Jeff: What about the women who fight like hell to be fighter
pilots, command bombers and the like? Are they freaks? Sure, most
women don't want that, but neither do most men. To me, the
overall factor is that wars, until very recently, did depend upon
certain physical capacities that men possess much more than
women, the same capacities that enabled men to dominate women in
domestic and other civilian life, and have certainly left
permanent marks upon the psychology of both genders. Also until
very recently, women in the very years they might have been
soldiers were apt to be pregnant or nursing young children. This,
too, affected the psychology of both genders. And unquestionably
the gender that was most concerned with preserving life would be
most bothered by an activity that ended it.
Bill Mandel
Jeffrey Blankfort wrote:
>
> William Mandel wrote:
>
> > War a man thing? How about Margaret Thatcher and the slaughter
> > of helpless Argentinian seamen in the Falklands War? Golda Meir
> > and the endless wars to drive the Palestinians out of their
> > homeland (I am Jewish)? Albright's public statement when asked
> > whether the tens of thousands of dead Iraqi children due to the
> > continuing American embargo on food and medical exports to the
> > country was worth it: "yes"? Catherine the Great (since I happen
> > to be a Sovietologist) and the slaughter of Russian peasant
> > rebels, and of Russian peasant soldiers and of Turks in the
> > endless wars with that country? etc., etc., etc.
> > Because women have generally been subject to male
> > oppression, the number of female rulers responsible for such
> > slaughters is very much smaller than the number of men, but it
> > does not explain or justify the fact that they acted as rulers,
> > not as women.
>
> The issue here is not who gives the orders but who willingly fights the
> wars and bonds together while doing so. Clearly, when in power, women
> have shown the same disregard for human lives as their male
> counterparts, but the willingness to get into the trenches and kill
> one's fellow man who has done you no harm, is an entirely different
> kind of sickness, which is primarily a male problem (like male-pattern
> baldness) and one, that to this point in time, has proven to be beyond
> our capacity to eliminate.
>
> Jeff Blankfort
> >
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