The human nature is not to kill.
[http://thespawnofthesphinx.com/spawn_of]
From 1968 – 1971, the United States government funded a number of studies by the Sociology and Psychology Departments of various Universities for the purpose of proving that ordinary homo sapiens could be transformed into elite Übermensch given the proper social environment. The studies varied in format, depending on the creativity of the graduate students. Some consisted of role-playing games carried out by college students; others consisted of situations that provided one student the opportunity to anonymously administer a mild form of pain to another student; and so on. That any students would play along with these games was considered statistically significant. The results were filmed, selectively edited, and shown at numerous high school and colleges over the next several decades. The impressionable minds watching this rigged science believed it “proved” the nonexistence of free will. Peer pressure innate in a social environment could turn anyone into a Nazi concentration camp guard.
Unfortunately for this thesis, S.L.A. Marshall (1900 –1977), a U.S. Army historian, had previously authored an account of infantry combat in World War II entitled “Men Against Fire.” Marshall collected details of recent battles by conducting group interviews of the survivors. In chronicling these small unit actions, Marshall reached a startling conclusion – most soldiers do not fire their weapons during a battle. In some skirmishes, only ten percent of the unit (the officer in charge, the man to his left, the man to his right, and the machine gun crew) fired upon the enemy. Even in desperate battles involving elite units, the number of men shooting at the enemy (many would deliberately fire into the air) was less than 50% of the force involved. Marshall discovered it wasn’t because the men were squeamish (most infantrymen in World War II came from rural backgrounds, and were experienced hunters familiar with killing and dressing game) or cowards – it was because human beings have a natural aversion to killing other human beings.
“They are restrained by a civilizing impulse not to kill and a faith that a few heroes will emerge to carry the action which,” Marshall wrote, “is generally what happens.”
Marshall’s findings were never questioned in military circles. He was speaking a truth that every soldier knew but did not admit. Furthermore, every available, parallel, scholarly study validated his basic findings: Ardant du Picq’s surveys of French officers in the 1860s and his observations on ancient battles; Keegan and Holmes’ numerous accounts of ineffectual firing throughout history; Richard Holmes’ assessment of Argentine firing rates in the Falklands War; Paddy Griffith’s data on the extraordinarily low killing rate among Napoleonic and American Civil War regiments; the British Army’s laser reenactments of historical battles; the FBI’s studies of non-firing rates among law enforcement officers in the 1950s and 1960s; and countless other individual and anecdotal observations all confirm Marshall’s fundamental conclusion that Man is not, by nature, a killer of other humans.
Meanwhile, oblivious college professors in the Church of Settled Science were giving surveys to young boys who had just finished watching a western on TV and concluding, based on their answers, that the killer instinct was endemic in all of us. In reality, this “science” was reinforcing the core theology and beliefs of the researchers: that the basis of individual reality was “I see, therefore I do,” and human nature was simply a reflection of its recent experiences. It was not until 1987 – 1990 that these civilian researchers became aware of the military studies.
They went on the attack.
The first criticism was that Marshall’s were not “scientific” studies carried out in a “controlled environment.” (He had quoted approximate numbers from oral histories.) The second criticism was that Marshall had not systematically collected and categorized the data. The third criticism involved ad homonym attacks on Marshall’s character. (Some of these were quite nasty.)
The Church of Settled Science also objected to Marshall’s observation that individual heroes played a significant role in the outcome of a battle. Their prophet, Karl Marx, had specifically written that individual actions are inconsequential – history is a collective consequence of mass psychology and class warfare. Obviously, S.L.A. Marshall must have been lying.
Although the Church of Settled Science was able to discredit Marshall’s anecdotal conclusions among fellow college professors, military men who had seen actual combat continued to support his views. Even as members of the Church of Settled Science were publishing papers, the military was fielding a version of laser tag to train soldiers for combat. In actual combat, a skirmish for control of a lightly defended outcrop would take four to six hours and result in one or two men killed. Using lasers, the simulated skirmish was over in less than forty-five minutes and all but one or two men were dead. Intrigued, the British Army restaged several historical battles with laser designators attached to the soldier’s rifles. The simulations more closely resembled the bloody climax of a Sam Peckinpah movie than the actual battle, causing the evaluators to conclude that real warfare proceeded much the way S.L.A. Marshall chronicled it and for much the same reason – the average soldier has difficulty killing another man.
Conversely, the “controlled studies” of the Church of Settled Science did not involve humans actually killing one another – their logic assumed, for example, that observing a person playing basketball in a video game is equivalent to interviewing an NBA player about a recent game he actually played in. The fact remains that less than 20% of men are capable of killing in combat, and less than 2% of men are capable of killing in cold blood…[/quote:18swizcf]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.L.A._Marshall
[quote:18swizcf]During World War II Marshall became an official Army combat historian, and came to know many of the war’s most well known Allied commanders, including George S. Patton and Omar N. Bradley. He conducted hundreds of interviews of both enlisted men and officers regarding their combat experiences, and was an early proponent of oral history techniques. In particular, Marshall favored the group interview, where he would gather surviving members of a frontline unit together and debrief them on their combat experiences of a day or two before.
Marshall’s work on infantry combat effectiveness in World War II, titled Men Against Fire, is his best-known and most controversial work. In the book, Marshall claimed that of the World War II U.S. troops in actual combat, 75% never fired their personal weapons at the enemy for the purpose of killing, even though they were engaged in combat and under direct threat. (Later research has cast doubts on his methods, but research into killing ratios of other wars, including the U.S. Civil War, has supported this claim.)[citation needed] Marshall argued that the United States Army should devote significant training resources to increase the percentage of soldiers willing to engage the enemy with direct fire.[/quote:18swizcf]
By gifting war zones, most soldiers probably won’t fire at all! C’mon there are better things to do than killing each other!
This reminds me of school history classes long time ago:
The World War I Christmas Truce of 1914
