![]() The warrior cult is now a big business, cashing in on society’s overall plunge into mindless adolescence instead of adulthood, and our generals (and not a few admirals) buy into this nonsense- after all, how are we going to get those slugs playing video games on their X-boxes to join the all-volunteer military? By making them warriors by gum! The women, too, are prone to this pathology-for example more and more I get female military history students wanting write about warrior queens (e.g. Or at least get “combat time” officially entered in our records, and for some of us green ink in our flight log books.* ![]() We thought, “these old geezers, trying to recapture their lost youth.” I remember me and my mates making fun of all this “warrior nonsense” in the 1990s, after the brief spasm of Desert Storm and Panama (and more darkly Mogadishu) allowed a few of us to “self-actualize” in combat. They were thought ridiculous by many-especially junior officers-at the time. There were “warrior days” and “warrior dress” (flight suits for us flyer-folk like naval aviators). One also saw, as the Cold War was ending, a tendency to highlight warrior-ship over an ethos of military professionalism, which in fact is what had really been behind the renaissance in the U.S. If there is one thing humans will probably NOT forget, it is how to get angry and kill each other. had been at peace for so long-that those asked to go into the fight might not have enough warrior spirit to prevail over the others. In the late 1980s, for example, one of my flag officer bosses gave himself the call sign “warrior.” I think this had to do with the fact that these flag officers and others worried that if combat did come-and because the U.S. This identity, and its associated worship, find much of their currency and appeal, especially among general and flag officers, when there is not much combat going on, with few real “warrior events” taking place. Now for some anecdotal stuff (I hesitate to call it evidence). The cult of the warrior (I am deliberately using small case now) is really about an unhealthy worship of an identity that modern liberal trends would, and should, prefer to minimize rather than glorify. After all, who wants to be a mere professional, or even one’s own little dull self, when one can be a WARRIOR (said in a deep voice). It leads more often to annihilation of identity rather than its actualization. With it comes an entirely new ethos, the “warrior ethos” it is named-but warrior really implies someone who is self-actualizing through violence, an unhealthy tendency in humans best captured by those discontents found in Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. Kuehn, for identification as a warrior, exposes a paradox-striving for identity among the boredom, anonymity, chaos, and carnage of war, the individual makes a devil’s bargain, they trade way true individuality for a brand name-warrior. However, in trading one’s name, say John T. Warrior, it seems to me, is that striving for identity in war by individuals who want to retain something of their own humanity. Others have written on this, notably the poles of military cultural history represented by Victor Davis Hanson and John Lynn. But more than that, it is an identity, not a temporary moniker, taken on and off like a change of clothes. Its simple meaning equates to any person who engages in war, from ritualistic combat to the often unheralded combat of mass slaughter in total war. ![]() These second types of cults are more insidious and long lasting because the object of the cult’s veneration and worship does not die, in this case the idea of the warrior.Īs for warrior, it is a term much-enamored by modern militaries, oddly. Or the more broad idea of a “cult of personality,” the unhealthy grouping of an entire polity around one overwhelming semi-mythic or religious person-Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, or even Napoleon. In some cases these leaders have names, David Koresh for example. The cult’s purpose is often personality related, i.e. Cult is a pejorative term that usually stands for an unhealthy grouping of individuals, usually around a religious idea or religious leaders, but any idea will do. In the somber aftermath of another memorial day, perhaps this is a good time to revisit something that has bothered me for years-the Cult of the Warrior and its veneration off and on by American military cultures, to say nothing of the American public.Īs a mentor once informed me “define your terms up front.” The phrase “cult of the warrior” must first be broken into its component parts and then synthesized into a whole. The Cult of the Warrior - Helpful or.Silly, or.Dangerous? ![]()
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