute costumes, little hats, shiny metals, various parades and official posturing and theatrics
that give this air of authority. Of course this is not to dismiss the true sacrifice of those who
have given their lives in war as there are always two sides. This true honour comes from a
position of working to help others not exploit them. Just as we hold the bravery of a
firefighter who enters a burning building to save a child in high regards. The intention to help
society through military service is indeed a noble gesture, but who enters with such noble
intentions are more often than not being exploited for the criminal purposes of the corporate
state.

We have to realize that war today is actually an inherent characteristic of the propertied
scarcity driven business system.

Major general Smedley d. butler one of the most notable officers in American history stated
the following with respect to the business of war in 1935.

“I spent 33 years and 4 months in active military service and during that time I spent most of
my time as a high class muscle man for big business, for wall street and the bankers. In short,
I was racketeer for capitalism. I helped Mexico safe for American oil interest in 1914, made
Haiti and Cuba a decent place for national city bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in
raping of half a dozen central American republics for the benefits of wall street. I helped
American fruit companies in Honduras. Looking back to all I compare myself to Al Capone,
he operated his racket in 3 districts whereas I operated in 3 continents.

The conflict reaction is predictable in our evolutionary psychology. Human nature exists as
interaction with conditions if we reward competition and produce scarcity, as we do today we
will perpetuate a natural tendency towards war. But if we work to ease stress and reward
balance we will generate a collaborative intention of balancing and understanding among
people. The real underlying conflict is the war against social balance itself. National war is
another form of class war as we have social economic hierarchy from lower to upper classes
such as super powers, vassal states etc.

Finally, how do we think about resolution of something as damaging as national war when on
micro level we in society praise reward and reinforce same basic underlying competitive
drive. Generally, when people faced with such a question they tend to play morality card as
though a matter of degree is what’s relevant not the philosophical basis itself. Usually this
vague distinction is gestured to the effect that competition is good, but we should never go
too far and be violent in any way. Then of course the question becomes what constitutes
violence? What if instead of physically attacking you directly I put you somewhere your life
is shorten by decades via diseases, cancer, hunger and other such consequences, would that
be considered violent.

Or what if such intentions were not even directly malicious such as lower desperate single
mother who works 3 jobs a day to supervise the family and one day she fails to provide
proper supervision for her child resulting in the death of her child? I ask what is the true
origin of resulting death and does that qualify as violence?

Mahatma Gandhi once said “Poverty is the worst form of violence”. We see the real war
going on is not as obvious as many think the real war exists in the very structure of our
society itself. A war in fact against public health and balance itself constantly producing
casualties after casualties in its hidden oppression and this form of violence today kills more
people than every type of direct behavioural violence put together.